research group from Mills College that traveled to the Frinthian plane torecord and study oneiric brainwave synchrony agreed that (like thesynchronization of menstrual and other cycles within groups on our plane)communal dreaming may serve to strengthen the social bond. They did notspeculate as to its psychological or moral effects. From time to time a Frinis born with unusual powers of projecting and receiving dreams -- never onewithout the other. The Frin call such a dreamer whose "signal" is unusuallyclear and powerful a strong mind. That strong-minded dreamers can receivedreams from non-Frinthian humans is a proven fact. Some of them apparently canshare dreams with fish, with insects, even with trees. A legendary strong mindnamed Du Ir claimed that he "dreamed with the mountains and the rivers," buthis boast is generally regarded as poetry. Strong minds are recognized evenbefore birth, when the mother begins to dream that she lives in a warm, amber-colored palace without directions or gravity, full of shadows and complexrhythms and musical vibrations, and shaken often by slow peaceful earthquakes-- a dream the whole community enjoys, though late in the pregnancy it may beaccompanied by a sense of pressure, of urgency, that rouses claustrophobia insome. As the strong-minded child grows, its dreams reach two or three timesfarther than those of ordinary people, and tend to override or co-opt localdreams going on at the same time. The nightmares and inchoate, passionatedeliria of a strong- minded child who is sick, abused, or unhappy can disturbeveryone in the neighborhood, even in the next village. Such children,therefore, are treated with care; every effort is made to make their life oneof good cheer and disciplined serenity. If the family is incompetent oruncaring, the village or town may intervene, the whole community earnestlyseeking to ensure the child peaceful days and nights of pleasantdreams. "World-strong minds" are legendary figures, whose dreams supposedlycame to everyone in the world, and who therefore also dreamed the dreams ofeveryone in the world. Such men and women are revered as holy people, idealsand models for the strong dreamers of today. The moral pressure onstrong-minded people is in fact intense, and so must be the psychic pressure.None of them lives in a city: they would go mad, dreaming a whole city'sdreams. Mostly they gather in small communities where they live very quietly,widely dispersed from one another at night, practicing the art of "dreamingwell," which mostly means dreaming harmlessly. But some of them become guides,philosophers, visionary leaders. There are still many tribal societies on theFrinthian plane, and the Mills researchers visited several. They reported thatamong these peoples, strong minds are regarded as seers or shamans, with theusual perquisites and penalties of such eminence. If during a famine thetribe's strong mind dreams of traveling clear down the river and feasting bythe sea, the whole tribe may share the vision of the journey and the feast sovividly, with such conviction, that they decide to pack up and startdownriver. If they find food along the way, or shellfish and edible seaweedson the beach, their strong mind gets rewarded with the choice bits; but ifthey find nothing or run into trouble with other tribes, the seer, now called"twisted mind," may be beaten or driven out. The elders told the researchersthat tribal councils usually follow the guidance of dream only if otherindications favor it. The strong minds themselves urge caution. A seer amongthe Eastern zhud-Byu told the researchers, "This is what I say to my people:Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we knew it. The rarestdream is the dream that tells us what we did not know." Frinthia has been opento other planes for over a century, but the rural scenery and quiet lifestylehave brought no great influx of visitors. Many tourists avoid the plane underthe impression that the Frin are a race of "mindsuckers" and"psychovoyeurs." Most Frin are still farmers, villagers, or town-dwellers, butthe cities and their material technologies are growing fast. Thoughtechnologies and techniques can be imported only with the permission of theAll-Frin government, requests for such permission by Frinthian companies andindividuals have become increasingly frequent. Many Frin welcome this growth

of urbanism and materialism, justifying it as the result of the interpretationof dreams received by their strong minds from visitors from other planes."People came here with strange dreams," says the historian Tubar of Kaps,himself a strong mind. "Our strongest minds joined in them, and joined us withthem. So we all began to see things we had never dreamed of. Vast gatheringsof people, cybernets, ice cream, much commerce, many pleasant belongings anduseful artifacts. 'Shall these remain only dreams?' we said. 'Shall we notbring these things into wakeful being?' So we have done that." Other thinkerstake a more dubious attitude toward alien hypnogogia. What troubles them mostis that the dreaming is not reciprocal. For though a strong mind can share thedreams of an alien visitor and "broadcast" them to other Frin, nobody fromanother plane has been capable of sharing the dreams of the Frin. We cannotenter their nightly festival of fantasies. We are not on their wavelength. Theinvestigators from Mills hoped to be able to reveal the mechanism by whichcommunal dreaming is effected, but they failed, as Frinthian scientists havealso failed, so far. "Telepathy," much hyped in the literature of theinterplanary travel agents, is a label, not an explanation. Researchers haveestablished that the genetic programming of all Frinthian mammals includes thecapacity for dream-sharing, but its operation, though clearly linked to thebrainwave synchrony of sleepers, remains obscure. Visiting foreigners do notsynchronize; they do not participate in that nightly ghost-chorus of electricimpulses dancing to the same beat. But unwittingly, unwillingly -- like a deafchild shouting -- they send out their own dreams to the strong minds asleepnearby. And to many of the Frin, this seems not so much a sharing as apollution or infection. "The purpose of our dreams," says the philosopherSorrdja of Farfrit, a strong dreamer of the ancient Deyu Retreat, "is toenlarge our souls by letting us imagine all that can be imagined: to releaseus from the tyranny and bigotry of the individual self by letting us feel thefears, desires, and delights of every mind in every living body near us." Theduty of the strong-minded person, she holds, is to strengthen dreams, to focusthem -- not with a view to practical results or new inventions, but as a meansof understanding the world through a myriad of experiences and sentiences (notonly human). The dreams of the greatest dreamers may offer to those who sharethem a glimpse of an order underlying all the chaotic stimuli, responses,acts, words, intentions, imaginings of daily and nightly existence. "In theday we are apart," she says. "In the night we are together. We should followour own dreams, not those of strangers who cannot join us in the dark. Withsuch people we can talk; we can learn from them and teach them. We should doso, for that is the way of the daylight. But the way of the night isdifferent. We go together then, apart from them. The dream we dream is ourroad through the night. They know our day, but not our night, nor the ways wego there. Only we can find our own way, showing one another, following thelantern of the strong mind, following our dreams in darkness." The resemblanceof Sorrdja's phrase "road through the night" to Freud's "royal road to theunconscious" is interesting but, I believe, superficial. Visitors from myplane have discussed psychological theory with the Frin, but neither Freud'snor Jung's views of dream are of much interest to them. The Frinthian "royalroad" is trodden not by one secret soul but a multitude. Repressed feelings,however distorted, disguised, and symbolic, are the common property ofeverybody in one's household and neighborhood. The Frinthian unconscious,collective or individual, is not a dark wellspring buried deep under years ofevasions and denials, but a kind of great moonlit lake to whose shoreseverybody comes to swim together naked every night. And so the interpretationof dreams is not, among the Frin, a means of self-revelation, of privatepsychic inquiry and readjustment. It is not even species-specific, sinceanimals share the dreams, though only the Frin can talk about them. For them,dream is a communion of all the sentient creatures in the world. It puts thenotion of self deeply into question. I can imagine only that for them to fallasleep is to abandon the self utterly, to enter or reenter into the limitlesscommunity of being, almost as death is for us.