10th July
‘It’s called Lisianski Island,’ said Helen as she and I looked down from the starcruiser onto a patch of green, embedded in the endless blue of the Pacific. ‘We’re nearly fifteen hundred kilometres from the nearest inhabited island,’ she added, ‘so we should be able to leave Amy on the beach and have a picnic and a swim without Rod Dowsing showing up. Amy, please land on that flat area at the southern end of the island.’
‘There’s a freshwater pool over there to the north,’ I said without thinking.
‘I can’t see anything,’ said Helen.
‘The pool is invisible from here,’ Amy contributed, ‘but I can confirm that it exists. Would you like me to land there?’
Helen looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. ‘You didn’t know where we were going. This is the most remote, uninhabited, tropical island I could find. How did you know about the pool?’
‘This is going to seem really strange,’ I replied, ‘but I dreamed about it last night. It was one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. We landed in a clearing near the beach – just by that inlet.’ I pointed towards the area.
‘Amy, please land where Swan has just indicated,’ said Helen.
Five minutes later we were standing on the white coral sand.
‘Tell me what else you remember from the dream,’ said Helen.
‘We walked into the trees, over there, and found this clear, circular pool – about thirty metres across and waist deep in the middle. You tasted some of the water and said that it was fresh, rather than salty.’
Helen walked towards the gap in the trees. I followed. As soon as we reached the tree line, we could see the pool – exactly as I had described.
‘That’s rather spooky,’ I said. ‘I can’t say that I’ve ever done any psychic stuff before.’
Helen bent down by the side of the pool, dipped her fingers into the water and raised them to her lips. ‘It’s fresh, rather than salty,’ she said. ‘Do you feel OK?’ she added, with concern. ‘Predicting the future isn’t exactly a symptom of any condition I know of, but have you noticed anything else that’s different?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’d forgotten all about the dream until the view of the island from the air suddenly looked familiar. Careful with that rock,’ I quickly added, pointing to a small boulder near her right hand. ‘You lifted it up in the dream and there was quite a large lizard in a burrow beneath it. It made you jump.’
Helen looked at the rock. ‘I was just going to pick it up,’ she said, taking hold of the rock and cautiously lifting it. She froze as a large lizard scrambled out from a hole beneath the rock, rushed into the water and swam away across the pool.
‘That certainly is spooky,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve just reached a point where this has gone beyond coincidence. You really did dream all this last night. What happened next, and how far into the future did it go?’
I smiled. ‘I must have dreamed about half an hour further onwards from this moment. Obviously I didn’t dream about having had a dream, so all our conversations about that are new.’
‘What happens in the next half hour?’ asked Helen.
‘Er … well … you said that you’d been wanting to make love all morning but that you’d been waiting until we found a nice, romantic spot.’
Helen blushed and smiled at me.
I pointed to a patch of green on the far side of the pool. ‘We found some really soft grass over there. I won’t describe much more after that. I woke up when you came for the second time.’