The Age of Sail. I'm on the deck of a graceful schooner, fore-and-aft rigged. She's not alone--all over the green sea, white arcs in the wind like scoops of ice cream. We're part of a great regatta. But this is no race. We're on a search and rescue mission. We seek the Lost Dutchman!

Now I'm on a different deck--the Dutchman, sailing the seas forever, cursed never to make port. I'm taken below to meet the skipper, the Dutchman himself. Ageless, blond and blandly handsome, he looks suspiciously like... Luke Skywalker.

Using the Force, Luke suddenly senses the flotilla seeking him. Rushes to a porthole and spots dim sail-crescents on the hazy horizon.

Haze? That's smoke! I smell it now. Fire onboard! In a flash of lucidity, I think: "Uh-oh! Is this smoke in our house that I'm just incorporating into the dream?" But as soon as I worry about real fire, the scent recedes, even as the dream-fire grows. I assume the dream is removing that extra authenticity to assure me it's just part of the dream-plot, not in my home, picked up subliminally. So I stay in the dream and let the scene play out.

The fire nears. Open flames glare down the hall. Red glare, roar, feel their heat. Is Luke Dutchman trapped? His face starts to blister. Even if he makes it up to deck, will he last long enough for the Flotilla to rescue him?

Wait--am I sure they really are rescuers, not pirate-hunters? What if they caused this fire?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Fire: fever! I get recurrent flare-ups of low fever, aches, chills, night-sweats. Almost certainly, the dream-fire's heat on my skin reflects a flare-up during REM. I woke with fever; lasted days.
• Were they out to save or burn the Lost Dutchman? I "forgot" my antibiotic herbs two nights running. Knew I risked a flare-up of inflammation, yet I did it. Once is careless--twice is brainfog, sabotage, or accidental-on-purpose experimentation.
• Lost Dutchman: doomed to be forever solitary. Quarantined. That's how I feel with this recurrent fever. And I seem to be letting it flare. To keep me alone?
• ACTION (now): take an extra-big dose of the wormwood I skipped last night. Need it.
• ACTION (long-term): I REALLY need to look at this self-sabotage.

ON DREAM-SCENT

I posted this dream partly to show dreaming's level of sophistication--this is no simple reflexive response to fever in sleep! I go lucid, realize the heat and smoke might be dream-echoes of waking-world stimuli, but draw a false conclusion--worry about a house-fire not fever--so the dream edits itself to be less realistic, to clarify the fire's a metaphor.

Some researchers characterize dreams as inherently just visual, audio and sometimes kinetic, but quite without taste or smell. That clearly isn't always true; dreams can and do include taste and smell. But this dream suggests one reason dreamers might usually hold those channels in reserve--they're an alarm system!

Here's a thought-experiment. Imagine if films added scent. Picture yourself in a theater watching a short, "The Lost Dutchman Burns". The scent of smoke fills the room. Is it story-smoke or is the place on fire? Do you sit trusting it's fiction as a real fire cuts off escape, or panic and stampede from a movie illusion? Either trust or suspicion could be a fatal error.

The hazards of confusion may explain why taste-and-smell dreams are rare, and why dreamers like me who do have them, rarely dream of smoke--and why the few smoky dreams I've had woke me promptly. How about you?

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