Maybe sex is your whole problem. How would a psychoanalyst interpret your dream? The faceless enemy is obvious. That means it's someone very close to you, someone you hate but shouldn't hate—or someone for whom you feel a forbidden love. And what about the water symbol?

But there was no one very close to me, no one it could have been. My mother was dead. Over two years. And I had never known my father, the man from Los Alamitos who had been my mother's lover for a week in Albuquerque and had left his seed in her.

And that was an answer, of course. The bastard son. What was the ratio of insanity among bastards? Higher than normal? I would have to look it up.

I shut the thought out of my mind. For a long while, I stared at the dim whiteness of the plastic ceiling. And then the picture of a shy, fair-haired girl with firm, uplifted breasts stole into my thoughts. The tension slid away from me. The horror of the dream was forgotten.

It's funny, the tricks your mind can play on you.

3

The following night I worked late, correcting a batch of the interminable freshman themes. I didn't have any night classes, but the offices were bright for the lecturers who did. I found it difficult to concentrate on the semi-adolescent exercises in expository composition even though the office was quiet and almost empty most of the evening. Near the bottom of the pile of papers I came across one theme that jolted me. It was called "How to Conduct a Seance." It was a juvenile and jocular approach to the subject, and I had never placed much credence myself in preternatural events and influences—or in extra-sensory powers. But now I found myself feeling defensive, resenting the spoofing tone of the student's theme. Wasn't anything possible? How much did we really know? Wasn't the wisest philosopher actually as ignorant as this nineteen-year-old?

I wondered if a man could have unusual perceptions, strange mental powers, for twenty-seven years without knowing it. Wouldn't a talent for thought transference or for hearing the mental communications of others make itself known early? Or would it be necessary to have two sensitive people involved, sender and receiver? Could you be a telepath without knowing it simply because you had never encountered another?

And I remembered the incident, distant in time and dim in memory, which I had refused to recall during the disturbing recent months. In 

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