"And now, gentlemen, the present." The evil radiance swamped the continents, reached out and touched the faces of the armchair observers. "There you have it, gentlemen. A restful night in utopia," said Clawly quietly. The green glow unwholesomely emphasized his tired pallor and the creases of strain around eyes and mouth. He went on, "Of course it's obvious that if nightmares are as common as all that, you and yours can hardly have escaped. Each of you knows the answer to that question. As for myself--my nightly experiences provide one more small confirmation of Thorn's report." He switched off the map. The carefully noncommittal faces turned back to him. Clawly noted that the faint, creeping dawn-line on the World Map was hardly two hours away from the Opal Cross. He said, "I pass over the corroborating evidence--the slight steady decrease in average sleeping time, the increase in day sleeping and nocturnal social activity, the unprecedented growth of art and fiction dealing with supernatural terror, and so on--in order to emphasize as strongly as possible Thorn's secondary discovery: the similarity between the nightmare landscapes of his dreamers. A similarity so astonishing that, to me, the wonder is that it wasn't noticed sooner, though of course Thorn wasn't looking for it and he tells me that most of his earlier subjects were unable, or disinclined, to describe in detail the landscapes of their nightmares." He looked around. "Frankly, that similarity is unbelievable. I don't think even Thorn did full justice to it in the time he had for his report--you'd have to visit his offices, see his charts and dream-sketches, inspect his monumental tables of correlation. Think: hundreds of dreamers, to take only Thorn's samples, thousands of miles apart, and all of them dreaming--not the _same_ nightmare, which might be explained by assuming telepathy or some subtle form of mass suggestion--but nightmares with the same landscape, the same general landscape. As if each dreamer were looking through a different window at a consistently distorted version of our own world. A dream world so real that when I recently suggested to Thorn he try to make a map of it, he did _not_ dismiss my notion as nonsensical." * * * * * The absence of a stir among his listeners was more impressive than any stir could have been. Clawly noted that Conjerly's frown had deepened, become almost angry. He seemed about to speak, when Tempelmar casually forestalled him. "I don't think telepathy can be counted out as an explanation," said the tall, long-featured, sleepy-eyed man. "It's still a purely hypothetic field--we don't know how it would operate. And there may have been contacts between Thorn's subjects that he didn't know about. They may have told each other their nightmares and so started a train of suggestion."