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"Dreams Are Sacred" is a short story by Peter Phillips, about a man who enters the dreams of a coma patient. The story was first published in the September, 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

A Science fiction writer named Craswell is in a coma, which his doctor explains has become, for him, an escapist fantasy world that keeps him from dealing with reality. The doctor has recruited the story’s narrator to help Craswell, by entering his mind and convincing him to snap out of it. The narrator agrees, and enters into the strange dream world of Mr. Craswell. The world is a kind of oversimplified fantasy, and the hero takes a flippant, jocular attitude to everything he sees there, and uses directed dreaming techniques to alter the dream’s premises. When a cab driver takes him for a short ride, and then demands $1.50, the hero opens up a hole in the street to swallow up the cab. When the hero and Craswell are confronted by a sexy vixen in a skimpy outfit, the hero tries to lower her skirt length. Eventually he gets Craswell to wake up, and seeing the hero, Craswell is very angry with him, though he can’t quite remember why. Later that day, in the real world, the hero meets the cabbie that he met in the dream, and the cabbie seems to vaguely remember some of the events from the dream (the doctor speculates that the cabbie was asleep at the time, and the hero may have inadvertantly transmitted some of the dream to him). Later, he also meets the woman from the dream, who in real life is a singer in a nightclub (Craswell had probably seen her there). She does not remember him, but the hero then gets the idea of dreaming about her again, while she is asleep, so that he can transmit his dream to her, just as he did to the cabbie.

Reprints

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).

Related Works

The premise of this story is similar to that of the Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell.