The August night seemed perfect: cool, still fragrant with the scents of late summer. Peter could smell the flowers in the front yards, the tomatoes and cucumbers in the backyard gardens. He could hear and smell the prowling of cats in search of midnight mice, and the occasional bark of a dog fulfilling a social contract to defend territory. A racoon scurried across the street on its was to knock over the next available garbage can.

The full moon washed the quiet street, the pretty wood frame houses, shrubs, lawns and shade trees on their quarter acre lots. The tar and pavement street was quiet under his feet as he walked down the center of the lane, careless about cars in the middle of the night. Bags of garbage and recyclables were already sitting neatly at curbside, waiting for the next day's pickup. As he passed a side street he glimpsed the tiny cemetery which contained century-old graves. It reminded him of the thin connections between past, present and future. It could be any of the small towns he'd lived in over the years: in Ohio, northern California, North Carolina. On this particular night it was a small town in upstate New York, where he'd lived for two years now, undetected, so far.

He was just about six feet tall, 175 pounds, twinges of grey in his dark hair at 35 years. A body strong and flexible from years of gymnastics in high school and college, and the contortions he'd practiced more recently. He was dressed in black jeans, a black button-down shirt and hightop black sneakers.

He'd first taken notice of his "gift" in his early teens. Puberty was well underway and awash with the usual hormones and fears, he'd noticed something that no one else talked about and that he knew was out of place. One night at summer camp he awoke in the middle of night and found himself awash in voices, sensations, scents. There were loud, boisterous and frightened young male voices, but no sound came to his ears; they played only in his head. In the distance he could faintly hear and smell others. He left the bunkhouse and walked through the quiet woods. Unafraid of the night after being raised in the country, he followed the dim voices across the camp until they grew louder as he approached the girls' bunkhouse. His ears detected no sound except the crickets and the lapping of the lake shore, yet his head was filled with sensations, people, sounds. And his nose held a musky scent standing just outside the girls' bunkhouse.

He suddenly felt himself in the lake and next to him one of the girls was thrashing in the water, panicked, unable to swim and terrorized. He reached over and held her, swam with her to the dock, helping her up. She relaxed, safe now, smiled and dissolved before his eyes. He was back standing in front of the girls' bunkhouse.

His mind reached out among the crowd of visions and found one of his young campmates dreaming of him; he willed it and entered her dream. They were in the woods, away from the others. They were kissing, pressed against a tree. He reached for her breast with one hand and let the other drop between her legs. She melted in his arms, moving against him and whispering his name. Young and overcome with feelings she'd only had masturbating in bed at night, she pushed her 14-year-old body against his and bit his shoulder as his hand roughly, but accurately, rubbed her where she needed rubbing. She tensed, shook and cried out in the woods. Then she dissolved into her pleasure and out of the dream state. Once again he stood in front of the girl's bunkhouse. Overcome, he stood there in the night, unzipped his pants and stroked his young cock until he spurt on the ground in front of him, awash in young women's dreams.

That was the first time he realized he had a gift, or an abnormality. He could not penetrate fully conscious minds, but those in a dream state, drunk, high, or those disconnected from normal linear perceptive reality were accessible to him. He could read and feel their thoughts, enter their dreams, become part of their dreams, merge their dreams with waking reality and fold their waking night reality into a dream.

It almost ruined his life. The quiet night became a cacophony of noise each night during his adolescence until he learned to control its flow, shut it out. But still he was drawn, as men are, to the dreams of women and their scent. In high school and college he could avoid the gross insecurity of not knowing for sure if a woman was interested in him. If they drank, got high or slept and he was within reasonable distance, he could learn from them. He ignored some women socially and could bring himself to those few who were interested, whose hearts and libidos ached for him. He came to realize, making lazy love in the middle of the night during his sophomore year, that if the woman was semi-conscious his mind could cloud her subconscious: their lovemaking was a dream to her that night. He could also sense exactly what his lover wanted and needed.

His lust became not just the usual male craving for women, but an obsession with the further joining of minds that he could accomplish. Women's dreams called out in the night, unheard but for him. He took satisfaction in their hunger meeting his. Entering their dreams, sharing and possessing them, controlling them so that the woman felt that everything that happened, including midnight couplings and suckings, was all a dream. Simple seduction and fucking were a pale substitute when compared to such intimacy.

And so, during most late nights in decent weather he walked the street, listening. On some nights he went home without satisfaction, on others, he crept into the homes and dreams of others.

College girls home for Thanksgiving vacation having gotten themselves deflowered and now constantly hungering for more. He came to them in the night as they slept, loving them, spurting on them, casting a spell that merged their dreams with their conscious lovemaking with him in the night. In the morning the memory of their lovemaking was only the whisp of last night's dream.

Single women, divorcees, married women whose husbands were away were all his lovers. He enjoyed reaching out to women coworkers, asking their dreaming minds if they were receptive to him, planting the fantasy in their dreams, climbing through their bedroom windows and converting dream fantasy into fleshy reality, all bathed in dreamscape. On one night he even entered a couple's bed chamber, cast the dream spell over both of them and sucked her nipples while he ate her. She sucked on his cock while her husband slapped into her from behind.

He could never tell anyone, they'd think he was crazy. He thought he was crazy, or at least a freak. No one would notice as long as he could place the dream spell on them as they awoke and as long as they drifted back to sleep afterwards, with no fresh memory of the dream. No point in making love, or having sex with someone who's asleep, they made love awake even though their minds told them otherwise and the next morning the experience to them was only a few scraps of melted memory, inseparable from a dream.

It was 2 A.M. before Elizabeth found sleep with the help of the brandy. She'd had to bring herself a second time that night, lying on her stomach this time. One hand and a long body pillow beneath her for her pussy to grind against, another slid underneath her silk camisole, pinching her nipples. As she fucked her hand she thought about being on top of Robert again like this, riding that hard, strong body, the base of his cock grinding against her clit as her palm did now. She kissed and licked the bed just as she would have kissed and licked his chest. As she came, she imagined his hands rubbing and squeezing her ass as they used to. She bucked and squirmed against the bed, grunting and then she called out his name.

"Shit! Bastard!" she screamed at herself immediately afterward. It had been three weeks since their confrontation and she'd thrown the sonofabitch out and yet she was still obsessed. She'd had the strength to throw him out when she realized that he'd been cheating on her and spending their money on drugs. She'd denounced him, punched him in the stomach and didn't start crying until he'd left the house. She'd rolled up their old futon, and bought a new bed and mattress. The most overt signs of him had been removed from the house, the home, the trust that he had so callously betrayed.

But even before the final confrontation, when she had begun to suspect that he was destroying their lives, she'd continued to sleep with him. She was so used to his presence, his hard body and his smell. The sex continued to scratch an itch, even as she ignored or suppressed her growing fear of his betrayal. He had been so enthusiastic about being trained and he knew just what moves she needed from his tongue and fingers, when and why.

The rational part of her brain knew that there were other men out there, ones who would not betray her and would also be happy to learn how she liked her pussy licked and fingered and how she liked to ride men's cocks and faces. But recently, that part of her brain hadn't been making as many appearances as she'd like, leaving center stage for pain, anger and paranoia. She directed much of the anger at herself, anger that she still ached for him at night when her heart and mind would prefer that he be run over by a slow moving truck.