The Dreamwalkers

Best friends stumble upon Lucid Dreaming and Remote Viewing

Lila and Ethan had been best friends since third grade, bonded by their love for wild ideas and late-night talks about the mysteries of the universe. Growing up in a quiet Virginia suburb, they spent countless evenings sprawled on Lila’s backyard trampoline, staring at the stars and wondering if there was more to the world than what they could see. In the summer of 1972, when they were both sixteen, something extraordinary happened that would change their lives—and the world—forever.


It started with a book Ethan found in a dusty corner of the local library: a tattered volume on lucid dreaming. The idea fascinated them—controlling dreams, shaping them like clay. They made a pact to try it together, following the book’s instructions to keep dream journals and perform reality checks. Night after night, they trained their minds to recognize when they were dreaming. After weeks of effort, it worked. Lila dreamed of a glowing forest, and Ethan, somehow, was there too. They ran through the dreamscape, laughing, shaping trees into spirals and rivers into glass. They thought it was just a game—a shared fantasy.


But one night, their dream took them somewhere different. They found themselves in their high school, standing in the hallway outside their chemistry classroom. The details were uncanny: the chipped paint on the doorframe, the faint smell of chalk dust, the periodic table poster curling at the edges. They wandered into the room, giggling as they rifled through desks, finding homework with their classmates’ names scrawled in familiar handwriting. Lila noticed a sticky note on the teacher’s desk with “Lab Safety Quiz – Monday” written in Mr. Hargrove’s neat script. They thought nothing of it until Monday morning, when Mr. Hargrove announced a surprise lab safety quiz. Lila and Ethan exchanged a look, hearts pounding. The sticky note was there, exactly as they’d seen it.


They didn’t sleep much that week. Instead, they pushed their dreaming further, testing the limits. They visited the school library in their next shared dream, noting the titles of books on the return cart and a coffee stain on the librarian’s desk. When they checked the next day, everything matched. They weren’t just dreaming—they were seeing real places, real details, without leaving their beds. They’d stumbled into remote viewing, a phenomenon neither fully understood but both were eager to explore.


The following week, their dream took them somewhere new: a classroom they’d never seen, tucked in a wing of the school under renovation. It was locked during the day, off-limits to students. In the dream, they explored the room, noting a cracked chalkboard, a desk with a wobbly leg, and a faded map of the world pinned to the wall, with a red pushpin marking Langley, Virginia. When the school finally opened the renovated wing, Lila and Ethan slipped into the room during lunch. Their breath caught—the chalkboard, the desk, the map, the pushpin—it was all there, exactly as they’d seen it.


They realized they weren’t just sharing dreams; they were accessing real-time information about real places. The implications were staggering. If they could see their school, could they see other places? Could they see secrets? They spent hours debating what to do. Ethan, the more cautious of the two, worried about the dangers of prying into things they didn’t understand. Lila, ever the visionary, saw potential to do good. “What if we could help people?” she said. “What if we could find missing kids or stop something bad from happening?”


They decided to experiment further, focusing their dreams on places of importance. They practiced lucid dreaming techniques, honing their ability to control where they went. One night, they targeted a government building in Langley—the CIA headquarters, inspired by the pushpin on the map. In their dream, they found themselves in a dimly lit office, a mahogany desk at its center. Papers were scattered across it, stamped with “CLASSIFIED.” Ethan hesitated, but Lila urged him to look closer. They read file names, dates, and fragments of text about foreign operations and surveillance programs. A locked drawer caught their attention, and in the dream, they somehow opened it, finding a dossier labeled “Project Stargate.”


The next day, shaken but determined, they researched what they’d seen. Project Stargate was real—a classified CIA program exploring psychic phenomena, including remote viewing. They hadn’t just stumbled into a dream; they’d accessed sensitive information. They knew they couldn’t keep this to themselves. Lila, bold as ever, drafted an anonymous letter to a CIA contact listed in one of the files, detailing what they’d seen and offering their help. Ethan was skeptical, but Lila mailed it before he could change her mind.


Weeks later, two men in suits showed up at their school, asking for them by name. The CIA had traced the letter. At first, the agents were skeptical, but when Lila and Ethan described the office—the desk, the files, even the brand of the CIA director’s pen—they were taken seriously. The agents explained that their abilities aligned with the agency’s research into remote viewing, which had been struggling to produce consistent results. Lila and Ethan, still teenagers, were brought into a classified program under strict supervision.


They called it the Gateway Program, a nod to the idea that their minds could act as gateways to distant places. Lila and Ethan worked with scientists and intelligence officers, refining their techniques to remote view while awake, using meditation and focus to replicate their dream state. They trained to target specific locations, from foreign embassies to hidden bunkers, providing details that stunned their handlers. Their ability to access locked files—like those in the CIA director’s desk—proved invaluable, revealing plans and threats that traditional intelligence couldn’t uncover.


By the late 1970s, the Gateway Program had grown, with Lila and Ethan as its unlikely pioneers. They recruited others with similar potential, building a team that quietly shaped national security. Their work helped locate hostages, uncover espionage, and even prevent a terrorist attack, all from a nondescript office in Langley. They never sought fame, knowing their work was too sensitive for public acclaim. But they took pride in knowing their childhood pact—to explore the unknown together—had led to something that protected their country.


Years later, as adults, Lila and Ethan sat on that same trampoline in her backyard, now a little weathered. They laughed about their first dream in the chemistry classroom, marveling at how far they’d come. “We thought we were just dreaming,” Ethan said, shaking his head. Lila grinned. “We were. We just dreamed bigger than we knew.”