things back from the light to share with each other.”
“Like you’re doing now,” Taylor said.
“Huh. Hadn’t thought about it like that, but yeah, I guess so.”
Taylor turned her paper over and picked up the pen. “Okay, do me a favor. Go back through all of that again but slower. I want to write it down.”
Greg was mostly caught up with everything except writing the paper for film. That class was quickly becoming more trouble than it was worth. Tired of his room, he had taken his laptop to the living room. Unfortunately, that wasn’t helping either. He thought about going to the library on campus, but getting out in the blustery cold that was threatening snow was less appealing than sitting on the couch watching the cursor blink on and off, on and off as if taunting him.
He’d just put his head back in utter frustration when Nelson came tumbling in the front door. The rush of cold followed him and flooded over everything.
“Sheesh,” Nelson said in exasperation as he slammed the door. “If this keeps up, I’m moving back to Washington.”
“I’m going with you,” Greg said. He looked again at the cursor and wondered if the word curse was why they had called it that.
“What’re you working on?” Nelson asked as he propped his backpack next to the couch, shrugged out of his coat, and headed to the kitchen.
“Cinema,” Greg called back. “Please, shoot me now.”
Coming back with a small handful of chips, Nelson sat in the chair. “I didn’t know you were taking cinema. Man, I loved that at Northwestern. Well, all except for the Jim Carrey one that freaked me out. Oh, that and A Beautiful Mind.” Nelson shivered. “Yeah, don’t get me started on that one.”
“Oh, yeah?” Greg asked. “Did they make you watch other movies outside of class too?”
“Outside? No.” Nelson ate a chip. “Why?”
“We have to watch something else that has a ‘similar element,’ and compare-contrast it with the one we watched in class.”
“Yeek.”
“Tell me about it. I’m trying to compare and contrast Kate & Leopold with Top Gun. Meg Ryan was in both of them, but that’s about where the similarities end.”
“Huh, so do the contrasts then,” Nelson said. “How are they different?”
“Well, she’s barely even in Top Gun for one. She’s like in the sub-sub supporting cast in that one, and she’s almost ditzy, at least that’s how she comes off at first. And she’s got a kid. She’s married.” Greg sat forward and considered. “Huh. I never thought about it like that. She doesn’t just play the same character in both.”
“It’s like the two Jim Carrey movies we watched. Same guy but playing two very different people.”
“Yeah.”
Slapping his hands to wipe the salt off of them, Nelson stood. “Well, if you ever need somebody to kick back and watch something with, let me know. I got pretty decent at analyzing camera angles and why a director chose what he did for a scene.”
“Noted.”
“So, alpha and theta are deep thinking, where we can’t really get there consciously,” Taylor said.
“Right.”
“And you can learn to get there even when you’re awake by relaxing and letting go of the struggle of thinking up the answer?”
“Yep.”
“When you do that, you go into lateral and quantum thinking instead of just linear.”
“Exactly.”
“And that lets you access things like vision, innovation, invention, creativity,” Taylor said. “It’s like quantum imagination or imagination times infinity. It’s the bigger reality that we don’t see, or can’t see, if we’re stuck looking at the world the way the world looks at the world.” She couldn’t really explain that, but she was trying. “It’s like me being able to see the painting I’ve been trying to do. I call it The Choice, and it’s these stone steps that lead up to a door that’s partially open and the light from inside the room where the door is floods down the steps.”
“So, what’s the choice? If there’s only one door?” Yoli asked.
Taylor could see those steps like they were right in front of her. “To take the chance to climb the steps to see what’s up there.”
“Oh, cool. I get it. It’s like me, going to the conference or not. The light is enticing, but the climb is…”
“Scary.”
“Right,” Yoli said, dragging the i’s out. “It’s crazy how many things I’ve talked myself out of because ‘going up there’ seemed weird. I didn’t want to tell anybody about the dreams because they freaked me out. I thought everyone would think I was strange.”
“Unique,” Taylor said with