North Loup sits in Valley County, in the middle of Nebraska, in the valley it was named for. The 2020 census counted 254 people in the village. Seventh Day Baptists out of Wisconsin founded it in 1872, the village was platted in 1877, and the Union Pacific reached it in 1882. Popcorn made it briefly famous: the first Popcorn Days ran in 1901, the celebration still runs every August, and for a while the place called itself the Popcorn Center of the World. The population peaked at 643 in 1930 and has been coming down the long Nebraska slope ever since. The Chalk Hills rise south of the river, and the climb up the one they called the Sugar Loaf still gives back the whole valley.
A man works behind the counter of a pharmacy in the village, serving a town of 300 people. He has been dead for decades. Both of those sentences are on the record, and they are on two different records. The first belongs to a dream his grandson keeps, banked verbatim on the morning it arrived. The second belongs to the county. Neither record asks anything of the other, and the grandson has been measuring the distance between them his whole life.
The practice is plain. He closes his eyes, he pictures the face, and he waits for the state to arrive. As a child he would visit North Loup, where his dead grandfather was no longer dead, but alive, behind the counter and working. In his teens he visited his cats that had died or gone missing over the years, and he would pet them and sing to them and sleep in the sun with them, because he never had a chance to say goodbye. In his twenties and thirties he visited his dead mentors, two men of the theatre, reliving conversations and extending them past what had been said while the men were living. Into his fifties he visited his young self, dead to him several times over, a mulligan given and forgiven, a hundred times over. Now, entering his sixties, he dreams of dead places. The elementary school filled with his friends. The radio and TV stations where he began his love of communication, the coworkers turned peers by the compressing telescope of time.
This is where the prairie piece meets the laboratory, and the register here is the record’s, not the wish’s. In 2003, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, a counting study asked what the night takes from the day. Two-thirds of everything the sleepers remembered dreaming drew identifiably on the days around it. A whole day handed back intact, the same afternoon with its time and place still attached, appeared in one or two dreams in a hundred. The night builds from stock. It does not replay.
What builds the pharmacy is native equipment. In sleeping animals, the hippocampus runs ordered firing sequences for corridors the animal has never walked, a standing repertoire of futures held in stock before any experience assigns them. The discoverers of the phenomenon named it preplay in Nature in 2011, and their own estimate puts the shelf at least fifteen futures deep, in a rat, at the measured floor. Off that shelf comes the drugstore of the dream: the counter, the stock, the man behind it, all of it built from the day’s materials, maintained across decades of visits, and believed completely every time, because the part of the brain that audits reality goes off shift while the builders work.
The ache on waking from North Loup has a measured name. In 2016 a research group published a scale for the condition in which the daydream consumes the day, and its first factor is named Yearning: the pull toward the elsewhere itself. The condition is real, the scale measures it, and the line between visiting and moving in is drawn by cost, not by longing. The visitor opens his eyes and works. In decades of the author’s archive, no entry records a visit costing the day a day.
So what is the pharmacy, on the record? It is not a dispatch from the dead. The channels were tested at full seriousness and closed on the record, by people who signed their own names to the failure. It is not a fantasy pasted together by longing. The machinery that builds it is the same machinery that plans your week. It is a construction, built nightly from the stock of one life, inside one skull, at full sensory conviction, and it is the only elsewhere that has ever admitted a visitor. The village of the dream is real in construction and local in address, and the address turns out to be the one place that can be visited at all. The prairie has always known how to keep what it loses. Now the laboratory has its own word for the keeping.
The book of all of this is published this month, and it is called PREPLAY: Rehearsing the Lives You Never Led. It measures the count and the engine, closes the channels that do not exist, maps the crossings that do, and prints the five specimens twice each, once told cold and once equipped, the pharmacy among them. The archive it was written from began in a village of 254, and the man who kept it kept everything, dated, down to the run that ended. If you want the whole record, it is at bolesbooks.com, it is on Kindle, and it is in a paperback on cream paper. Tonight the lights are on in North Loup, the counter is manned, and the work of the village goes on.