The earliest first dreams in the archive were from 1962, when the documentation program began. Eire worked mostly with the 1970s and early 1980s cohort, people now in their late fifties and sixties, whose lives had accumulated enough outcome data to make the cross-referencing meaningful.
The first dream was documented within seventy-two hours of birth. It had taken two decades to establish that the first dream was distinct from later infant dreaming: different in structure, different in the particular way it was encoded, persistent in a way that later dreams were not. The first dream did not fade. It remained, somewhere in the brainstem, intact and unmodified, for the duration of a life.
What the first dream said varied. Some were wordless: color, movement, the sensation of something not yet named. Some contained complete narrative sequences. The archive had, in its 1970s and early 1980s cohort alone, 2.3 million documented first dreams. Eire's job was to trace them forward: to find the patterns, the correlations, the way a particular quality of first dream corresponded to a particular quality of life.
She was good at this. She had spent four years in the archive and had developed an intuition for the relationship between a first dream and the life that followed, not predictive exactly, but resonant in a way that was hard to explain to people outside the field.
Her own first dream was in the archive under her ID number. She had not opened the file.
She was not sure what she was waiting for. She told herself: the right moment. She was aware this was not a professional reason. She worked with first dreams every day. She understood that the right moment did not arrive by waiting for it.
She filed three correlations and went home.