Calatrava, a well-known architect in Europe, was invited to compete in the second competition for the completion of the Cathedral. During the planning process, he had a dream of a phantasy cathedral, in which Gothic style was supplemented to include the environment. He saw columns resembling the tallest trees of the climax rain forest, and a mammoth greenhouse full of smaller trees within the cathedral itself. On waking, he actualized this vision in his entry for the competition. And he won, partly because Dean Morton recognized the synchronism of Calatrava's dream with his own. No other entry had transcended the Gothic tradition.

4. Bill Thompson's dream

Director of Lindisfarne and Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral, had sat in on the first architectural competition but had been unaware of the second. Without knowing about the Dean's dream (or Calatrava's) he became transfixed when John Todd showed him Calatrava's winning designs. Thompson then organised a gathering of the Lindisfarne Fellows for October of 1991 at the Cathedral. And as eighteen of the Fellows were on the podium together before an audience of a hundred or so, in the Common Room of the Cathedral School, he began to explain the "intellectual architecture" which connected my work in the mathematics of dynamical systems to Lynn Margulis' work with spirochetes to Varela's work with neurons and Todd's work with "Living Machines" in bioshelters.

Thompson is the weird sort of Irish-American bard with a gift for gab. He dreams open-eyed as he speaks to an audience. For him, a public lecture is a kind of energy-hit in which he channels things he has never thought of before. So with a backup section of eighteen Lindisfarne Fellows, he took off on a mind-jazz riff on a new kind of "electronic stained glass" that would make the invisible microcosm of Margulis' work visible to people walking through the Cathedral. The sound and wave motion of the flagella of the spirochete would become visible -- as children pressed their fingers to a computer screen in a request to hear "the Song of the Spirochete" -- on a liquid crystal display screen in the Cathedral.

Margulis and Varela looked along the backup section at each other and laughed. They had been Fellows longer than I and were used to Bill's improvisational raps, but I was astonished. It was as if Bill were reading my mind, picking up an idea I had been wanting to do for a long time. I had proposed electronic murals in 1985 for the Disney EPCOT Center in Florida. But Bill was right: the Cathedral was the appropriate place for it, and "electronic stained glass" correctly captured is sacred intention. The next morning we all got together at Bob Schwarz' appartment in the sky above Central Park West and sat down to work out in earnest the next steps in the design, and for the financing.