What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

**Spoilers Ahead**

* Read the story circa 1975 in an anthology of sci-fi stories. Pretty sure the story dated to the 1950s, but it might have been published in the mid-'60s.
* Believe the story was set in NYC - a world leader or man with an important role is permanently locked in a dream world. The protagonist must go into a lab where the leader's sleeping body is, get jacked in (essentially) and join the leader in his dreams. There, he must fight pulp-inspired monsters (who are, I think, holding the leader a prisoner) to try to free the leader. He uses details from his real-world waking life to fight the monsters.
* Backstory: as a child, the protagonist had nightmares with scary monsters until his father gave him his .45 to put under his pillow at night.
* The dream battles have details that spill over into the real world. For example, at one point, our hero his threatened with a mass of monsters and he summons a battalion of NYPD cops in a fleet of New York taxi cabs. In the dream, he gets the help of the cops by offering one of the cops (a dream version of the cop on his local beat) tickets to a big (real) boxing match. When he wakes, he runs into the cop in real life and although the cop doesn't remember the dream battle, he expects the protagonist to get him fight tickets.
*The battles in the dreams grow steadily scarier and the protagonist is finally unable to pull anything from the real world to save himself ... until he remembers the .45 under his pillow as a kid. He's able to use that to finally vanquish the enemy in his dreams and free the world leader.

Ring any bells?

I can't put a title or author to it, but this sounds like one I read, where the villain has a beautiful girl. The protagonist during the dream keeps making her skirt shorten, and the villain keeps lengthening it. The protagonist sees the girl after the dream is finished (I think she might be a nurse) and she glares at him.

That sounds about right. It definitely had a dated feel, even when I read it in the mid-70s.

Dreams are Sacred by Peter Phillips.

It's collected in these anthologies: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cg... , or you can read it online at: https://archive.org/details/Astoundin...

Astounding! That's the story, all right. Thank you for identifying it and sharing links where I could find it. It suffers greatly from the intervening years and the growth of my reading taste, but it's intensely satisfying to re-encounter it.

@Sue - Turns out it was the protagonist making the beautiful magician's dress longer, and the villain -- in this case, the guy he's trying to bring out of his dream-coma -- who kept making it shorter. Funny reversal of memory. But she definitely glares at him at the end.

Dreams Are Sacred by Peter Phillips