Dreamside (11 page)

"What
do you get out of it, apart from seeing your name under an article in
The
Spoonbender's Gazette}
"

"Let's say, Brad, that I'm easily
satisfied."

"Done," said Lee.

"Done," said the others.

"Good,"
said Burns, getting out of his chair, "next week we'll see if we can't
start a program
of real
dreaming."

Ella was the last to
file out through the hall. The door stood open to admit a wedge of cool night
air, and a glimpse of a new moon hanging low over the graveyard opposite. The
light played without sympathy on the old academic's cable-veined forehead as he
helped Ella on with her coat.

"By the way,"
shaking her hair free of her collar, "how did you know when we, that is
Lee and I, started lucid dreaming for real?"

"Oh,"
Burns smiled slyly, closing the door to behind her, "I'm a sharp old
cookie."

S
E V E N

All
would be well

Could we
but give us wholly to the
dreams

—W. B.
Yeats

"How do you mean, 'meet up'
with each other?"

Term
was over, the students had all gone home,
summer
was
delivering its promise. Lee and Ella had abandoned their plans for combing the
Mediterranean beaches of the Aegean islands; the plump faces of German and
American tourists went unflattered by Honora's quick pencil sketches; and
Brad's medical tomes lay unstudied on the shelf.

The sash windows of
Burns's lounge were pushed up to admit the sweet summer air. Lee held out a
hand for one of Ella's hand-rolled liquorice-paper cigarettes which he had
taken to smoking, and Ella grudgingly passed him the one she had just been about
to light for herself. Honora reclined in a heavy armchair, her cotton dress
sticking to her moist skin as she fanned herself with an Erich Fromm paperback
she had plucked from the professor's shelves. Brad looked on glumly with his
eyebrows raised in the expression of barely tolerant boredom that he had
cultivated of late.

"I
mean exactly that: arrange a meeting, a rendezvous between the four of you at
some pre-arranged location, just as you would in normal waking life."

"Can it be done?"
Ella, not looking up from her tobacco.

"It's already been done," Burns
said impatiently, "many times, under laboratory conditions."

"If
it's such a well-trodden path," said Brad, "why are we bothering to
do it?"

Burns,
looking tired, rested his head against the wings of his armchair. "I don't
care to continually justify my interests; if you want my rationalizations then
you'll have to earn them. If you do manage to rendezvous in
dreamtime"—Burns used the new language, the conspiratorial argot of this
small cell of lucid dreamers,
dreamside dreamtime dreamwork dreamthought
dreamspeak,
to reaffirm his membership of the group—"then exchange a
phrase, a song or a proverb. Something you can bring back as an objective
correlative.
Confirmation.
Words
that will become real things in waking time.
That's
all for tonight.
Thank you."

He rose and escorted them to the door.

"Tetchy."
Brad spoke against the background of a pulsating pub jukebox.
"Very tetchy."

"You
have that effect on people," said Ella. "In any case, it's time to
move this thing into a different gear. Let's agree a rendezvous point, a
meeting location which we could head for during dreaming. L. P. says others
have done it, so why don't we give it a serious shot? We all manage to shift
locations in dreamtime; let's agree on a place to meet."

"There's
a difference," Brad muttered, "between shifting locations inside our
own dreams and in bringing four different dreams together."

"It
can work; I know it. I just know it." Honora surprised them with her
enthusiasm. "Have faith. Just choose a place."

They all
stared back at her, and for the first time Ella recognized the attraction
which the Irish girl held for the two men. She saw them watching as Honora
shyly averted her eyes and lifted her glass to her mouth. Honora was the one
who talked least about the dreaming, who was the least inclined to speculate,
but Ella sensed that she was also the one who dreamed deepest. She spoke as if
she knew the coinage in that strange, different country. Ella warmed towards
her and felt saddened by a simultaneous pang of jealousy.

"Honora's
right," she said, breaking the spell, "we've got to believe it to be
possible. If you've got any more doubts, Brad, keep them to yourself."

"Choose
a place," Honora repeated.

Brad tapped
the table in front of him.
"This pub, preferably after
hours when we can help ourselves."

"Be
serious."

"I am
being serious!!"

They walked
home across the park. A full moon sat low in the sky. They walked past the
tennis courts and along the row of cherry trees that some weeks ago had hung
heavy with pink blossom. Brad aimed a full-throated howl at the appalled moon.

"This
would be a good place to meet in dreamtime!" Ella still had strong
associations for the place, as, she knew, did Lee.

"Are you
sure?" said Lee.

"What's
so special about this place?" Brad wanted a more dramatic setting.

"It's
easier to make an outdoor scene appear than it is to shift to an indoor
location."

"Is it
hell," said Brad.

"Anyway
this place has
a certain
intensity."

"Maybe
it has for you two," he smirked. "It certainly does nothing for
me."

"What
do you mean by 'intensity'?" Honora wanted to know.

"It
probably means they fucked here," said Brad. "But that's no help to
us two."

"The
place suits me," shrugged Honora.
"Seems as good as
any."

So a plan
was formed and the group went their separate ways, hoping to meet there again,
but in very different circumstances.

Brad
insisted on walking Honora home, against all her protests. Ella saw Lee
watching them go.

"Poor
Honora," he said.

"Yes."

The night
was hot. They propped the windows open with text books, but even then the air
was close and uncomfortable, making sleep difficult. They lay on the mattress,
discussing the night ahead. What would be the possibilities if they did
rendezvous in dream-time? Excitement kept them awake. Eventually, sleep took
them.

Lee awoke with
Ella leaning over him. Did you dream? Did you go there?"

“No," Lee still dazed, blinking
stupidly, "I didn't even dream."

       
"Me
neither.
Nothing."

 
      
"Maybe we tried too hard."
"Maybe."

E
IGHT

To dream of creeping up a mountain signifies

the
difficulty of the business at hand

—Astrampsychus

For some time the project was a
singular disappointment. Not
only did the four
fail to keep their dreamside appointments, but the dreams themselves failed to
come. Or at least, they couldn't remember them in the morning. Whatever the
reasons, they felt as if a power had suddenly been switched off at source, a
cable disconnected, a fuse blown.

They tried a number of
strategies to reactivate the circuit, all of which proved futile. Ella and Lee
tried sleeping apart; another night Ella disappeared and returned an hour later
with a small brown wedge of hashish in the hope of encouraging vivid dreams; they
tried a program of rampant exhaustive sex, which, while enormously enjoyable,
remained sadly ineffective; and they began a regimen of difficult-to-digest
foods last thing at night, strong cheeses with exotic names and an array of
pickles, all of which produced nothing more than bad breath. Finally they had
to conclude that dreams rode on horses which, while they could be led to the
dark waters of sleep, could not be made to drink.

Honora
and Brad, inquiries revealed, were having similar problems. Nothing was
happening. Honora, however, had a different theory about why her dream diary
was gathering blank pages. She complained that Brad Cousins had taken to
inviting himself back to her room every night for the past week, flatly
refusing to leave until the dew was up on the grass. Honora's device for
beating back his advances was to make a fresh mug of coffee every twenty
minutes so that she might have something—a caffeine curtain—to draw between
them. These massive doses of caffeine and the attendant lack of sleep did no
more to remedy Brad's or Honora's current dream amnesia than any of the
desperate nostrums employed by the other two.

"Let's
run through all of the original exercises," said Burns, "from the
beginning."

Ella
stifled a yawn. They met more frequently now, and always at Burns's house. If
they had thought that the extended 'grants' which Burns had miraculously
engineered would promise them an easy summer, they had been mistaken. Burns
proved to be rigorous about punctuality at meetings, exhaustive in his
questioning and insistent upon meticulously kept journals charting the daily
progress of their dreamwork. "This is not like studying for a
degree," he said more than once, "this is real work."

Burns was
trying hard to give them some uplift to beat the sag in the development curve.

"But
we've been through all of those exercises," Ella protested. "That's
not what's blocking things."

"So what is, exactly?"

"I don't know."

"Precisely.
You don't
know. I don't know. We all don't know. So we go back through it again, from the
beginning, following our previously successful formula until something breaks
for us; and what's more, we keep a diary every day charting the exercises and
the results."

"But there are no
results!" said Lee and Brad in chorus.

"So
we carefully chart our exercises and note that there are no results, and we
explore our lack of results. What's the matter with you?" Burns's
exasperation was becoming more apparent. He marched over to the sash window and
pushed it open.

"It's
boring," said Honora.

"Oh!
I do apologize if this scientific method of research is not a glittering parade
of fun and spills involving one big kick after another. Pardon me." He sat
down again abruptly.

"That's
not what I meant."

"Then
why say it?" The four stared glumly at the carpet. "So, as I said, we
return to the beginning, repeat our original procedure and generate a new level
of lucid dreaming."

Ella
muttered something under her breath.

"Yes
Ella, I know that you all belong to the Me generation and that you are
accustomed to having everything you want exactly when you want it, instant
coffee, instant money, instant gratification, a spoonful of this, a splash of
that. Well let me tell you that this thing damn well won't make like that do
you see? It's something you have to actually work for and only then might it
work and even then only
might."
He got up again and stormed over to
the sash window, this time slamming it down. "Now I think you'd all better
go since you're not in the mood for work. Come back tomorrow when you're ready
to be serious."

They
walked slowly to the end of Burns's street, an avenue of three-storey houses
with great gables prodding at the dusk.

"What's
getting to him?" asked Ella, affecting cool but obviously stung.

"Maybe
we asked for it," said Honora, stopping at the corner.

"Naw,"
said Brad, "he's just a constipated old grump who didn't get his dish of
prunes today."

"We
should be more methodical," Lee cut in, "if we're serious about
it."

"Doesn't
matter how serious," said Ella, flushing, "I can't dream to order.
You don't turn dreams out like cakes hot from the oven; you have to wait until
they come to you."

"Ella's
right," said Brad, "what does Burns know about it? We're the ones
making and delivering the goods, he's just the warehouseman with a pencil
behind his ear hassling us about his invoices."

The
post-mortem went on, with Honora and Lee becoming divided from the other two in
defence of Burns. Then Lee began to mistrust Brad's motives and Ella to suspect
Honora. It also caused some resentment between Lee and Ella, and neither
desisted from tapping home the wedge that they set up between themselves. It
seemed at times like these that the dreamwork project had become a vain and
profitless obsession.