Dreamside (14 page)

"Yay!
When?"

"Tomorrow.
Why not? The weather is better than we deserve, and I
know a rather beautiful spot where we can spend two or three days
relaxing."

"Relaxing!
Yo! Where is it?"

"Wait
and see. The idea is for us to spend some time there, relax, soak up the
beautiful countryside, grow even closer as a group, make associations with the
place, absorb some of its nature . . . Are you persuaded?"

"We're persuaded! Let's do it!"

Next morning they travelled southwards, squeezed into
the professor's cherished Morris Minor, Burns driving slowly and with exasperating
caution. The sun got up hot overhead, bouncing off the polish and chrome of the
car and cooking its passengers. The girls' bare legs stuck to the leather
upholstery and Lee and Brad both took off their shirts, sitting bare chested
and sweating. Burns, dressed in collar and tie, sweater and tweed suit, steered
carefully with hands gripped permanently at five-minutes-to-one, resisting all
overtures either to drive faster or to reveal their destination.

In Coventry he turned
sharply into a one-way street and a flow of oncoming traffic. A policeman stuck
his head out of his car window and bellowed at him to pull over. Particulars
were noted and Burns, who remained calm and polite throughout, was instructed
to produce his driving documents at a police station within fourteen days.

"An
unfortunate development," he muttered when they were mobile again.

"It's
nothing," said Brad, "all you have to do is take in your licence and
insurance and stuff."

"I don't have one. A driving licence
I mean."

"What!"

"Nor
any of the other documents he mentioned.
Insurance and
such."

"Eh!"

"I
only take the car out once or twice a year, around the block as it were, just
to keep it going. I resent having to insure it for that. Is it likely that they
will make a fuss, do you think?"

"Just
keep going," someone said, "we'll try not to think about it."

"Right;
fuck the pigs!" screamed Ella through the open window, and with such
revolutionary ardour that Burns was startled, or possibly inspired, into
driving marginally faster for the rest of the journey.

They
reached the Brecon hills around lunchtime, and Burns drove them to an isolated
house, belonging, he said, to a colleague. The place was rudimentary, some kind
of holiday cottage equipped in utilitarian fashion. They ran up and down the
stairs quickly claiming rooms, Ella and Lee together, Honora alone and Brad
accepting a camp bed arrangement with good grace so that L. P. didn't have to
scramble with the rest of them to stake out his territory in the front bedroom
of the house. The old professor looked utterly exhausted by the journey, and
sank down into a chair. When someone shouted that neither shower nor bath was
functioning, he looked apologetic and bewildered, and could only suggest that
they bathe in a lake he knew of, some three or four miles down the road.

Ella
could see how tired he was. She went over to him. "It doesn't matter about
the bath. It would be great fun to swim in the lake. And the house and the
countryside are wonderful." He looked reassured by her words and forced a
brief smile. The others realized that they were going to have to slow down over
the next few days unless they wanted an invalid on their hands.

They
took him at his word about the lake, and Brad persuaded him (by dint of hard
work and outrageous promises) to surrender the car keys for the drive down to
it. Again they all squeezed into the uninsured Morris Minor together with a
deckchair for Burns to sit on while they swam. Burns complained that they were
treating him like a geriatric, but was obviously gratified by this
consideration. The lake was cool and inviting. They parked the car at the side of
the road and walked down to its grassy banks. An ancient oak leaned out over
it, root and branch plunging into the dark, deep water. They made camp under a
row of weeping willows which dipped leafy stems into the blueblack cool. A
spiral of excited swallows wheeled and turned and dotted the sky with
parabolas above the lake, intoxicated by their own matchless aerial display.

Burns’s
deckchair was set up with protracted ceremony and discussion. Only when he was
fully installed did the others undress and leap squealing into the water. He
watched them swim and bob, and laid towels out on the grass for them. Then he
returned to his deckchair, where he promptly fell into a doze.

It
must have been two hours before he woke. The sun had slipped in the sky.
Everything slumbered. Something of the lake's calm had distilled itself into
the afternoon tranquillity. Glancing down, he saw four young bodies basking in
the heat, their smiling faces lifted up to him as if they expected him to
speak.

"Did
you dream lucid dreams L. P.?" Lee asked lazily.

Honora
said, "You were talking in your sleep."

Ella
giggled. "We heard everything. You named names."

"Lilly?
Did I say Lilly?"

"Yes."

Burns
smiled sleepily and settled back in his chair. "Lilly was my wife. You
know, she died more than ten years ago. I've been dreaming of her a lot lately.
Good dreams, nice dreams. We used to come here, often, years and years ago.
Beautiful, peaceful; just as it is now.
It hasn't changed at
all. That's why I thought of this place."

"I
love it," said Honora.

"We
can have some pleasant days here before returning. There should be a rowing
boat in the shed. We can bring it down here, or rather you can. There's fishing
tackle if you're interested. Or we can take a walk through the woods
there." They all agreed that the choice had been fine—quiet, unspoiled,
entirely tranquil.

The
next three days were a summer idyll. The weather held out, and time seemed
suspended as they swam in the lake, picnicked under the spreading oak, drifted
in the rowing boat, or went on long walks in the cool fern woods. Burns in
particular loved to stroll in the woods, along narrow pathways winding between
giant ferns, with the echoing rap of an unseen woodpecker as descant to his students'
conversation. He liked to stroll with each of them in turn, probing,
challenging,
teasing
them with his gentle irony.

They would
return from these walks shaking their heads at the breadth of his knowledge,
waiting for him to fall asleep in his deckchair before relaying an impression
of their discussions to the others. It seemed that he could talk with authority
about anything, pick up their own arguments and generously advance them before
dismantling them with an opposing view. Lee found him fascinating on the psychosexual
meaning of fairy-tales, of all things, and stalked the woods discussing the
sexual imagery of Beauty and the Beast; Ella could listen all day to his
analysis of revolutionary history or to his satirical monologue on the
psychology of the fascist disposition; Honora found him an expert on
Surrealism; and Brad had his eyes opened on everything from football to the
pharmaceutical industry. Though they never did see a unicorn in those dense,
aromatic woods, the possibility of doing so had never seemed so close.

Burns was
generally content to sit quietly in his deckchair, watching events take their
predictable shape. There was little in the splashing and cavorting of the four
young students to make this grey-haired scholar of human behaviour raise an
eyebrow, but he saw—where they might not—the doomed infatuation of Lee and
Ella, too hot not to burn itself out too soon; Brad's persistent and not
unsubtle advances on Honora, gently but firmly deflected; Brad's disguised
interest in Ella, secretly recognized and shrugged off by her but completely
missed by Lee; and the subtle affection Lee and Honora reserved for each other,
prompting more speculation by others than it ever did for them.

And while
he watched all this with fond interest, it added to, rather than detracted
from, the uninhibited delight of three perfect summer days. How could it be
otherwise, when the place itself was a kind of dream? But beyond that which he
would always see with his trained eye, he could never have guessed at, nor
would he ever have permitted, the growth of those strange forms already tightening
round that close circle of four, like snaring vines in a wood, or like
dangerous weeds reaching from the bedrock of a lake to the thrashing ankles of
careless swimmers.

T W E L V E

And I
too in Arcadia
—Anon

In the following weeks, the group
made five almost effortless
rendezvous experiments on
dreamside. The dreamside location, the site of their recent summer trip, was
easily called to mind during bouts of ordinary dreaming. Appointments were made
and were kept.

Burns
resisted their impatience to return and return again to dreamside, so hot was
their excitement, and insisted that the rendezvous took place no more
frequently than once per week so as not to fatigue their powers or jade the
sharpness of the experience. For him it was a time of furious note taking and
exhaustive post-dream analysis, questioning the four ever more assiduously,
pressing more closely in his collection of minutiae for the construction of a
theory that held little interest for them. Their direct experience was like
bathing in incandescent light, while the professor wanted to grope in the
shadows. He became at times irascible, frustrated at their inability to
crystallize the unbearable excitement of the elusive, drifting experience of
their dreamside rendezvous.

"To be
there is to know," Lee tried lamely during one post-dream analysis,
"and to know is to be there."

Burns threw
down his notepad and pencil. "So, Lee, you've had a few nice dreams and
now you're a Zen Master." He leaned forward, a crimson rash spreading
over his forehead as he spat the words, an iron-grey lock of hair loosening and
lashing at his face. "Look; God or nature equipped you with the most
accurate and poetic language in the history of nations. You have at your
disposal the precision of the Latin and the expressiveness of the Germanic, and
you were born lucky enough to ride the confluence of both. Why don't you use it
because I DON'T HAVE THE FUCKING
TIME FOR YOUR MORONIC BABBLING UNDERGRADUATE BUDDHIST
LAMENT
"

They were
shocked into silence. Burns had obviously learned how to swear. He looked ill.

"Forgive
me, I'm raving," he said at last, "I do apologize."

"No,"
said Lee, "I was being sloppy; you're right. Let's start again."

"Maybe
a short break for coffee?" Ella suggested.

It was
during this break that Honora complained of something peculiar which had
happened to her that morning. "I woke up, washed and dressed, went out of
the door and—"

"You
woke up," said Brad.

"You
had it too?"

"Couple of times."

"More
than a couple," said Ella.

All four of
them had experienced what they called "false awakenings," dreams of
waking up which were so prosaic that they could not be distinguished from the
actual experience of waking into the real world. Lee testified that he had even
experienced the false awakening twice in the same morning.

"It can get so you don't know if you've woken or
you haven't."

"Or whether you are just about to," Ella put
in.

"An
interesting side effect," said Burns. The others weren't so sure how
interesting it was.

Their
dreamwork analysis continued. They could easily describe how they had managed
to rendezvous on dreamside, how they had touched or talked or even how they had
once swum together. But these adventures held no particular fascination for
Burns. He was far more interested in the fact that on dreamside most of the
events took place without words: if there was an agreement to swim, they simply
dived in, it was understood, and if there was an idea to move off in one
direction together then it was communicated at some mysterious subverbal level.
Burns set them the exercise of passing on messages during dreamtime, usually
slogans or proverbs or short quotations. Such a task required considerable
discipline. Words would sometimes come, but as with Lee's original
breakthrough, not always the intended message. Results were mixed and
communication was unstable. Burns became more demanding.

At
last, another breakthrough was made. It did become possible to stabilize the
dreamside scenario and deliver the appropriate message which was then generally
recalled upon awakening, but
this required tremendous efforts
of concentration on both the part of the giver and the receiver, quite often
with the result that the weight of concentration would itself break up the
dream. This difficulty notwithstanding, the four became increasingly proficient
at stabilizing the flow of the dream and passing on or picking up the words
which had been selected for them by the professor.