Dreamside (32 page)

It was she,
after all, who had raced down to Cornwall to bring him back. She had cooked up
the whole plan; and it was she who had gone alone to the hospital that morning
after the ultimate dream. When she had woken the morning after the storm on
dreamside—incredibly only three days ago—she had not waited for the other two.
She had got into her car and had driven to the hospital with a terrible
foreknowledge. It echoed an earlier experience in her life. It had been a fine
morning, like this one, of diffuse yellow sunshine and the grass wet with a
heavy dew.

She had
thought of the time she had washed him and shaved him and cut his hair and
dressed him, ostensibly in preparation for meeting the others but really for
their last walk on dreamside. There had seemed to be a tiny measure of hope,
but that was then. Of course she wished she hadn't done any of it, wished she
had left Brad to his mouldering alcoholic decay in Elderwine Cottage. But she
knew that bringing him back to face that final dreamside rendezvous was as
unavoidable as daylight coming after dark. Or the reverse; Ella wasn't sure.

She
tried hard to recall the thing which he had begged her to remember. It grieved
her deeply that she hadn't been able to see how important it might have been to
Brad if she had just been able to lie— if indeed lie it was. But no; surely
that would have made the entire dreamside business nothing more than a
conspiracy. A conspiracy of what would at worst be a nest of liars, and at best
a coven of hysterics. Yet it had all happened. And whatever they were, she was
not about to betray or deny a single moment of the reality of dreaming.

At the hospital they told her that Brad had died
during the night, that he'd never come out of his coma. There was some bewilderment
on their part, and talk of a post-mortem. Ella had said "Thank you"
to the doctor who had broken the news. It had been an odd thing to say. What
Ella had meant was thank you for the clarity, thank you for the confirmation of
what she already knew, thank you for the permission to grieve. When she had
returned to the house, to tell Lee and Honora what they too had already
guessed, that's when her tears had come.

On her way out of town, Ella drove up to the lake to
take a final look. After he had held her for a while, Lee had cleared the
house. He had suggested they stay in the town while the formalities of Brad's
death were taken care of. That night they had checked into a hotel, where Lee
had booked three single rooms.

In the
morning, when Lee found himself alone with Ella, he told her that he wanted to
return to Northern Ireland with Honora. Ella was not at all surprised.

"Honora
wants it; but she won't do it because she thinks you will feel betrayed. I know
that's not so, and I think you would have been leaving me anyway."

"Tell
her I understand."

"I
love you, Ella, but I'm no match for you and I'll never be enough for
you."

"I'm
not sure I know what you mean by that."

"Yes,
you do."

"Lee,
will you do me a favour and leave today? I'll stay here for another night or
so."

"I
can't leave you with all of this."

"I would prefer it. Really I
would."

Lee knew that Ella
didn't say things for the sake of form. She wanted Honora and him to go, so
they did. Before they left, Ella hugged Honora and kissed her and they made
unkeepable
promises about seeing each other again. Then she
went to Lee.

"Ella ..." he
began.

But she stopped him.
"Now you're going to kiss me, and then you're going to go," she said,
as if she were directing an actor.

Lovers were easy to
come by, thought Ella. They were as thick on the ground as used dreams. But a
relationship that would stand the test was rare. So she and Lee parted for the
second time, and she never let him know that he was right, that she would have
been leaving him anyway. The sun was warm, and at the top of the hill
overlooking the lake she stopped the car and climbed out to see what was
happening. A small army of volunteer conservationists had already begun the
task of cleaning the polluted water. They were busy dredging, draining and
replanting. Ella felt heartened. She wanted to go over and wish them luck, but
she felt shy about it. She knew they would do a fine job.

End

Dreamside, an
Afterword
by
the author

It seems fictional to me to
say so, but it is a quarter of a century since I started writing my first
published novel
Dreamside
.
 
I had the seed idea in my head and had
scribbled a possible opening; but then a bang of blood to the brain made me
quit my very good job,
ask my girlfriend
to marry me,
and hare off with her to the Greek island of
Lebsos
.
 
There we lived on the beach in a scorpion-infested
shack, just outside a village called Petra.
 
There was no electricity, we drew water from a pump and I wrote while my
wife painted watercolours.

It was there that I completed
Dreamside
.
 
The working title at the time was
Zeds
.
 
I knew it was a lousy title but I’d already discovered that wringing one’s
hands trying to dream up a good title was Number 39 in the long list of
Ways
To
Run Away
From Actually Writing
.
 
Anyway there
was no internet, no TV, no local cinema and the only entertainment available was
watching one of the local shepherds catch and milk a goat.
 
Back home in England I’d quickly got used to
a PC/Word Processor, so now I had to revert to a portable typewriter with – and
I tell this story to my children who listen with deep
scepticism
 
-
something called a return carriage
so that every time you reached the margin of the page a bell rang.
 
I sat under a vine-covered canopy looking out
at the sparkling Aegean and making my little bell ring every fifteen or so
words.

Ting.

You might think that with my
working in such an inspiring place, at the edge of the aquamarine sea, close to
the ancient Gods and under the stirring Mediterranean light that I might have
written about Greece.
 
But it never works
that way with me.
 
I would come to write
about the Greek islands much later; meanwhile experiences have to be milled,
yeasted, fermented and left in a dark place before the mysterious stewards of
the back-brain are ready to barrel them up for consideration.
 
So I worked on the idea I’d smuggled with me
from England, and that idea was founded on the concept of Lucid Dreaming.

Lucid Dreaming is
semi-fantastical.
 
The ability to control
and steer one’s dreams can be and has been rationally tested.
 
What appealed to me most about it at the time
was that the condition of any kind of dreaming can’t be dismissed as pure
fantasy, even though its content is often Surreal and can only be demonstrated
in so far as an individual dreamer reports his or her dreams.
 
Thus events in a lucid-dream world, even
though they may appear to belong to fantasies of the paranormal, do actually
take place in this world, inasmuch as we all dream and those dreams are
unquestionably part of a real human experience.
 

This in itself generated serious
questions about the type of novel I had written.
 
In 1989, the year I sold it, my publishers
not unreasonably wanted to know on what shelves it would sit.
 
Was it a science fiction novel they asked
me?
 
Was it Fantasy?
 
Or even Horror, since it has its fair share
of creepy moments.
 
Or was it after all a
Mainstream novel, since most of the events in the novel fell in the waking,
natural world rather than in the dreaming world.
 
All good questions, which I
was too inexperienced in the world of publishing to answer.
 
I hadn’t a clue.
 
I wanted it to have a compelling narrative,
engaging characters and some psychological insight.
 
I also wanted it touch on the world of the
paranormal.
 
All that seemed quite enough
to think about.

After 25 years in the
business I do of course now realise that these genre divisions mean very little.
 
They are of course important to the
bookseller, but that’s all about the market place and not about the book
itself.
 
If I’d known then what I now
know my answer to those questions every time would be: which of those is selling
the most?
 

For me the most important thing
about the book is the leak of the miraculous into the ordinary world; the idea
that the marvellous is always closer than we think.
 
I’m fixed on the notion that rationality –
wonderful rationality – will take us so far but will never answer everything to
our satisfaction; and that the most difficult thing that rationality will ever
face is the question of what makes us human.
 
Dreamside
set me on a very
particular trajectory of novel writing - for a quarter of a century at least –
that I didn’t know was in front of me.
 
I
still can’t answer the question of what kind of novel this is (or any of the novels
that followed).
 
I’m happy to let other people
answer for me.

As for
Dreamside
itself the principle of Lucid Dreaming is somewhat
distanced from Fantasy in that there are many people who can dream lucidly and
who can control their dreams.
 
At one time
quite a lot of scientific research went on into the subject and the most
remarkable – and still unexplained – report from that body of research was that
Lucid Dreamers could categorically meet up with each other, by pre-arrangement,
in some mentalistic universe.

The subjects, interviewed separately
after a period of dreaming and without being able to contact each other, successfully
confirmed who amongst their experimental group had made the dream rendezvous
happen.
   
They were able to identify precisely
who from their experimental group had kept their appointments and who hadn’t.
 
And the remarkable thing was that they corroborated
each others’ claims exactly.
 
The scientific
experiments foundered when the experiment subjects, their extraordinary
achievements notwithstanding, were unable to progress their experiences.
 
Research requires a practical pay-off.
 
Not content with the merely astonishing, the
funders
of this exciting research lost interest.
 
Dreamside
speculates on the notion of what might have happened if such
an
research group had managed to progress the enterprise further.

I don’t like going back and
re-reading my past work, though I did so to get this novel ready for
E-publication.
 
There are one or two
wince-inducing lines and some things I would now do differently.
 
 
I can’t
quite believe I was seduced into using words like
tremulousness
.
 
That sort of nonsense
belongs in the kind of bad novels we have come to call “literary” and all I can
say is forgive me the sins and offences of my youth.
 
Other than that the story itself seems to have
weathered quite well.
 
Note that it was
set in a quite recent time when there were no mobile phones and the idea of the
internet was but a dream.
 

The novel describes techniques
for incubating lucid dreaming.
 
I didn’t
invent these techniques.
 
Most of them
are taken and adapted from some of the research papers I mentioned above.
 
Anyone seriously interested in developing lucidity
while dreaming is invited to try them.
 
The
idea is to pepper your waking day with conscious references to lucidity, so
that when you sleep that same content will find its way into your dream.
 
The “hands” technique is a good place to
start.
 
My own experiments were only
partially successful.
 
I could reach the
point of lucid awareness but I could never sustain the lucid dream: it would hit
a “dissolve” point quite early.
   
Perhaps you would have better luck.
 
I should warn you that natural lucid dreamers do report that the experience
of false awakening can be disturbing (I called these “repeaters” in the novel).
 
I can’t vouch for the success of the reality
checking techniques I offer, which are fictional, though genuine lucid dreamers
have reported that hitting a light switch is helpful.
 
If you are dreaming the light tends to come on,
but in another room.

Language – speaking it or
writing it – is possibly the most
conscious
thing we can do.
 
On the planet of the
human psyche it lives on the well-lit side, whereas dreaming happens on the
dark side.
 
That’s why message
transmission during lucid dreaming breaks down.
 
In our normal dreams we might think that people speak things to us but
they don’t.
 
Not in the normal time-frame
of sequential twanging of the vocal chords anyway.
 
We apprehend communication in a radically
different way and then treat it as though it were speech because we don’t know
any better.
 
But I suspect – and now I’m
moving into the realms of speculation – that we also actually accomplish this other
form of communication quite regularly during our waking life.
 
Our apprehension of the practice is eclipsed
by our capacity to speak, but it manifests regularly in what we call intuition
and inter-subjectivity; group-mind and insight; telepathy and thought
transference.