Dreamside (9 page)

"I'm a fucking revolutionary,"
she said, on many an occasion.

Once Lee, who knew different, decided to throw down the intellectual
gauntlet.
"No you're
not," he said.

"Yes I am."

"No you're not."

"Yes I am."

"No you're not."

"Why am I not?"

"You're just not."

"Why not?"

Lee got out before things got too deep.
"Never mind."

Nothing
much was happening. And it wasn't happening in Lees dreaming activities any
more than it was happening in his sex life. In fact he couldn't see much
difference between the two. Both seemed to involve some futile speculation
which was failing miserably to produce dividends, and he had almost forgotten
what one had to do with the other. He persisted with the prescribed exercises
whenever he remembered what they were, earnestly quizzing himself about
whether or not he was dreaming and solemnly reminding himself to become aware
during his next dream. But these exercises were always broken by sexual
fantasies of architectural proportion, with Ella Innes as the central pillar.
Conversely, the most potent of these fantasies of Ella would occasionally be
startled by the flashing thought that he must by all means become aware during
his next dream. As far as he understood it, the relationship between the two
things, sex and dreaming—and he was honest enough to recognize his own
motivation—was that if he did manage to control his dreams, then in that other
shadowy place he might have more success with Ella Innes than he did in the
real world.

He
continued to attend the dreamwork sessions, conscientiously reporting complete
inventions. He was smart enough to make only the most modest of claims, in case
he was pressed for detail by the professor. At times he considered dropping
out, as some others had done, but then, in one session, Ella crossed and
uncrossed her legs and he remembered why he was there.

"
Dreamwork
," said the professor, breaking into Lee's
reverie and signalling the end of the session. "Awareness of dreaming, in
at least some muted form, is now upon most of us, so I have another exercise
for you. I want you to perform this exercise at every opportunity during your
dreams. Look at your hands in front of your face. Try to fix your gaze on your
hands. Look at your hands and try to hold them there for as long as you can
manage. That's all."

One
night, shortly after that session, something strange happened. Lee was asleep
and dreaming. In the dream he met not Ella, but Honora Brennan, the Irish girl
from the seminars.

Lee
found a small walled garden in the middle of busy streets. All around it, giant
concrete towers loomed, and above it was a colossal motorway flyover with
loud, but somehow distant, rush-hour traffic. The garden had been planted
between two of the flyover's huge pillars. In its centre he came across Honora
sprawled in a deckchair and wearing a thin cotton dress. In the telepathy of
the dream both recognized the erotic effect this dress was having on Lee, and
Honora seemed to flaunt the fact that she wore nothing underneath. Honora
seemed relaxed, Lee felt uneasy. Slowly, Honora rose to her feet,
then
climbed the one tree in the garden to sit on one of the
lower branches. Clamping her legs, she let herself fall backwards, so that she
dangled upside down, hanging from the clenched backs of her knees. Her dress
slipped down over her naked body, revealing a pubic bush of shining chestnut
curls above her flat, white belly.

"Do you know you are dreaming?" she asked
Lee.

"I know it."

"Remember
your hands." And Honora disappeared like the Cheshire Cat.

He
raised his hands and looked at them for a long time, until he grew bored.

On waking, Lee scribbled
everything down, and even prepared a dummy back-diary so that he would have a
respectable document to present at the next seminar. He reported the dream
faithfully, omitting just a few of the erotic elements, and sat back to be
congratulated.

A
number of the initial participants had left, including the girl with migraine,
who claimed that the exercises exacerbated her medical condition, and the girl
who had consulted the chaplain only to find that the dreamwork sessions
clashed with the Christian Union's candle-and-guitar nights. The group now comprised
only "graduated" lucid dreamers with established credentials. To
most people's dissatisfaction Brad Cousins was still a regular and was now
dreaming, as he said himself, with Technicolor lucidity.

Lee's
excited report was greeted with a mild response. He was merely showing signs of
catching up with the rest. "Why," said Burns, sensing Lee's frustration
with the obduracy of the group, "would you consider this experience of
lucidity to be of greater significance than any of your experiences
hitherto?"

Lee was in
no position to admit that his "previous experiences" were woven of a
fabric even thinner than dreams. "Obvious," he said, claiming time to
think.

"This
obvious factor," Burns twitching one of his secret smiles, "is a mite
too slender for my apprehension. Would you like to share it?"

"It
seems to me that people in the group have begun to help each other in this
enterprise, perhaps unconsciously."

Some eyes
squinted in appreciation of this idea and some heads nodded. Burns thought for
a moment.

"Interesting proposition, Lee."
The professor's familiar address was new. "But I
would tend to be more modest about claiming the erotic or otherwise attentions
of the admittedly attractive Miss Brennan. I think you can safely claim this to
be your own work."

Heads
nodded, some nostrils snorted, all in agreement with this sound judgement.
Embarrassed but not offended, Honora smiled timidly at Lee. But if his new
powers failed to impress the group as a whole, they had an interesting effect
on Ella.

After the
session, as the reduced group trailed out of the professor's house, Lee hung
back to talk with Honora, worried that he might have embarrassed her by
blurting graphic descriptions of her lurid behaviour in his dreams. But his
concern also had something to do with the fact that the intensity of his dream
had conferred an enhanced radiance on Honora. She
looked
different.

It was
while Lee was talking to Honora that Ella dropped back and inserted a
proprietary arm under his.

"I
just told Brad and the others that we were going on somewhere," she said.

"Oh,"
said Lee.

"Right,
then," said Ella.

"Right, then."

For a
moment they stared dumbly at each other.

"Next
time," said Honora, already a shadow hurrying to catch the others.

Lee and
Ella walked along the side of the cemetery as dusk fell, then out across the
park towards Ella's house.

"Where is this somewhere we are going?"

"Nowhere
different," said Ella, "I didn't want to do the usual; chew the
fat, all that
stuff."

It was a
mild spring night. When they reached the row of cherry blossom trees by the
tennis courts, Ella stopped abruptly, and turned and kissed his lips. She
quickly slipped his arm, skipped away from him and leaned against the bough of
one of the trees.

"That dream," she said.

"What?"

He took a
step towards her but she reached up for a low branch and scrambled up to sit on
it. She looked back at him. Her eyes were like gleaming obsidian and her hair
fell across her face. She was a spirit in the tree.

"Do you know what I can do?"

"What can you do?"

"I can do this."

Clasping
her calf muscles tight against the branch she let herself fall backwards,
hanging from the backs of her knees, swinging slightly as she dangled there
upside down,
her
hair falling away from her ears and
neck, her outstretched arms almost reaching the grass.

Lee was mesmerized. "Yet it's not the same."

"Do it."

Lee
put his hand on her stomach, creamy white in the darkness, and unbuttoned and
unzipped her faded blue jeans. He undressed her against gravity, pushing up her
jeans and pants to her knees to reveal the upward-pointing black triangle of
hair, where in the dream he had wanted to put his tongue, and where here he did
so. Ella shivered, and asked him to lift her down.

They
walked across the park to Ella's house, most of the way in silence. When they
got there Ella made her room even more like a cave by switching off the lights
and lighting candles and turning the place into a flickering nimbus of joss
scents. Only then would she let Lee undress her, this time with gravity in
support. She pulled back a sheet on her mattress on the floor. Lee thought he
might be dreaming, but he wasn't.

F I V E

Romeo: I
dream'd a dream tonight.

Mercutio: And so did
I
.

Romeo:
Well, what was yours?

Mercutio:
That dreamers
often lie

—Shakespeare

Two episodes of explosive excitement had been touched
off in Lee
Peterson's life, one
seeming to detonate the other. In the daytime he and Ella skipped lectures in
favour of a program of sexual exhaustion, Ella's acrobatic invention matching
Lee's ardour. In the nights which followed, either with numb satiated bodies
entangled as they slept or with restless limbs disturbing all deep sleep when
they lay apart, Lee found his awareness during dreaming beginning to grow. He
was able to arrest the progress of ordinary dreaming whenever it occurred to
him to look at his hands. From that moment he would always know he was dreaming,
and that he would shortly wake. From this awareness he progressed rapidly to a
level of control over the substance of his dreams of which he had previously
thought himself incapable. In the dream state, the awareness of hands turned
into simple exercises recalled from childhood but generating profound excitement:

Here is the church here is the
steeple

Open the door and here are the
people

It was as though he had opened a real door to a parallel physical
dimension, a door through which he could actually pass. These hand
manipulations gave way to the conjuring of small objects from nowhere, like a
stage magician. In the dream it was possible to make a silver coin, a rubber
ball, an ace of spades appear. The objects which could be summoned were
limitless; the only difficulty was to sustain control. A kind of forgetfulness
would take over him after a few seconds, a veil would be drawn over the
lucidity and control of the dream, and all would be lost as the dream shifted
or stopped.

Lee made copious notes in his dreamwork diary and told Ella everything,
as if he were passing on hard news. Ella listened intently to his feverish reports,
nodding occasionally but neither probing into these accounts of his abilities
nor inviting comparison with her own experiences. Indeed, Ella stopped
remarking about her own lucid dreaming experiments beyond the reports which she
reserved for the formal dreamwork seminars. Meanwhile, Lee was in a state of
high excitement, massively stimulated by the curiously related developments now
pushing back the boundaries of his experience. The bouts of lucid dreaming had
an aphrodisiac effect on him and Ella reciprocated time and time again with
unwavering energy. In turn the dizzying sex sessions acted like a thunderous
backdrop to Lee's dreaming, an amphetamine boost to his struggle to assert control
over the substance of his dreams. It was a struggle in which, step by tiny
ominous step, he felt himself nearer to victory.

The weekly meetings of the lucid dreamers continued, and Lee became one
of the most dedicated and most vocal attendees. Professor Burns could always
be relied upon to smuggle some new box of tricks into each session. At one
meeting he introduced the practice of dreamwork re-entry, an attempt to
reactivate a dream in which lucid dreaming had taken place by using relaxation
techniques and the gentle guidance of his semi hypnotic prompts. There were
some successful results in reactivating dream associations in this conscious
state, but the main requirement for these sessions was for the group to create
a hypnotic atmosphere of stillness and peace. There was one main obstacle to
this:

"I
can't help it; when everyone goes so quiet and po-faced I just want to
laugh." Brad had spent an hour in the bar before the session.

"We
will allow you a minute or two to giggle it out of you Mr. Cousins." Burns
was beginning to lose his secret smile at this third interruption. "And
then we will try again."

"Doesn't anyone else see the
ridiculous side of it?"

"No.
Only you."
Lee had become Brad's sparring partner in
the sessions, but at this remark Brad started snorting again, pretending to
suppress his guffaws by stuffing a grimy handkerchief into his mouth.