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Dreamside Page 10


  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.

  There was one drawback. This developing skill was accompa­nied by an increase in frequency of the false awakenings. It was not uncommon for three or four such unpleasant and disturbing experi­ences to be stacked one on top of the other. Another word of special significance crept into the dreamer's argot: the repeater.

  Burns persisted with his interest in information transmission, so rigorously that they began to joke that he was working for the intel­ligence services, or perhaps for some foreign power. Burns took this in good part, camping it up and telling them that they would never know, would they, but he was not to be deflected from his purposes. Then he suggested that one of them might take a book, any book, to dreamside, and attempt to read it.

  The task was beyond their capacity. But, although it proved a failure, it failed spectacularly, yielding some interesting information for Burns, and generating further passionate scribbling.

  To begin with, no one could ever "remember" to transport a book to dreamside. Though they planned it conscientiously enough, even selecting a particular work by a favourite author and placing it by their bedsides, the task never occurred to them until they had returned from dreamside and awakened to see the volume lying nearby. After several failures of this kind they told Burns that they thought the books had been too "heavy" to "carry," and Burns said he thought he knew what they meant by that.

  Then, after the task had been dropped, Brad arrived on dreamside holding a book, though, disappointingly, it turned out not to be a book that he had ever chosen to bring with him. Brad and Lee inspected it together. They opened the pages at random and read:

  I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls With vassals and serfs at my side, And of all who assembled within these walls That I was the hope and the pride

  Neither of them recognized the verse, but when they looked at the lines again a few moments later, those very same lines had changed, now reading very differently:

  I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls

  Where each damp thing that creeps and crawls

  Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

  The transformation produced much hilarity. But when they looked back to check the lines a third time, they were changed yet again:

  I'll dreamt that I'll dwealth mid warblers’ walls when throstles and choughs to my sigh hiehied.

  This metamorphosis of the words went on endlessly. All they had to do was look away, and then look back at the page, for the words to undergo another completely new transformation.

  When they reported this to Burns, they were unable to recall any of the words at all, only that they changed continually. Burns was fascinated, but ultimately concluded that the effort was wasted and that the exercise with the books could stop.

  "It's disconcerting," Brad was saying, "you don't know whether to bother to wash your face in the morning in case you have to do it again." The repeaters were beginning to disturb them.

  "Sometimes it's not pleasant," Honora agreed. "You can spend a whole day thinking that you might be going to wake up any time. You only feel sure when you put your head down to go to sleep again, and even then you're not so sure; you know: dreams within dreams."

  Burns became concerned. "All I can suggest is that you use some signal demonstrably external to your dream to wake you, a telephone call or more practically an alarm clock which you set at different times each night so that you are jolted out of your dream. Beyond that per­haps you should try to enjoy, and live to the full, your other new 'lives'."

  "Thanks," said Brad.

  Of course, it was possible to dream of being awakened by an alarm clock in repeaters, but in general the professor's advice was useful, and although the repeaters did not abate, the experience of them became less sinister. Then Burns recalled the failed exercise in reading. He reminded them of the instability of written information on dreamside, and suggested that they might turn to printed mate­rial as an acid test of whether or not they were awake. If they read a line or two from a book, then reread it to find that it remained con­stant, they could assume to have awakened. They found this prac­tice successful, and adopted it as a critical test. Somehow the test eluded them when actually inside the repeaters, but it was easy to remember when awake. It was felt to be an encouraging remedy, and so kept much of the anxiety about repeaters at bay.

  Term time came around and students returned en masse to the uni­versity. For Honora, Lee and Ella this was to be their final year. On the first day of the new term Ella called around at the professor’s house to deliver her dreamwork notes. The door was answered by his cleaning lady, who told Ella that the professor had been taken to hospital and was in the coronary unit.

  Burns was sat up in bed, propped by a mound of pillows, smil­ing faintly.

  "How did I know you would come?"

  "Has no one else been ? " asked Ella.

  Burns shrugged. "I just hoped one of you would come."

  "They told me I could only see you for a few minutes. The oth­ers will come when they hear that you've been brought in like this. Is there someone to get things for you? I mean I know there isn't, what I'm saying is, can I get anything . . . ?"

  Burns seemed to have barely enough strength to turn his head. He opened and closed his mouth but no words came out. Then he beckoned her to come closer, and as she leaned forward he grasped her wrist with surprising force. He spoke in a hoarse whisper. "I was dreaming. Dreaming of Lilly. My wife, you remember I told you about her that day by the lake? My lovely wife. You were teasing me, remem
ber? Lilly."

  "Yes, I remember you telling us about her."

  "Listen to me. I was dreaming of Lilly. She kissed me and she gave me a telling-off. She said I was to leave you young people alone."

  Ella shook her head. She was a little frightened by his intensity.

  "Listen, Ella. I'm very happy with what we achieved but I would like the dreaming to stop now. Lilly's right, as usual. She's right. I want you to tell the others that it has gone far enough and that now it should stop." He let go of her wrist, his own hand falling onto the bed.

  "I don't understand, Professor. Is there anything wrong with what we do?"

  "Just understand that I don't want you to continue."

  "We wouldn't unless you wanted us to."

  "That's right. Now I'd like to sleep."

  "I'll come tomorrow." But she wasn't sure if he was already asleep.

  Ella returned to the campus and to Lee’s room. They climbed into bed, talking about Burns. At some time during the dark hours close to morning Ella dreamed—and knew that she was dreaming—that Burns came through the door of their room. His right arm was stretched out towards her, his palm open, and he said:

  He hath awakened from the dream of life.

  In the morning Ella phoned the hospital, and an anonymous voice confirmed what she already knew.

  T H I R T E E N

  / can never decide whether my dreams are the

  result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of

  my dreams

  —D. H. Lawrence

  "I say we carry on," said Brad. The four had assembled in Lee's cell-sized room. Brad was peering into the mirror, where he seemed to have found something of enormous charm, and couldn't tear himself away,

  "We've heard ten times what you say; we're trying to find out what others might think." Ella was perched on the one available chair looking at Honora, who sat on the bed with her knees drawn up under her chin. Lee lay on his back on the floor blowing smoke rings while balancing an ashtray on his stomach.

  Brad continued to address his own reflection. "It's just begin­ning to get interesting. It will all have been for nothing if we quit now."

  "I feel like I made a kind of promise to L. P.," said Ella.

  "You shouldn't have."

  "No, Brad, but I did. I'm not inclined to stop the dreamwork; it's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me. But he got a bit spooky that night in the hospital. A kind of warning. He was really quite anxious."

  "Lee thinks we should carry on," said Brad.

  "Yup," said Lee.

  "Is that all you've got to say?" Ella gave Lee a look intended to be intimidating.

  "Yup."

  "Honora?"

  "I think we could continue. But we should be careful."

  "Careful of what?"

  "Just careful."

  Brad turned from his reflection to face the others. "Let me just say this and it will be my last word on the matter."

  "Wonderful," said Ella.

  "Hear me out. You all saw how important this project was to L. P. It became a consuming interest for him, almost an obsession. We're involved in a major breakthrough in the field of parapsychology research: he knew it and we know it. L. P. was an academic and what do they want except to go down in academic history as being at the head of their field, even if it means exploiting a few talented students on the way ... all right, all right," fending off a few weak protests from the others, "I liked the old boy as much as any of you, but what I'm saying is, he knew the absolute fucking potential of this thing.

  "That's why his brief to us was to keep working on the passing of information; while we were caught up in the excitement and pleasure of what happens on dreamside he wanted information. If we were ever capable of controlling this message transmission... use your brains!... the telephone would be as obsolete as the carrier pigeon, governments would pay fortunes for knowledge of this abil­ity, they'd pour millions into research, and what's more we would be indispensable. Know what I'm talking about?"

  No one answered, so Brad continued. "Lee, Honora, what have you got in mind for your careers. Teaching? Selling? What about you Ella ? Full time revolutionary? What I'm talking about could be a way of life."

  "I got the point."

  Lee stubbed out his cigarette and sat up. "I've got a proposal. We continue with the experiments, but in a disciplined way. If any one of us becomes unhappy about the way things are going and wants to stop, then we stop, and what's more all four of us stop."

  "Why?" said Brad. "Why should just one person be able to pull the plug on all the others?"

  "I can't explain it properly, but you know—you know—that there's something about this whole dreamwork enterprise that has a corporate feel to it. An entanglement. On dreamside if one person shivers, the others feel it. That means a special responsibility, so I say: One Out All Out."

  Ella and Honora were nodding vigorously in agreement.

  "OK," said Brad.

  "No, not just OK. If we're doing it at all, we're doing it with a commitment."

  Ella sighed. "There goes my promise to L. P."

  "A deathbed promise," said Honora.

  So they continued. Interest in their final-year studies was sus­pended as they attempted to make progress on dreamside with the same air of discipline with which the professor had moderated and controlled their earlier experiments. The dreamside rendezvous took place once a week, with clear objectives and exercises to be conducted in the dreamtime scenario of the lake, the over-arching oak tree and the adjacent woods. It was followed by rigorous recording and reporting and the assembly of copious notes. Post-dream meetings were discussed and analysed, and progress was monitored.

  But without the detached observation and charismatically imposed discipline of Professor Burns, this academic rigor came to seem empty. Measured against the intensity of the dreamside experi­ence, the four began to feel as though their notebooks were nothing more than a shrine to Burns's memory. The excitement of the encounters had not blunted: they continued to experience every­thing as they had described it to the professor, shivering on the edge of orgasm, on the brink of some overwhelming discovery which would come—not yet, not quite yet, but which was there and which would come.

  And it was how it felt that mattered. Physically it felt like the skin had been peeled back to expose nerves that sighed at every breath of wind. The mere proximity or movement of others made teasing waves in the air. Every pore ached with pleasure. Yet under­neath this sensuous carnival lay something else. It was an anxiety, a misgiving; one which they all felt but to which, curiously, they never referred. This anxiety was always there, like an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and grew in proportion to the level of excitement or pleasure they experienced.

  Ordinary and trivial details seemed exciting, and exciting things were overwhelming. So, when Lee kissed Ella and put his tongue into her mouth, the fabric of the dream broke, like a bubble rising in the air and bursting soundlessly. And it broke not just for Lee and Ella but unaccountably for Honora and Brad as well.

  It was against this degree of intensity that the message-passing experiments were conducted. Competing against the narcotic plea­sures of exploring other dreamside powers, it became a dismal chore. Without the influence of the professor, interest in these experiments degenerated into a games sequence of feats and tricks performed only for amusement, such as Lee's discovery of how to disappear behind the oak tree and reappear immediately somewhere else, like an actor who could exit stage left and enter stage right. Then they found the rowing boat drawn up against the shore as if they had conveniently left it. Floating the boat on the water became an absorbing pastime. When at first the touch of the boat on the skin of the water had been enough to puncture and end the dream, it became possible to float the small craft and to clamber into it, before the dream burst. All of this was enchanting and bewildering, and altogether more fun as the discipline of scientific observation was neglected.

&nbs
p; Autumn term passed in a goldening and withering of leaves barely noticed by the four students, whose disdain of studies did not go unnoticed by university authorities. But written warnings only became certificates of bravado in the collective dreamwork enter­prise. At Christmas that year they went home on shortened holi­days, returning early to recommence the programme of dreaming.

  Then came a disruption to the scheduled program, introduced so naturally that if anyone was immediately aware of its irregularity they forgot to, or chose not to, comment on it. At least not until later. Somewhere between the strict pattern of the weekly rendezvous a second meeting quietly inserted itself and became established as if by tacit agreement. No such additional rendezvous had ever been discussed in waking time, yet the four arrived at that same lakeside location in no state of surprise, as if washed back there by cool cur­rents or unnoticed tides. Then one unofficial rendezvous became two or three, or more, until any regular pattern or monitored sched­ule was lost.

  The second disruption was of a more human order. Brad started to look upon Lee and Ella's amorous dreamside behaviour with a dangerously jealous eye. Honora meanwhile was deter­minedly preserving from him the virginity she thought worth keeping. She had so far managed to resist Brad's playful and charmless advances as emphatically on dreamside as she did in waking time.

  Brad's seduction line—delivered in the thinkspeak of dream-time, a combination of thoughts and mouthed utterances into which millions of ambiguities and misunderstandings could seem to fly— failed to persuade her.—You're the luckiest girl ever to have lived— he murmured to her on one dreamside encounter—I mean have your cake and eat it won't you; have the beauty of knowing what it's like and still being a virgin, it doesn't count on dreamside—