Dreamside Read online

  Brad lamely mimicked Honora's soft Fermanagh brogue. "Would it be the priest or the professor gave you that idea now?"

  "Honora's right, we've got to have confidentiality," said Lee decisively.

  "So you're after the Irish one as well, are you?"

  "If you intend to get fucking mouthy about personal things said in the sessions no one's going to open up. That's the point."

  Brad, taken aback by Lee's sudden aggression, shrugged. "I didn't realize we were such a serious bunch of kiddies."

  "We are," said Ella, "is the point."

  "Yes, we are, is the point," said Honora.

  FOUR

  Only people with no imagination

  have to resort to their dream life

  —Fransisco Umbral

  The dreamwork seminars continued, measured against the advance of spring. Lee persevered in a knot of frustrated lust for Ella and blamed this condition for the temporary abandonment of his studies. The late night sessions in Ella's room continued, but they never brought him closer to her. Ella usually invited Honora and other people from the dreamwork group back to her draped cavern, where he had to satisfy himself not with the hot, honeyed sex of fan­tasies, but with fluting, undergraduate conversation and a long stick of hand-rolled tobacco which supposedly contained something interesting, but which only ever burned his throat. Even Brad Cousins, who was always patently uninvited to these sessions, often managed to insinuate himself into the barricade of languid bodies that blocked any prospect of physical intimacy with Ella.

  Against all contrivance, Lee always seemed to find himself sit­ting opposite and away from Ella, a kind of dumb agitation corru­gating his brow as he fidgeted and gazed over at her. She would sit on the floor with her legs drawn up under her and lecture some­one—probably about the coming revolution—while making gentle karate chopping motions at the air in front of her as if she were neatly slicing her argument into digestible chunks. Occasionally, just occasionally, she might look up and grant him the special inti­macy of a brief smile. Like any starving man, he showed a pathetic gratitude for these meagre crumbs.

  On the rare moments he did find himself alone with Ella, he balanced himself on the edge of her bed like a jungle cat waiting to pounce but never feeling that the moment was quite right. After the initial mistake he had made on the first night, he felt sorely inhib­ited. In any event, in the absence of a crowd of bodies, Ella set up another kind of barricade—an unbroken mesh of words; a tirade of original ideas, rehashed theories, speculations and unproven asser­tions which constituted her semi-occult excursions of the past or her left-wing projections for the future.

  "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.

  "Couldn't we etherize Brad and use him as a subject for re-entry?" Lee was serious.

  "Rear entry? Not my line, mate."

  "Ether is a very old-fashioned method . . ." said Burns.

  "But we share the sentiment," said Ella. "What about carefully placed electrodes?"

  "Mind-expanding drugs?" suggested another, warming to the subject.

  "Too ambitious," said Ella.

  Brad snorted derisively.

  "If we're finally ready to start," said Burns, "let's have Honora."

  "Let's have Honora!" shouted Brad.

  "That's enough vulgarity," Burns retorted sharply.

  "Rear-entry!” countered Brad.

  "I think all of the assembled company would deeply appreciate it, Mr. Cousins," said the old professor in his most formal voice, "if you would be so kind as to shut your consummately tedious gob."

  The session continued in peace.

  Sleeping alone that night, dreaming his bauble-juggling tricks, Lee got a whiff of some of the possibilities of this dreamshaping, as it had been dubbed. He began to feel the potency of his control and was ready to try something new, a m
ajor progression, like conjuring another person to his dream. But suddenly, his grip on the dream loosened, not by loss of concentration as usual, but by a sound like hail on a tin roof. The sound woke him and he realized that some­one was rapping frantically on the window of his cell-sized room.

  "What does it take to wake you up? Let me in, I'm soaked."

  "It's four in the morning Ella, what are you doing?"

  "I'm standing in the rain trying to bloody well get in!" Ella's hair was plastered to her head, raindrops bubbled on a face red from running, blue from cold. She wore a long raincoat, collar turned up and clutched at her throat. "Jesus! Let me in!"

  "Yes right. I'll come round and open the door."

  "Just push the bloody window up."

  Ella half-climbed half-fell through the opened window, bring­ing with her fresh grass cuttings pasted to her boots and the smell of spring rain. As she kicked off the boots Lee could see that she was wearing nothing beneath her coat but her knickers, which she threw off before leaping, shivering and complaining, into his single bed. Lee climbed in with her.

  “You're as cold as the grave, Ella."

  "Never mind that," teeth chattering, pressing herself to him, "it happened and I ran over to tell you."

  "What happened? Ella, you ran two miles practically naked in the pouring rain in the middle of the night, what for?"

  "Can't you guess?"

  "No."

  "Guess!"

  "You're not—?"

  Ella thought. "Christ no, I'm not pregnant; I wouldn't tell you if I was!" Lee felt a thin shadow of disappointment. "I came to tell you about the dream I had. I mean the lucid dream, it happened, I made it happen."

  "I don't understand."

  "I made it happen. By myself. I did just what you described, with the hands, I made objects appear in my hands in the dream, and then I made them go away again."