Dreamside Page 8

  "It's boring," said Honora.

  "Oh! I do apologize if this scientific method of research is not a glittering parade of fun and spills involving one big kick after another. Pardon me." He sat down again abruptly.

  "That's not what I meant."

  "Then why say it?" The four stared glumly at the carpet. "So, as I said, we return to the beginning, repeat our original procedure and generate a new level of lucid dreaming."

  Ella muttered something under her breath.

  "Yes Ella, I know that you all belong to the Me generation and that you are accustomed to having everything you want exactly when you want it, instant coffee, instant money, instant gratification, a spoonful of this, a splash of that. Well let me tell you that this thing damn well won't make like that do you see? It's something you have to actually work for and only then might it work and even then only might." He got up again and stormed over to the sash window, this time slamming it down. "Now I think you'd all better go since you're not in the mood for work. Come back tomorrow when you're ready to be serious."

  They walked slowly to the end of Burns's street, an avenue of three-storey houses with great gables prodding at the dusk.

  "What's getting to him?" asked Ella, affecting cool but obvi­ously stung.

  "Maybe we asked for it," said Honora, stopping at the corner.

  "Naw," said Brad, "he's just a constipated old grump who didn't get his dish of prunes today."

  "We should be more methodical," Lee cut in, "if we're serious about it."

  "Doesn't matter how serious," said Ella, flushing, "I can't dream to order. You don't turn dreams out like cakes hot from the oven; you have to wait until they come to you."

  "Ella's right," said Brad, "what does Burns know about it? We're the ones making and delivering the goods, he's just the ware­houseman with a pencil behind his ear hassling us about his invoices."

  The post-mortem went on, with Honora and Lee becoming divided from the other two in defence of Burns. Then Lee began to mistrust Brad's motives and Ella to suspect Hon­ora. It also caused some resentment between Lee and Ella, and nei­ther desisted from tapping home the wedge that they set up between themselves. It seemed at times like these that the dreamwork project had become a vain and profitless obsession.

  "Why did you side with her?" Ella asked Lee as they made their way home.

  "I didn't side with her; she was right."

  "That's the same thing."

  "I just think we shouldn't play at it."

  "Which means what exactly?"

  "I think it needs a serious edge. Some of us aren't making the effort, and that's what's holding us back."

  "And you think I play at it?"

  "Sometimes; yes."

  At that Ella turned away and walked off. Lee pretended he was not concerned, a self-deception that lasted five minutes. He thought he could punish her by not running after her. So he went home and got into bed alone, lying sleepless in the shadows, suffering agonies about where she was and what she was doing and whether she was with someone else. Then, after a few days, when he thought she had been punished enough, he went to her, to be readmitted to the scented cave, where he sulked for a few hours until their differences were forgotten. At least for the time being.

  N I N E

  But to withdraw one's steps and to make a way out

  to the upper air, that's the task that is the labour

  —Virgil

  Burns, locking up after his students have gone, anticipates Ella's question seconds before she delivers it to the others as they dawdle on the street corner only yards away. He shakes his head. Exposing the students to your tantrums won't help anything—neither you nor them nor the project. It just makes you look as though senility is right behind you, pulling faces and drooling toothless for their entertainment. Anyway, what is it, exactly, that's eating you?

  He returns to his study—a desk at the window and three walls of books on shelves so high he has to keep a footstool to reach the top. Not that he has reason to return to the tough-bound uppermost volumes, or those on the lower shelves for that matter, but the stool gets used by the lady who cleans and keeps house for him three days a week, since he happens to think that dust gathering on the ridge of untouched and out-of-print books symbolizes in too sharp a sense the slouch of old age into weak-mindedness and dotage. So he pays someone to come in and keep his books free of dust and his win­dows clean, so that the outer condition might at least reflect the pre­ferred impression of the inner. So what's all this raving at the students, he asks himself.

  It is early, still dusk, the students having been chased away by an infantile temperament, by his inexcusable tantrums, who was it this time, yes, Ella, who he hopes will forgive him quickly but who he knows is more sensitive than she pretends. He sits in his chair and takes his notes out of the top drawer, determined to log his observa­tions even if the students are proving restive, but leave them, give 'em a break, they're young and full of it whatever it is, while he is feeling increasingly tired as he turns the pages and the pencil in his hands begins to scuttle across the blank folio leaves at high speed depositing a fine trace of graphite in erratic bursts of what must be En­glish but looks something like a fusion of bastard Arabic and auto-didactic shorthand, and which for an account of an evening's research in which nothing is supposed to have happened and noth­ing is purported to have been done still manages to break across the page like the waves of the sea under a bracing wind.

  He scribbles like one in the grip of a spirit, but it's nothing like that, being only too conscious of anything he might commit to paper and anyway too self-possessed to admit the intrusion of any second authority, from the spirit world or otherwise, to come between him and his outpourings. Tired, tired indeed, but hands still scuttling across the page at speed laying down a pattern of new ideas, complete and half-complete thoughts, perceptions, reminders, references and observations, all of this operating inde­pendently and at a level beneath or above his reproach of his own behaviour, where he looks even now for a reason for his irritation and finds, depressingly, none other than that general malaise for which physicians have never found a satisfactory term other than old age.

  Burns pauses and gazes out of his open window, blinking at a darkening horizon, dusk leaking from an unseen puncture in the silk and sable canvas, falling with defiant slowness but relentlessly enough, like the minute hand on the clock. He switches on an Angle-poise lamp which throws a ring of yellow light around his notes. He breathes in the sweet air of the summer evening and his hand automatically begins to scuttle back and forth across the white expanse of the page.

  Not as if, he reflects, he doesn't prefer the company of the young students to that of the dry or childish presence of his aca­demic colleagues. Because it is true he does prefer the buzz of youth and always has, three cheers for that, and what's more always dreaded turning into the crabbed old stick he felt himself becoming. And certainly these four were no worse than any others, and on the contrary he felt a special warmth for all of them, believing,—and perhaps this was the secret of what it was that was actually driving him harder and causing him to want to push them faster—believ­ing, in a way that could never be more than intuitive, that there really might be something happening with these four, something in the chemistry that existed between them, something which he had sensed in the earlier seminars and the close comparisons in the nature of their results, just a spark, nothing rational, not yet anyway, but a spark and a shadow of apprehension—let's not call it fear— which had surprised him one day on recognizing the undercurrents in their respective commitments to this dreaming business.

  And there was another problem, since the project had originally been double-bottomed, a smuggler's suitcase, the lucid dreaming project the ostensible reason for the seminars (and always a legiti­mate area for study, the dreaming project, since it was yielding up fascinating data) while Burns's other interest was a certain interac­tive study in the evolution and dynamics of
the group. This covert study had of course never been made known to the seminar dream­ers in the interests of protecting behaviour from the influence of observation, the spy hole staying open as the group reduced to four participants for the same parallel purposes; but now the dreamwork study had begun to eclipse the other. This had also taken Burns by surprise, shocking him in that his impatience with another's small disinclination towards scientific method had caused him to cancel a whole evening's work on dream research.

  But he knew that the current halt in progress, the vacuum in dreaming, was only a temporary arrest, a block that would be over­come by a little effort, put there by some external factor like the change in dynamics from the original large group to the group of four, or something happening between the four themselves. What­ever the block was, it would dissolve, and dreaming, strong dream­ing, would resume. He had, he assured himself once again, a feeling about this group.

  Burns's hand stops its mechanical movement across the page, and he drops his blunted pencil. He coughs, recovers, and presses a thumb and forefinger to his tired eyes. Always, and always at night before concluding his notes, he thinks, in an abstracted tender way, of his wife Lilly. It has been over a decade since she died, leaving a huge absence in his life, and one which he has only ever filled with a devotion for work of the kind he used to reserve for her. He leans back in his chair and breathes deep the sweet night air carrying in the scent of the trees and bushes outside his window, and he thinks of her as she always was, and smiles to himself to think that if she were alive now she would come in and put her hand through his hair and her arms around him and reproach him for letting the stu­dents tire him so; and he would confess to her that he'd been irrita­ble with them for no apparent reason, and she would find an excuse for him and tell him that the students ought to be grateful anyway for receiving the attentions of such a good man. Many evenings after working like this in his study, and even more frequently of late, Burns rewards himself with thoughts of his dear wife, and never allows himself to consider his reveries an expression of loneliness.

  Burns shaves his pencil and writes a conclusion to his notes, hand moving more slowly across the page now as exhaustion steals over him. Then a trace of a woman's perfume comes into the room, one he recognizes, and he's dimly aware of a presence behind him; and then a voice, sweet with loving care and lilting gently, like the point where song takes over from verse, but saying only what he so often hears now, always the same question which so lovingly framed commands the answer it seeks, "Isn't that enough work for tonight, L. P.?"

  "Yes, my love," and he obediently puts down his pencil and returns his notebook to the top drawer of his desk.

  Shadows thicken outside. Burns gets up and lowers the sash window, fastening the clasp at the top. On his way out he switches off the light. Talking to myself, he thinks with a brief smile, those kids will think me more senile than then they already do, and he closes the study door behind him.

  T E N

  Our dreams are a second life —Gerard de Nerval

  Then something astonishing happened. It was the morning of their next scheduled meeting with Professor Burns. Near the wak­ing moment, with the darkness peeling away, the flakes of light stealing between blinds and through the partings in dreams, Lee was lying asleep in his own room away from Ella, dreaming vividly and with clear control. In the dream he looked down at his hands and remembered, with absolute clarity, the appointment. There was a whisper from somewhere, a message: Do it.

  With ease he dissolved his surroundings and found himself in the park, standing by the cherry tree close to the tennis courts where he and Ella had had their first sexual encounter. The place was absolutely still, cocooned in the grey light of a false dawn. A mist hung around like wisps of cotton, as if trailed by a wind. The air seemed unbearably tense. Lee could feel, physically feel, the dawn about to crack, to split the light and open up a terrible, joyous new day.

  He waited. He had no sense of impatience. In the distance, tak­ing shape through the mist, or perhaps just from the mist at the end of the path, he could see someone walking towards him. It was not Ella but Honora. She seemed somehow uncertain, hesitant. Then, as she got nearer, he realized he was mistaken. It was not Honora after all, but Ella. Ella had found her way to him! They were going to meet.

  When Ella reached him, she smiled and stretched out a hand to touch his cheek; she was not shadow, nor phantom, but flesh and blood, warm and vital. He could feel the palm of her hand against the coolness of his cheek. He was gripped by a rage of excitement; he wanted to embrace her and shout. But at the same time he was caught in a kind of paralysis that inhibited and slowed his every move. His limbs were locked, his muscles contracted, the air around him con­gealed and thick, inhibiting movement and constraining all action, though his brain raced and his skin crawled, and a fist squeezed inside his belly. He wanted to shout, This is it! We did it! This is the meeting! But something happened to the breath that contained his words, and instead, in a voice that hardly seemed his own, he said: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Ella smiled back at him, wordlessly, unmoving. They stood like that for some time, without discomfort, and then the dream dissolved.

  Lee woke with a dull headache but with the dream clear in his mind. Shivering with excitement he pulled on his clothes and ran the full distance to Ella's house. Before hammering on the door, he leaned against the wall, panting heavily, trying to recover his breath, still shaking with anticipation; praying that Ella would confirm that the rendezvous had taken place and yet terrified that she would prove that all he had experienced was delusion cupped in a dream. He found the front door of the house ajar, and went through to Ella's room. Inside he found Ella already dressed, sitting cross-legged on her mattress bed and writing in a book. She got up.

  "I left the front door open for you."

  "So," said Lee, "you were expecting me."

  "There are more things in heaven and earth . . ."

  Lee released a triumphant roar and took hold of Ella, the two of them dancing around the room in an ecstatic jig. He ran out into the yard, leaping and punching the air like a Cup Final goal scorer, then returned to Ella for further acclaim. "You summoned me!"

  "I did?" said Ella.

  "You called me; it was your doing! I heard you. You did it!"

  "I did? Really?" Ella allowed herself to be persuaded.

  "Think hard," said Burns, "what was it, Honora, that you saw that made you lose the picture?"

  Honora held her hands to her mouth, palms pressed together like someone in prayer. "I was on my way to the meeting place. I saw the path and the tennis courts; and then, by the cherry trees, I saw someone waiting. I remember thinking it might have been Lee, but I wasn't sure. Then I lost my way. That's all I can say. I lost my way."

  "So when I thought I had mistaken Ella for Honora, it could actually have been Honora on her way to the rendezvous?" said Lee.

  "It's possible; but it's not what I'm getting at. There is some block for Honora that made her 'lose her way' as she put it; other­wise she was clearly on the path to meeting up with you and Ella."

  "We could try guided re-entry," suggested Brad.

  "No," said Burns. "I don't want to surface any more of this material just yet. We may run the risk of disturbing a delicate process of development in dream control. My instincts tell me to let it incubate. Ella, tell us again how it felt for you." He leaned for­ward, eagerly.

  "I had the know, in the way we've talked about before, the dreamside way of knowing. That sense which is more than a belief, it is a confident knowing that such-and-such is so, and in that way I knew that Lee would be waiting. There was no question about it. I didn't pause to think of Honora or Brad. The feeling of excitement was overwhelming. It was elation and anxiety mixed: that's what it was, that's what caused the kind of paralysis we both felt." Lee was nodding vigorously. "It was sexual too; we've discussed it and we both felt almost like the moment b
efore orgasm. The tiniest mun­dane things were incredibly stimulating, and exciting things were unbearably so. That's why we hardly did anything, we were para­lyzed by this feeling. When I touched Lee's face it was the most I could do; I mean the most. That's why, when he started quoting Shakespeare I thought it the most clever, profound and appropriate thing that could possibly have been said at that moment—less so now but at the time it was overwhelming!"

  "But like I said, I didn't seem to have anything to do with it," said Lee, "and I wasn't trying to be clever. I went to say something like 'hello Ella' and the other stuff is what came out."

  "But what was remarkable," Burns observed, "is that not only did you meet, as previously agreed, but you also passed on a gift, a token, a message which you then brought into the objective reality of waking life. Do you realize what you've done? You've punctured a tiny hole in the membrane that separates the dream world from the waking one. Now we have to keep that hole open, and get Hon­ora and Brad involved.

  "Now; why that choice of place? Did it have resonance for Lee and Ella, but not for Brad and Honora? What we have to do now is find a tree where all four of you can, as it were, scratch your initials. I'll give the matter some thought. Meanwhile, see if the experience can be repeated. It should be possible to do something to overcome the paralysis you describe. The potential to think and move and act on dreamside, just as you would here, must ultimately be available to you. Brad and Honora—you must familiarize yourself with this particular spot in the park. At the moment that's all I can suggest. We may be moving towards a point where I can no longer give you advice. After all, you four are the practitioners, and my few theories are quickly being left behind. All I can do now is offer you an objec­tive critique of the experiences you describe, evaluation at a distance. "Now I'm feeling tired. Shall we call it a very big day?"