Dreamside

ONE

The poster, hand-written in bold red marker pen, was displayed in the main university concourse, and Lee was pretending to read it. He was pretending to read it so that he could stand next to Ella, the girl with the spray-on blue jeans. She was also studying the poster, and he had to strain to hear the words she was speaking to her friend. Lee stood close enough to take in her scent of patchouli, baby soap, unruly pheromones and warm apple-blossom skin. He had spotted her once before, in the university library. He’d been dozing over his reading, and his first sight of her had been enough to make him leave tooth marks in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. How was anyone expected to study? So when he’d seen her here he’d had to go and stand behind her. He still hadn’t thought of anything sparkling to say, when she turned from the poster and walked right into him.

“Sorry,” he said. It was his best line.

But she and her friend had gone, leaving Lee defeated and slumped against the noticeboard. When he recovered he was able to read the poster for himself. He thought he was probably not a lucid dreamer (whatever animal that might be), but he had heard Ella saying that she was going and guessed that he could always do a good job of pretending; at least until he was found out, or for as long as it took to get on coffee-bar terms with Ella, whichever came first.

So why not? He set off across the university lawns. Spring was on him like a drug, as if the air was full of music, there until you tried to stop and make it out. Spring in the air, like the confirmation of a rumour.

Lee arrived at the small seminar room in a state of high anticipation. About a dozen people, none of whom he knew, sat around in a rough circle. Ella wasn’t there. They sat whispering to each other while on one isolated chair, hands folded on his lap and gazing with expressionless interest at the floor, sat the Head of the Department of Psychology, Professor L. P. Burns.

Now nearing retirement, Burns had led a distinguished but unspectacular academic career, making a number of suitably perplexing contributions to educational psychology and parapsychology, although he always maintained that the latter interest ranked only as a hobby. He wore a drab mottled green suit. His hair was thin and his skin stretched like parchment across his face, but his eyes were alert, and the angular characteristic of his features dissolved easily when he smiled.

Lee was already thinking about how he could get out of this when the professor suddenly spoke as if he were addressing a full lecture theatre. “It is some five minutes after the appointed time. I don’t think we are going to be joined by many more, given that we compete with the thousand and one delights offered by the university on such a spring evening, so we will make a start. But even as I speak I see I am to be contradicted. Come in, ladies, do come in.”

Two girls hovered doubtfully behind the open door—Ella and her companion. They stepped into the room. Ella wore a black beret and black tights, and took a seat opposite Lee, crossing her legs as she sat down. Lee crossed his.

“Excellent,” declared the professor, passing a list around the circle for everyone to sign. “This is almost a better turn-out than I get at my lectures.” A polite titter went around the circle.

“Are any of you psychology students? I don’t recognize anyone.” If any of them were, they didn’t own up.

“Excellent again!” said the professor. “We might just get some intelligent contributions.” Another polite titter, dying after a single circuit. “So, you are all lucid dreamers? Yes? No? You all spend your nights dreaming lucidly in your beds? Yes? No?” He looked around jovially from face to embarrassed face. With no answer forthcoming he continued. “What is required is a corpus of willing volunteers, such as yourselves, prepared to take part in a scientific, accurately documented piece of research into the interesting subject of lucid dreaming; a phenomenon which, however commonplace it may seem to you,” he smiled at Lee, “is not, after all, experienced by many of us. I for example am not a lucid dreamer. Unlike you I have never experienced the what to me would be thrilling prospect of controlling, manipulating, directing or merely influencing the course of my dreams; nor even the sensation of knowing that what I am experiencing is a dream, and of therefore being able to say to myself that shortly I will awake from this dream into another reality.”

“Excuse me,” a girl with an Irish accent said shyly, “I’m not sure whether I’m a lucid dreamer or not.”

“We’ll come on to that,” said Burns. “What I would like to establish first is whether the people here would be prepared to make the necessary commitments involved. The research must be scientifically handled and this will involve keeping diaries of your dream experiences, the introduction of certain exercises into your dreaming and the faithful participation in a weekly evening seminar, hopefully in more convivial surroundings than this, for the further discussion and exploration of your respective dream studies and experiences. Of course this will require a certain discipline, something which I find to be rather a dirty word amongst today’s students.”

Another snigger went around the room, but it was arrested at the boy sitting on Lee’s immediate left, a dark-haired youth with deep-set eyes and a chinful of stubble. “How much will we be getting paid?” he demanded.

“A good question. Let’s clear that up without further delay. And you are…?”

“Brad,” said the boy, rather taken aback at the professor’s smiling response, “or rather Brad Cousins.”

“Well now Brad, or rather Brad Cousins, we must get that matter straightened out before there is any confusion. I hope not to disillusion you by saying that there is no payment. No, on the contrary, the principle involved is similar to that of the donor system at the medical centre; only it’s not your blood or your semen we are after, it’s your dreams.”

This time a laugh did a couple of circuits. Brad shrugged.

“For incentive,” the old academic continued, “the departmental budget might be seen to extend to the provision of a glass of wine and a dice-shaped piece of cheese or two at our weekly gathering, and possibly even to an end of term dinner party; beyond that we offer but the thrill of the intellectual hunt, in the hopefully not vain speculation that Mr. Cousins and the rest of you will be stimulated and satisfied by this more metaphysical payoff.”

“Glad I don’t have to go to his fucking lectures,” Cousins whispered at Lee.

Lee broke his gaze, which had hitherto been fixed on the tiny Himalaya of Ella Innes’s kneecap. Ella’s own attention was concentrated upon the professor, and her face had already assumed the irritating expression of the disciple at the feet of the avatar.

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” said the professor clasping his hands together and indicating the person on his right. “Let’s go wither-shins—why do you think you are a lucid dreamer?”

Each person was invited to summarize their experiences. Lee was relieved that he was not obliged to go first. Most simply declared that they were often vaguely or partially aware while dreaming that they were in a dream state. One or two sometimes felt able to influence the direction their dreams were taking. Ella spectacularly declared that she had, on occasion, been clearly able to control the course of her dreams, but she was outdone by Brad’s contribution, for it was Brad who asserted, almost with disdain, that he was sometimes able to reactivate a dream from a previous night.

“Like putting a tape into a cassette,” said Burns.

“Almost,” said Cousins.

“I think I’m probably a possible lucid dreamer, or perhaps a half-lucid dreamer,” said the Irish girl.

“I think it probable that that’s possibly enough for you to be of great interest to this company,” Burns replied, with exaggerated gallantry.

When it was Lee’s turn to speak, with all eyes sharply focused on him, he became acutely self-conscious. Ella leaned forward, her lips parted and her eyes expectant—a solicitous fascination she had offered to all contributions short and long but which touched him like acid on litmus. He parroted a few words stolen from one of the earlier speakers, unexciting remarks about occasional awareness. Ella fell back in her seat. Lee felt as though he’d had his testicles calibrated and was found lacking.

“But I do sometimes have premonitions,” he almost shouted as an afterthought, hoping the lie would rekindle some interest. Lee glanced over at Ella. It had done the trick. She smiled at him briefly.

“A different matter,” said the professor, “but one which I predict will be interesting to test.”

“Would you mind if I talked to the chaplain before agreeing to go ahead with these experiments?” asked one girl. “Only I would like his reassurance that I’m not, you know, dabbling.”

“Dabbling? Hmmm. Talk to the chaplain by all means; I’m sure he will let you dream with his blessing.” The professor suppressed a smile. “Any further questions? None? Good. Start keeping a diary of your dreaming. I don’t want you to do anything unusual, just make a daily record of the scenario and figures of your dreams. Concentrate on detail. I want no interpretation, thank you very much: Messrs Freud, Adler, Jung and all those other old bores are not invited to the party and will be regarded as gatecrashers. For this week I simply want you to find your way into the habit of recording. That’s all. Nothing arduous in that. You may or may not find that this in itself begins to have an effect. If you don’t dream, write clearly in your diary that you were unable to recall your dream but that it is your intention to recall subsequent dreams. A small tip: set your alarm clocks half an hour earlier than you normally wake. We will, if at all serious about this, make a few sacrifices. We shall meet at the same time every week, for a slightly longer period, having more to talk about. All clear?”

Everything was clear.

“So.” The professor got up and walked to the door. Before closing the door behind him he turned and looked back. “Sweet dreams,” he said darkly.

The students pushed back their chairs and made movements towards the door.

“Anyone going for a drink?” Brad shouted.

“I could go for that,” said Lee, looking encouragingly towards Ella and her friend.

Ella, along with the rest of the students, shuffled out without replying. Bollocks, thought Lee.

TWO

Brad Cousins was exercising his favourite habit of speaking to one person as if they were a gathering often. Lee was his audience. Against the backdrop of the student bar, pinball tables chattering, crack of pool balls striking and muted Stones’ classics piped through a stuttering PA system, Lee was regaled with an accumulating list of Brad’s personal antipathies. He was half-way down a pint of flat amber beer by the time he had been instructed on Brad’s aversion to basketball, brazil nuts and beehive hairdos, his detestation of Liverpudlians, lavender perfume and loose-leaf ring-binders, his hatred of trade unions, tapioca and television journalists. Lee groaned inwardly at the thought of another dismal half-pint’s worth of cataloguing before he could make his excuses and leave.

“She’s dirty,” cackled Brad, breaking off from his inventory of rancour, “I like her; dirty.”

Lee followed Brad’s gaze and locked on to a figure in black beret and black tights standing at the bar. Having shaken off her shadowy friend, Ella Innes had arrived and was ordering herself a drink. As she turned from the bar Lee semaphored wildly to attract her attention. But she looked through him without recognition, and settled at a nearby table where she expertly proceeded to roll a cigarette in brown liquorice paper.

“Frosty,” Brad scoffed, swirling his beer to make it froth. “Anyway I can’t stand women who drink out of pint glasses to try and prove something.”

Lee ignored him. Ella’s table was two strides away. “I waved at you to ask if you wanted to join us,” he said, sitting down next to her.

Ella moved an eighth of an inch away from him. “Yes, I saw you.” She concentrated on crafting the cigarette in her long white fingers, only looking up at him as she slid her tongue along the gummed edge of the paper.

“Oh?”

“Pardon?” She blinked at him.

Lee hovered, looking for a way out. She’s pulling my strings, he thought. “Why don’t you join us?”

Ella looked over her shoulder as if for signs of imminent rescue. She was an international celebrity being pestered for three minutes of her time by a provincial journalist. With a practised, long-suffering if there’s to be no help shrug she gathered her papers, matches, tobacco and beer and relocated to their table.

“What did you make of that session?” Lee asked.

She shrugged and lit her cigarette. “What did you?”

“That beret is ridiculous,” Brad said to ten people. “You look like a member of the Provisional IRA. In drag. After a bad night. In Belfast.”

“The thing about going to these sessions,” Ella said to Lee, “is that you never know who you’re going to meet.”

Brad pretended that the irony was lost on him. “All I’m saying is that the effect doesn’t work. It doesn’t come off.”

“I was interested,” Lee cut in quickly, “in some of the things you were saying. About controlling the direction of your dreams, I mean. I’m really going to get into it.”

“Do it,” she said, as if to say stop talking about it.

“You sounded quite advanced.”

“Head of the coven,” said Brad.

“But I don’t have premonitions.” She plucked a loose flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.

“He only said that about premonitions,” Brad put in, looking at Lee, “so he wouldn’t sound as boring as the others. Isn’t that right?

Lee only glared back at him.

“Ignore it,” said Ella.

“And it worked,” said Brad.

“What did you think of L. P.?” Lee asked her.

“I’ve come across him before; I think he’s sweet.”

“Why do women always say sweet when they mean clapped-out and half-way to senility?” Brad again. “What on earth is sweet about that dry old stick?”

“It’s true;” she replied dryly, “that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”

Lee established that Ella was prepared to take the weekly sessions quite seriously. She told him that it hadn’t occurred to her that most people were unable to direct their dreams. She was prepared, she said, to take things as far as she could to find out what they meant.

“I’m not,” said Brad. “You sound like you’re expecting too much from it. I can’t see it going anywhere.”

“Then why don’t you drop out of it?”

“I probably will after a while.”

“The group,” said Ella to Lee, “would never recover.”

She produced her purse to buy another drink. Lee offered twice, but she insisted that she buy her own. While she was away at the bar Brad said, “Listen mate; she’s making you dance.”

“What?”

“Dance! Dance! She’s a vixen.”

“A vixen? I don’t know about that, but she’s got you taped.”

“Not a chance! Anyway it’s not my tongue that’s hanging out drooling: you’re making an indecent public display of yourself.”

“What?”

Brad got up to go. “I’ll leave you to it.” He patted Lee on the face. “Dirty.”

Ella returned. “Your friend’s gone, then?”

“I only met him tonight. He’s not a friend.”

“He’s a reptile. He’s got the eyes of a lizard and scales on the inside of his mouth.” She crossed her legs.

“I see.”

But Ella obviously didn’t think of Lee as a reptile, otherwise she wouldn’t have taken him back to the house she shared with two other girls about a mile from the university. Lee, for his part, overestimated Ella’s style. Once they were behind closed doors he half-expected, wished, hoped that Ella would tear off her erotic black outfit and demand that they make urgent love (beret remaining in place). To say that Lee was more relieved than disappointed when she didn’t would be a lie. He was a knot of tension and in Ella’s presence his mouth ran dry. Although he was not a complete stranger to the private rooms of the women students, something about Ella’s aura—a subtle scent and a kind of leading signal beyond the range and faculty of human definition—intimidated him while at the same time snaring him in a noose of sexual longing.

Ella at twenty was busy cultivating an air which, ten years later, she would be earnestly trying to throw off—that of the jaded adventuress, physically satiated, spiritually exhausted. This blasé image had, as was intended, a contradictory energizing effect on Lee. When he breathed in a single hot draft of this distillation of elements, it worked on him like a witch’s potion. He perched nervously on the corner of her bed nursing a chipped mug of chicory-flavoured coffee as she relaxed back into a comfortable armchair, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Ella’s room was a revelation. Those of other female students had always been pale stereotypes of pastel shades, feminine pillowslips and obligatory postcard collections. Entering Ella’s room was like walking into a subdued decorated cave or a Bedouin tent. The four walls were draped with hanging fabrics, Indian batiks, Serbian rugs, Greek blankets, Russian scarves, antique lace cloths—a hanging exhibition of textures, a treasury of intricate folds. Slow-burning incense breathed seductive fumes from elaborate brass cups. Ella relaxed in her armchair, rolling herself another liquorice-paper cigarette as she spoke. In Lee’s mind she had already fused the mystical qualities of the Tarot Priestess, a 1970s Sibyl, and a contemporary Circe into one exotic being, and had focused them all into a soft dark triangle at the top of her legs.

“I don’t do drugs any more; it’s a waste of spiritual energy,” she was saying. She seemed to be deliberately parodying herself.

“I’ve come to the same conclusion,” said Lee, who had never so much as abused the instructions on an aspirin bottle.

“I’m in and out of TM at the moment…” she continued.

“TM?”

“Transcendental Meditation.”

“Right.”

“Only just recently I got my head into TA…”

“TA?”

“Transactional Analysis.”

“Right.”

“Where’ve you been living?” asked Ella.

“I’ve been into TP.”

Ella looked foggy. “TP?”

“Teaching Practice. TP. It’s a joke.”

“A joke,” said Ella. “Right.” She looked at her watch and glanced at the door.

“You’re quite a spiritual entity,” Lee tried. It was obviously the right thing to say. Ella brightened, or perhaps her aura expanded, but anyway she proceeded to map out the dizzying geography of her psychic development over the past twelve months. In a matter of minutes she alluded to astrological configurations and Zen Buddhism; the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Hexagrams of the I Ching; Tantric Lore and Cabbalistic Law; primal screams and astral projection; rebirth experiences and regression into former lives.

Lee thought he might be talking to a Martian.

“In the end you’re just chasing your tail,” said Ella. Lee nodded in sage concurrence. “Which is why I’m interested in this dream thing. I want to leave all that clutter behind, trust in my own resources. I want to get inside my own head.”

I just want to get inside your pants, Lee thought. “Exactly why I’m interested,” he said.

Coffee had gone cold in the bottom of cups, incense had burned itself out. Ella was silent for the first time since they had walked through the door. Lee tried to keep the conversation on the boil by casually declaring that he was thinking of dropping out of university so that he could travel overland to Tibet.

“Do it,” she said simply. It was the second time she had used the phrase that evening. There was something dismissive about the way she said it which twisted the knot in which she already had him tied.

Lee sat squirming on the corner of the bed, trying to think up a way of making the next move when she suddenly said, “Now I’d like to go to bed.”

Lee stared at her, dumbfounded. Was that an invitation or what? He made an assessment of Ella’s breezy self-confidence. “OK,” he said, and started to untie his shoelaces.

Ella watched as he kicked off his shoes. Then she spoke.

“What the hell are you doing?” For a moment she looked flustered and a little wide-eyed: an apprentice Sibyl lost for words, a novice Circe frightened by a piglet.

“You don’t want me to stay?” asked Lee.

“If ever I do,” she said, recovering slightly, “you’ll be the first to hear of it.”

Lee pulled his shoes back on, trying to model a win-some-lose-some look as Ella opened the door. At the last minute she tore a book from the shelf and thrust it into his hands, simultaneously propelling him forward. “You really must read this and let me know what you think of it OK goodnight.” She closed the door just a little too hurriedly behind him.

Lee took a short cut across the university lawns, philosophical. The book Ella had given him must have been a way of saying that the door would be open another time. He was half-way home before he looked at it. It was a battered paperback copy of Alice in Wonderland. The university clock-tower rang out the hour in the distance. It was 2 a.m.

THREE

The silence was embarrassing. The second meeting of the lucid dreamers had convened in Professor Burns’s own lounge in a large house close to the university and across the road from a sprawling Victorian graveyard. They had turned up at staggered intervals, and after being warmly greeted by the professor were seated in one of the assorted armchairs drawn into a circle. Lee arrived late and suffered agonies on seeing Brad Cousins ensconced on a small, cosy-looking sofa with Ella Innes. Lee took a seat next to the shy Irish girl.

“Had any premonitions?” she whispered as soon as he sat down.

“Not one.”

At last the group became aware that the professor was patiently awaiting their silence so that a start could be made. The whispering diminished in tiers until they were left gazing upon Burns, waiting for session number two to begin. But he didn’t speak.

The professor remained with his gaze fixed steadily three feet above the head of a girl immediately opposite him. His face carried a perfectly neutral expression, neither hostile nor friendly, neither impatient nor uninterested. Fidgeting began and increased as the period of silence extended. A sigh, a scratch, a cough, the sound of someone twisting in their seat all punctured the embarrassing hiatus before it was immediately sealed up again with silence. After an agonizing five minutes of nothing, Brad Cousins spoke.

“If this is a psychological exercise designed to make us all feel uncomfortable, its working.”

All eyes were turned on the professor, who did nothing to acknowledge the remark or deal with the implicit criticism. His expression remained consistent, as did his gaze. The group, exasperated, plunged into a silence more oppressive than the last. The silence seemed to expand, becoming more profound as it lengthened. Lee looked at Ella; Ella looked at Lee. Brad looked at Ella and Lee; Lee looked at Brad. The Irish girl looked at Lee; Lee looked at the Irish girl, Brad and Ella. Ella looked at Brad, Lee and the Irish girl. Now no one seemed to want to look at the professor at all, except sideways.

“If nothing’s happening,” Brad tried again, “maybe we should all go away and come back next week.” His words fell like the sound of a small pebble tossed into a vast reservoir. Now everyone, with the exception of the professor, affected to be fascinated with their fingernails or their footwear.

At last, but not before the agonized hush had become a rack upon which everyone lay stretched, the professor spoke. “It might or might not be,” he intoned, “that in fact a great deal more is happening in this group than if we were to pretend otherwise by speaking.” A few there nodded heads in counterfeit sagacity; others looked around wildly for help. The pressure of the silence was redoubled.

He looked gently at the Irish girl sitting beside Lee. “Honora is it? Did you dream, Honora?”

“I did dream,” said Honora, “and I was aware that I was dreaming.”

“So you are now a card-carrying lucid dreamer. Did you keep a diary?”

“I did.” Honora produced an open black ring-binder in which Lee could see large copperplate handwriting interspersed with fibre colour or lead pencil drawings. “I also made a few sketches of… situations… if you can call them that.”

L. P. Burns was impressed and said so. He proceeded around the room, pressing everyone on the subject of diaries, which appeared to be more important to him than the cargo of dreams they carried. Lee claimed to have forgotten to bring his.

“Forgot?”

“I didn’t realize we would be needing them tonight,” he said lamely.

“Even with your special foresight?” said the professor.

“Sorry?”

“Never mind. Next.” He made the word sound like a bell.

Brad Cousins declared with a proud swagger that he hadn’t had a single dream since the last meeting of the group, not even the night he got roaring drunk.

“Perhaps you’re blocking, so that you can’t remember.

“I don’t think so; I don’t want to miss the fun.”

“But your largely unconscious reasons for blocking,” said the professor, “might not find the dreams all that amusing.”

“Possible.”

“More than possible; believe it.” The professor fixed his eye on him until Brad was forced to look away.

Another student digressed on her history of migraine and treated the company to a dismal saga concerning repeated visits to the health centre, including names, dates and times of day, in order to obtain prescriptions for sleeping pills of different varieties all of which failed in turn to produce the desired remedy. Burns listened patiently before moving on to Ella. Where the last speaker had numbed the group, Ella startled them into life again by bravely declaring that all of her dreams had been of an exotically sexual nature and that her self-awareness during the dreams had been acute.

“Funky!” yelled Brad Cousins, cutting Ella short.

“I’m not entirely sure whether Brother Cousins intends to encourage you or discourage you with that last shouted remark,” said the professor, “but we might all feel relieved to remember that our interests are more concerned with levels of awareness than with precise anatomical descriptions.”

A stifled giggle did the circuit before Ella protested, “It’s just that I can be choosy about who I do it with!”

“Whom!” yelled Brad, trying in vain to whip up a group guffaw. “Whom you do it with!”

The professor leaned in towards Ella, and so did the rest of the group. “Can you genuinely control who takes part in your dream… encounters?” he asked.

“Sometimes; not always. Faces slip and change; it can be an effort to keep things fixed.”

“Sounds like it’s an orgy!” Brad Cousins being helpful again.

Burns held up an admonitory hand to Brad as he pressed Ella further. “You are actually conscious of an effort, a struggle to direct the dream along a course predetermined by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Struggling against what, exactly?”

“Well; against the natural flow of the dream.”

“So you could make the choice to sit back as it were, and experience a different dream over which you would have no influence?”

“Yes.”

Silence, as the group watched the professor turning over the possibilities of Ella’s revelations. They waited for the nugget of his profound deliberations. “Sounds like pretty sophisticated stuff,” he said.

Ella flushed her humility, uneasy at being rocketed to the top of the class. At the end of their discussions the professor set an exercise.

“Homework,” said Brad.

“Yes, Brother Cousins,” said Burns, “dreamwork. Continue to keep a meticulous record in your diaries. But now I have some exercises for you which may or may not lubricate the passage through to lucidity, by which of course I mean they may facilitate lucid dreaming; you too Ella, notwithstanding your superior control.

“Exercise one: ask yourself several times through the course of your day whether or not you are dreaming. I am sure that many students in this university if confronted with the same question would have difficulty in replying within a time period briefer than fifteen minutes, but I have nothing but faith in all of you here. Is it a matter of some amusement Messrs Cousins and Peterson? Good; be amused, but do it. And the second part of that exercise is, having persuaded yourself that you are not after all dreaming, to go on to tell yourself that you want to recognize and be aware of the fact that you are dreaming the next time a dream occurs. Clear?”

“Can I ask myself,” said Brad, “if I am dreaming that you are really saying this to us?”

“Very witty, Brother Cousins, well done. Of course I don’t mind where you ask it so long as you complete the exercise as I have described. The principle is quite simply that of leaving your unconscious mind so many messages and memos that it will eventually have to act on them.

“Exercise two: next time you wake up from a dream, try to imagine yourself going straight back into that dream. And when you are back in there, at least in your imagination, instruct yourself that the next time you dream you want to be aware of the fact. Tell yourself that you want to recognize that you are dreaming. Thus in approximating the dream state you are making your intentions very clear. More memos to yourself. That’s all. As I said, keep a record of all of this and indeed of your ordinary dreams.”

“What if you’re not having any dreams?” asked Brad.

“Correction: what if you’re not remembering any of your dreams. You need to know that if you’re not remembering your dreams when you wake up, it is probably because you don’t want to remember them. For some reason you are blocking the recall of those dreams. I don’t know why you would be doing this; you must ask yourself. It may be because something in the dream frightened you and you don’t want to remember it. Perhaps the dream contains a message asking you to change something about yourself that you don’t want to change. Or you may be terrified of being in an environment where you are not in control of what is happening. Or perhaps you are just preoccupied with too many other things. I don’t know. If this is happening to you, ask yourself why.”

“Very helpful,” Brad whispered to Ella.

“I’m sorry if I can’t work this out for you. What I will say is that you will recall your dreams not through an act of willpower, but more by letting go. That is why I said that all you can do is leave messages around the place for yourself. Does that make sense?” Brad screwed up his face. “No? Something for you to think on. Meanwhile keep your diary by your bedside, and on waking scribble the first things that come to your head. This might give you some access to dream material. Try waking up after sleeping for a multiple of one and a half hours, which is the normal time between dreams. In other words if you go to sleep at midnight, wake at seven-thirty, not at eight o’clock; or in Brother Cousins’s case at nine or at ten-thirty or whatever part of the day you can manage. Finally, last time I told you to set your alarm clocks to wake you up, but I want you to begin to train yourself to wake up without the intrusion of an alarm. This is because it causes a radical change of consciousness which I want you to avoid. You must learn to surface with your dream. Any questions?”

There were none.

The post-session analysis took place in the nearest bar. Lee, Ella and Brad had been joined by the Irish girl, Honora, and two other members of the group. Brad was complaining loudly.

“He’s just taking the piss out of us. Seems to me that he’s got us there under the pretext of doing something about this dreaming crap, while he’s really using it for some other kind of study which will no doubt distinguish his own academic career and make monkeys out of us.”

“He puts you in your place at any rate.” Ella, with her head down constructing another of her liquorice-paper snouts.

“We wouldn’t expect complaints from the prima donna.”

“But we would,” light, puff, puff, “expect them to come,” puff, “from the clown prince.”

“Never mind Ella’s pornographic fairy-tales,” said Brad, “what was all that crap at the start of the evening?”

“Perhaps he was just trying to create an intense atmosphere,” said Honora.

“To make the dream stuff seem more real,” Ella agreed.

“That’s probably it, Brother Cousins,” said Lee, raising a laugh.

“You’ll agree with anything she says if it’ll help you get into her pants,” said Brad. Lee groped for the laser riposte, but it wasn’t there.

“Looks like we’ve found our lowest common denominator,” said Ella.

“Lowest what? You were the one who turned the discussion into a blue movie.”

“You have to be honest if you’re talking about dreams,” Honora said angrily. “You shouldn’t abuse people’s honesty by taking advantage of what they say in the sessions.”

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

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.

FIVE

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:

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 major 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.”

“What?”

“What, what?” Ella mimicked heavily.

“But what about all the other times.” Lee sat up. “All your other lucid dreams. All that stuff in your dreamwork diary. All those lurid accounts you gave in the seminars.”

“No,” pinching his nipple between her teeth, “this was the real thing!”

“The real thing? What was the other stuff then?”

“It was… not the real thing.”

“Wait a second. You mean you made it up?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean sort of? You don’t sort of make up things like that! You mean it was all lies. Jesus! All your stories of lucid dreams were all a pack of lies.”

“Not exactly lies. More kind of half-lucid dreams.”

“Day dreams more like! It was all bullshit!”

“Don’t get so fucking superior—you’ve only just started lucid dreaming yourself, remember! You strung people along at the beginning.”

“But not with Technicolor big-budget cast-of-thousands pornographic epics like yours! Christ I believed every word; so did all the others. I’m going to enjoy telling them. I’ll enjoy telling Brad!”

“You won’t say anything. The important thing is that it really happened. I made it happen.”

“I’m going to tell them all! Miss Lucid Dreamer of the Year! I can’t wait to see their faces!”

“You won’t tell on me,” said Ella. She took his cock in her cold hands and rolled it like dough. Rain swept against the outside windows in great gusts, coming in through the open window, soaking the curtain and dampening the disorderly heap of books.

“Here is the church,” she said, “here is the steeple.”

He promised not to say anything.

SIX

From that night Ella stopped her I’m-more-lucid-than-you games. She was a fast learner, and her genuine skills developed accordingly. She contrived to disguise the substantial change in the accounts she offered to the weekly seminar, and if anyone was made suspicious by her later reports being more modest than her early claims, nobody said anything. Even so, an unacknowledged hierarchy did develop in the group, with Lee, Ella, Brad and Honora clearly emerging as the people with the strongest ability to influence the course of their dreaming. Each of them progressed, without major effort, from being able to conjure small objects to switching locations and settings in which dreaming took place.

Professor Burns, when pressed, admitted that, despite several years of trying, he, like most people, had never experienced the state of self-awareness during dreaming which would allow him to manipulate the course of dream events. “I think I’m too crusted over by a life devoted to academic pursuits,” he confessed, admitting to more than a little envy of their abilities. “Besides which,” he added, “I don’t have the modern swagger of youth in the face of fear.”

End of term beckoned, and the round of dreamwork seminars was held to be a moderate success. Their efforts, Burns asserted, while not having lit up the skies of science and progress, had contributed to a growing body of research in the increasingly important field of parapsychology. To conclude matters, he added cheerfully, a miserly wine-and-cheese celebration on the expenses of the parsimonious departmental budget would be arranged for the final week of term.

The students made their arrangements for a long summer: Ella and Lee planned a backpacking expedition around the Greek Islands, sleeping on beaches and living on tzatsiki and feta cheese salads; Honora a trip home to beautiful County Fermanagh where she hoped to make a few pounds sketching portraits of tourists boating on the Loughs; while Brad, as a medical student, had work which would keep him at the university. Meanwhile June warmed the nights in which they lay in their beds and dreamed their lucid dreams.

Invitations to the wine and cheese party came as promised. The students dutifully spruced up and went along to the house. A stiff performance with an early finish was predicted, but they were surprised to find Professor Burns racing around in high spirits, his eyes enlivened by whatever share of the drinks he had already consumed, exhorting everyone to get stuck in to the crates of wine that had been provided along with the standard party fare of cubes of cheese and French loaves.

“Drink! It’ll probably be the last time we can get this out of the miserable blighters!” Burns danced around, lavishly topping up any glass within arm’s length, everyone’s congenial host. “Don’t be shy Brother Cousins, there’s another crate through there!”

Some group members had brought their partners, swelling the numbers to twenty or more young people freely availing themselves of the generous flow of wine and filling the house with noisy chatter. Burns held forth to a knot of students in the corner, his steady stream of university anecdotes and outrageous disclosures producing waves of raucous laughter. After an hour or so he noticed Honora standing alone in the middle of the room with an empty glass. He cha-cha-cha’d his way over to her. He had obviously been making the most of the departmental wine while the going was good. His jewel eyes blazed merrily and a long thin lock of iron-grey hair had become displaced from its habitual coiled groove across the top of his head. It hung gamely down the side of one ear.

“Wait behind, Miss Brennan,” he whispered as he refilled her glass of white wine from the bottle of dry red he was carrying, “after all the others have gone.” He winked, then cha-cha-cha’d back to the corner of the room. Honora, speechless, colouring, looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Ella drifted by.

“L. P. is pissed,” said Ella.

“I know; he’s trying to chat me up.”

“No! What did he say?”

“He wants me to stay behind afterwards.”

“Then we’re in for three-in-a-bed; he asked me to stay, too.”

“What can he want?”

“We’ll probably have to suck his balls.”

“I’m not going to!” cried Honora.

“No, don’t,” said Ella, already regretting the joke. “But he’s a sharp old cookie. He must be up to something.”

Ella knew that Burns had also invited Lee to stay. She had a sneaking suspicion that Brad would also be asked. Indeed, when Burns shepherded out the last of the guests, Brad was still looking very comfortable in a large high-winged armchair, nursing his very own wine bottle. Honora looked deeply relieved.

“Yes, help yourselves to that; I don’t really want the incriminating stuff hanging around here.” Burns was carrying out empty and half-empty wine glasses four in each hand. Then he returned and closed the door behind him. “I did intend,” he said, holding out his glass to Brad, “to keep a clear head, but the road to Hell blah blah.”

“Blah blah.” Brad poured from his bottle, stealing a glance at the others.

“Quite right. Point being, why did I ask you four to stay behind?”

“Because we four are your most lucid dreamers—we’ve got nothing else in common.”

“Too right,” someone else agreed.

“Too right indeed. But the question is are the four of you interested in continuing?”

“Continuing? Continuing how?”

“Yes, Ella, continuing. Carrying on,” said Burns as if he was having to explain an obscure concept or an arcane word, “progressing, doing more, not stopping, going further. Some rather more intensive exercises, under more testing conditions, exploring the true potential of these… talents of yours.”

“Sounds interesting,” said Lee, “but I’d got the idea we’d taken things as far as they could go.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s the case at all. Remember, it wasn’t until half-way through the seminar program that you discovered your capacity for lucid dreaming.” Lee looked at Ella. “Likewise Ella. Come on, don’t look quite so sheepish. It’s not important; I know your later accounts were genuine enough. What I’m more concerned about is whether you four will stay on over the summer vacation and do some real work.”

“The thing is,” said Brad, swirling wine dregs in a smeary glass, “we don’t all have the luxury of the academic cushion.”

“Pardon?” Burns’s eyebrows were twin Norman arches.

“He means some of us have to spend the summer working,” said Lee.

“I thought of that. And not wanting any of you to suffer the indignity of having to work for a living, I thought of a way of keeping you on as temporary research assistants. At least until the new term begins. Of course I’d want some results out of you; but from what I’ve observed of your academic activities, Brother Cousins, it won’t squeeze out your studies.”

“You mean we’d get paid?”

“A grant?”

“For dreaming?”

“And for writing up your results with a little more rigor than we’ve seen hitherto.”

“What do you get out of it, apart from seeing your name under an article in The Spoonbender’s Gazette?”

“Let’s say, Brad, that I’m easily satisfied.”

“Done,” said Lee.

“Done,” said the others.

“Good,” said Burns, getting out of his chair, “next week we’ll see if we can’t start a program of real dreaming.”

Ella was the last to file out through the hall. The door stood open to admit a wedge of cool night air, and a glimpse of a new moon hanging low over the graveyard opposite. The light played without sympathy on the old academic’s cable-veined forehead as he helped Ella on with her coat.

“By the way,” shaking her hair free of her collar, “how did you know when we, that is Lee and I, started lucid dreaming for real?”

“Oh,” Burns smiled slyly, closing the door to behind her, “I’m a sharp old cookie.”

SEVEN

“How do you mean, ‘meet up’ with each other?”

Term was over, the students had all gone home, summer was delivering its promise. Lee and Ella had abandoned their plans for combing the Mediterranean beaches of the Aegean islands; the plump faces of German and American tourists went unflattered by Honora’s quick pencil sketches; and Brad’s medical tomes lay unstudied on the shelf.

The sash windows of Burns’s lounge were pushed up to admit the sweet summer air. Lee held out a hand for one of Ella’s hand-rolled liquorice-paper cigarettes which he had taken to smoking, and Ella grudgingly passed him the one she had just been about to light for herself. Honora reclined in a heavy armchair, her cotton dress sticking to her moist skin as she fanned herself with an Erich Fromm paperback she had plucked from the professor’s shelves. Brad looked on glumly with his eyebrows raised in the expression of barely tolerant boredom that he had cultivated of late.

“I mean exactly that: arrange a meeting, a rendezvous between the four of you at some pre-arranged location, just as you would in normal waking life.”

“Can it be done?” Ella, not looking up from her tobacco.

“It’s already been done,” Burns said impatiently, “many times, under laboratory conditions.”

“If it’s such a well-trodden path,” said Brad, “why are we bothering to do it?”

Burns, looking tired, rested his head against the wings of his armchair. “I don’t care to continually justify my interests; if you want my rationalizations then you’ll have to earn them. If you do manage to rendezvous in dreamtime”—Burns used the new language, the conspiratorial argot of this small cell of lucid dreamers, dreamside dreamtime dreamwork dreamthought dreamspeak, to reaffirm his membership of the group—“then exchange a phrase, a song or a proverb. Something you can bring back as an objective correlative. Confirmation. Words that will become real things in waking time. That’s all for tonight. Thank you.”

He rose and escorted them to the door.

“Tetchy.” Brad spoke against the background of a pulsating pub jukebox. “Very tetchy.”

“You have that effect on people,” said Ella. “In any case, it’s time to move this thing into a different gear. Let’s agree a rendezvous point, a meeting location which we could head for during dreaming. L. P. says others have done it, so why don’t we give it a serious shot? We all manage to shift locations in dreamtime; let’s agree on a place to meet.”

“There’s a difference,” Brad muttered, “between shifting locations inside our own dreams and in bringing four different dreams together.”

“It can work; I know it. I just know it.” Honora surprised them with her enthusiasm. “Have faith. Just choose a place.”

They all stared back at her, and for the first time Ella recognized the attraction which the Irish girl held for the two men. She saw them watching as Honora shyly averted her eyes and lifted her glass to her mouth. Honora was the one who talked least about the dreaming, who was the least inclined to speculate, but Ella sensed that she was also the one who dreamed deepest. She spoke as if she knew the coinage in that strange, different country. Ella warmed towards her and felt saddened by a simultaneous pang of jealousy.

“Honora’s right,” she said, breaking the spell, “we’ve got to believe it to be possible. If you’ve got any more doubts, Brad, keep them to yourself.”

“Choose a place,” Honora repeated.

Brad tapped the table in front of him. “This pub, preferably after hours when we can help ourselves.”

“Be serious.”

“I am being serious!!”

They walked home across the park. A full moon sat low in the sky. They walked past the tennis courts and along the row of cherry trees that some weeks ago had hung heavy with pink blossom. Brad aimed a full-throated howl at the appalled moon.

“This would be a good place to meet in dreamtime!” Ella still had strong associations for the place, as, she knew, did Lee.

“Are you sure?” said Lee.

“What’s so special about this place?” Brad wanted a more dramatic setting.

“It’s easier to make an outdoor scene appear than it is to shift to an indoor location.”

“Is it hell,” said Brad.

“Anyway this place has a certain intensity.”

“Maybe it has for you two,” he smirked. “It certainly does nothing for me.”

“What do you mean by ‘intensity’?” Honora wanted to know.

“It probably means they fucked here,” said Brad. “But that’s no help to us two.”

“The place suits me,” shrugged Honora. “Seems as good as any.”

So a plan was formed and the group went their separate ways, hoping to meet there again, but in very different circumstances.

Brad insisted on walking Honora home, against all her protests. Ella saw Lee watching them go.

“Poor Honora,” he said.

“Yes.”

The night was hot. They propped the windows open with text books, but even then the air was close and uncomfortable, making sleep difficult. They lay on the mattress, discussing the night ahead. What would be the possibilities if they did rendezvous in dream-time? Excitement kept them awake. Eventually, sleep took them.

Lee awoke with Ella leaning over him. “Did you dream? Did you go there?”

“No,” Lee still dazed, blinking stupidly, “I didn’t even dream.”

“Me neither. Nothing.”

“Maybe we tried too hard.”

“Maybe.”

EIGHT

For some time the project was a singular disappointment. Not only did the four fail to keep their dreamside appointments, but the dreams themselves failed to come. Or at least, they couldn’t remember them in the morning. Whatever the reasons, they felt as if a power had suddenly been switched off at source, a cable disconnected, a fuse blown.

They tried a number of strategies to reactivate the circuit, all of which proved futile. Ella and Lee tried sleeping apart; another night Ella disappeared and returned an hour later with a small brown wedge of hashish in the hope of encouraging vivid dreams; they tried a program of rampant exhaustive sex, which, while enormously enjoyable, remained sadly ineffective; and they began a regimen of difficult-to-digest foods last thing at night, strong cheeses with exotic names and an array of pickles, all of which produced nothing more than bad breath. Finally they had to conclude that dreams rode on horses which, while they could be led to the dark waters of sleep, could not be made to drink.

Honora and Brad, inquiries revealed, were having similar problems. Nothing was happening. Honora, however, had a different theory about why her dream diary was gathering blank pages. She complained that Brad Cousins had taken to inviting himself back to her room every night for the past week, flatly refusing to leave until the dew was up on the grass. Honora’s device for beating back his advances was to make a fresh mug of coffee every twenty minutes so that she might have something—a caffeine curtain—to draw between them. These massive doses of caffeine and the attendant lack of sleep did no more to remedy Brad’s or Honora’s current dream amnesia than any of the desperate nostrums employed by the other two.

“Let’s run through all of the original exercises,” said Burns, “from the beginning.”

Ella stifled a yawn. They met more frequently now, and always at Burns’s house. If they had thought that the extended ‘grants’ which Burns had miraculously engineered would promise them an easy summer, they had been mistaken. Burns proved to be rigorous about punctuality at meetings, exhaustive in his questioning and insistent upon meticulously kept journals charting the daily progress of their dreamwork. “This is not like studying for a degree,” he said more than once, “this is real work.”

Burns was trying hard to give them some uplift to beat the sag in the development curve.

“But we’ve been through all of those exercises,” Ella protested. “That’s not what’s blocking things.”

“So what is, exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

“Precisely. You don’t know. I don’t know. We all don’t know. So we go back through it again, from the beginning, following our previously successful formula until something breaks for us; and what’s more, we keep a diary every day charting the exercises and the results.”

“But there are no results!” said Lee and Brad in chorus.

“So we carefully chart our exercises and note that there are no results, and we explore our lack of results. What’s the matter with you?” Burns’s exasperation was becoming more apparent. He marched over to the sash window and pushed it open.

“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.

NINE

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.

TEN

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 before 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?”

With the four of them gone, Burns sits hunched over his study desk, his window open to the thickening dark and the smells of moon-washed grass and earth. His Anglepoise lamp throws the disc of light around the paper on his desk and illuminates his skeletal hand scuttling back and forth. The pencil whispers to the page as it delivers its looping longhand scrawl, whispering, whispering as it goes, stopping only occasionally, like a creature listening for prey or predator; until the scuttling hand moves back in action to effect the compulsive writing of the old academic who fears he might have found more to say than he has time in which to say it.

ELEVEN

Ella was waiting under the tree, a silhouette. From the distance Lee recognized the slope of her shoulder and the fall of her hair. In the next instant he was beside her, and she was smiling. He thought her eyes were like jewels, and then they were jewels—twin sapphires—and then they were eyes again. Ella touched him and he shivered. Touching almost broke the dream.

Then Ella was sitting in the tree. She was the tree spirit again. She blinked at him and he was sitting on the branch beside her.

—Did you make me do that? Or did I?—

—Do what?—

On dreamside, communication existed in a zone between thought and speech. You had spoken before you realized it. You thought after you had spoken. All communication seemed wide open to ambiguity and interpretation. Meanings generated new meanings.

—Make me be here. In the tree—

—In the tree?—

The muddle of the dreamspeak made them laugh. “In the tree” became for them an expression to explain the euphoric but confused, dithering condition of their dreaming state.

—Why all this mist?—It was a cobweb sheen, deadening all sound, filtering light through a grey sky, soaking the grass with heavy dew.

—Why all this mystery?—

—In the mist tree?—

They were drunk on dreaming.

—It’s us! Us! See, Ella? We’ve fogged it. The mist. Tree. It’s our own… dreamscape!—

—Can we change it?—

—Let’s get rid of this mist and bring a sun up. Think it. Over there—He pointed to the eastern horizon. Ella focused.

And together they made the sun rise. Dreamside dawn was shell-pink and grey.

—Bigger—said Ella. The sun swelled visibly.

—More—The sun inflated again. It filled the sky, unnatural in its dimensions and pulsating with light. All mist had evaporated. The dew on the grass had dried.

—Change colour—said Lee. The huge, throbbing disc changed from pink, to blood red, to tangerine, to liquid gold.

Ella gasped.—It’s incredible. I feel like a painter! I feel like… —

—Like… God—

And so they walked together under the huge sun they had wrought. It was a world still moist from creation. They were afraid to touch each other.

—Lee. I love you Lee—

—I love you Ella—

The dream had a skin, a thin film which threatened to puncture at any moment. It also had a pulse, more sensed than heard, that kept time with their beating hearts and the throbbing energy of the sun. But this other pulse was frightening. They knew that when it stopped the dream would split at the seams.

—Do you feel it?—

—Yes. Like something trying to get in—

—It’s frightening. Kiss me, Lee—

Lee turned to Ella. The idea of kissing her was more than he could bear. Even as he touched her, he felt the tiny hairline cracks appearing in the very fabric of the dream, and multiplying at astonishing speed.

Then suddenly, the dream broke.

The couple woke, shivering and exhausted.

Further dreamside encounters took place, characterized by that same intensity but always inhibited by an erratic sense of control. Lee and Ella reported that the paralysis which had gripped them on the first occasion had loosened and had opened up possibilities for further interaction, but that they still sometimes felt like live figures trapped in a painting. Any strenuous effort to act in a prescribed manner ran the risk of breaking up the dream. But progress was made and every small step was minutely observed and feted by the group. They became insular and secretive, conspiratorial even, as their interest in the experience grew and their excitement increased.

Burns was becoming more than a little concerned that Brad and Honora were still unable to make the dream rendezvous, and that they were beginning to feel left behind, despite their encouragement and support for the successes of the other two. Even Brad had become less flippant, even a touch introspective as he struggled to catch up with the action. Both his and Honora’s lucid dream control had progressed astoundingly, spurred on by the inspiration of their co-dreamers. But they repeatedly failed to find a path to the meeting place.

“It’s like it’s a closed place on dreamside,” Brad complained, “anywhere else I can get to without a ticket. Sometimes I feel like I could shift to the Bank of England or to the Kremlin, but this place, somehow it never feels on.”

Honora agreed. “I get a know about it. It’s not an option, it’s not on, I have the know.”

Burns had come to trust the strength of the dreamknow to which Honora referred, and which only he of the five could not claim to have experienced. This know was more comprehensive, more fundamental than one’s understanding in ordinary waking time, and he respected it deeply.

“Is it a fear, an anxiety or something that keeps you from the place where Ella and Lee meet?”

“I don’t know. For us it’s a neutral; a dead force field; a zone of used possibilities.”

“Then we must find another zone or field.”

“I had a fear,” said Ella, “of someone else getting in.”

“Oh?”

“L. P., can I ask you something?” Ella chancing the familiar mode while Burns was in a good mood.

“Ask away, E. I.”

“Why are you so anxious to make all four of us rendezvous?”

“Is it a private party?”

“No; it’s not that. I get the feeling you want further confirmation of what’s happening.”

“She means don’t you trust us,” said Lee.

“Yes Lee; I know what Ella means. But why shouldn’t I trust your accounts?”

“We misled you at the beginning of the exercises. You would be right to be sceptical.”

“Sceptical of you two I am not. Perhaps you will forgive my guard against credulity however, which springs from years of working in a discipline which has never been more than an Art which believes itself to be a Science. Even so, our capacity for self-deception and the unfaltering pursuit of wishful thinking are probably the most dependable of human attributes.”

“So you do think we’re making it all up!”

“Not so. Certainly not consciously, as in telling fibs to deceive a gullible old academic with nothing better to entertain him. No. But there is such a thing, to name an example, as a folie a deux.”

“Madness between two emotionally involved people,” said Brad cheerfully. “Where one feeds off the other’s delusions.”

“So we’re liars or we’re mad!”

“I’m not saying you’re either of those, Ella, please don’t make such a grim face at me. I’m pointing out that there are possibilities of illusory states of mind. Even with or without my spectacles I know you and Lee to be emotionally entangled. We have to consider these things. Now, a third or fourth party entering the scenario would help to confirm things.”

“So if a second person sees the unicorn in the woods, it still doesn’t exist,” said Lee, “but if a third person sees it we’ll give it a scientific name!”

“Speaking as someone who is a great believer in unicorns, I’d still want all three of them to have their heads tested!”

They all seemed to laugh longer at this quip than was necessary. The professor concluded the session. “Let’s just say that it’s much harder for three to keep up a conspiracy of self-deception than it is for two.” Whatever that meant, they accepted it in good faith.

Three days later they called around at the professor’s house and found him in high spirits. Still breaking open bottles left over from the end of term soiree, he announced his plans.

“It’s time for us to find that tree I mentioned.”

“What tree?”

“The one for you all to carve your initials on. By which I mean to say we now need to identify a new location as our point of rendezvous, one with which all four of you can have good strong associations, and which can become a new focus for us on dreamside. We are all going on a little summer holiday.”

“Yay! When?”

“Tomorrow. Why not? The weather is better than we deserve, and I know a rather beautiful spot where we can spend two or three days relaxing.”

“Relaxing! Yo! Where is it?”

“Wait and see. The idea is for us to spend some time there, relax, soak up the beautiful countryside, grow even closer as a group, make associations with the place, absorb some of its nature… Are you persuaded?”

“We’re persuaded! Let’s do it!”

Next morning they travelled southwards, squeezed into the professor’s cherished Morris Minor, Burns driving slowly and with exasperating caution. The sun got up hot overhead, bouncing off the polish and chrome of the car and cooking its passengers. The girls’ bare legs stuck to the leather upholstery and Lee and Brad both took off their shirts, sitting bare chested and sweating. Burns, dressed in collar and tie, sweater and tweed suit, steered carefully with hands gripped permanently at five-minutes-to-one, resisting all overtures either to drive faster or to reveal their destination.

In Coventry he turned sharply into a one-way street and a flow of oncoming traffic. A policeman stuck his head out of his car window and bellowed at him to pull over. Particulars were noted and Burns, who remained calm and polite throughout, was instructed to produce his driving documents at a police station within fourteen days.

“An unfortunate development,” he muttered when they were mobile again.

“It’s nothing,” said Brad, “all you have to do is take in your licence and insurance and stuff.”

“I don’t have one. A driving licence I mean.”

“What!”

“Nor any of the other documents he mentioned. Insurance and such.”

“Eh!”

“I only take the car out once or twice a year, around the block as it were, just to keep it going. I resent having to insure it for that. Is it likely that they will make a fuss, do you think?”

“Just keep going,” someone said, “we’ll try not to think about it.”

“Right; fuck the pigs!” screamed Ella through the open window, and with such revolutionary ardour that Burns was startled, or possibly inspired, into driving marginally faster for the rest of the journey.

They reached the Brecon hills around lunchtime, and Burns drove them to an isolated house, belonging, he said, to a colleague. The place was rudimentary, some kind of holiday cottage equipped in utilitarian fashion. They ran up and down the stairs quickly claiming rooms, Ella and Lee together, Honora alone and Brad accepting a camp bed arrangement with good grace so that L. P. didn’t have to scramble with the rest of them to stake out his territory in the front bedroom of the house. The old professor looked utterly exhausted by the journey, and sank down into a chair. When someone shouted that neither shower nor bath was functioning, he looked apologetic and bewildered, and could only suggest that they bathe in a lake he knew of, some three or four miles down the road.

Ella could see how tired he was. She went over to him. “It doesn’t matter about the bath. It would be great fun to swim in the lake. And the house and the countryside are wonderful.” He looked reassured by her words and forced a brief smile. The others realized that they were going to have to slow down over the next few days unless they wanted an invalid on their hands.

They took him at his word about the lake, and Brad persuaded him (by dint of hard work and outrageous promises) to surrender the car keys for the drive down to it. Again they all squeezed into the uninsured Morris Minor together with a deckchair for Burns to sit on while they swam. Burns complained that they were treating him like a geriatric, but was obviously gratified by this consideration. The lake was cool and inviting. They parked the car at the side of the road and walked down to its grassy banks. An ancient oak leaned out over it, root and branch plunging into the dark, deep water. They made camp under a row of weeping willows which dipped leafy stems into the blueblack cool. A spiral of excited swallows wheeled and turned and dotted the sky with parabolas above the lake, intoxicated by their own matchless aerial display.

Burns’s deckchair was set up with protracted ceremony and discussion. Only when he was fully installed did the others undress and leap squealing into the water. He watched them swim and bob, and laid towels out on the grass for them. Then he returned to his deckchair, where he promptly fell into a doze.

It must have been two hours before he woke. The sun had slipped in the sky. Everything slumbered. Something of the lake’s calm had distilled itself into the afternoon tranquillity. Glancing down, he saw four young bodies basking in the heat, their smiling faces lifted up to him as if they expected him to speak.

“Did you dream lucid dreams L. P.?” Lee asked lazily.

Honora said, “You were talking in your sleep.”

Ella giggled. “We heard everything. You named names.”

“Lilly? Did I say Lilly?”

“Yes.”

Burns smiled sleepily and settled back in his chair. “Lilly was my wife. You know, she died more than ten years ago. I’ve been dreaming of her a lot lately. Good dreams, nice dreams. We used to come here, often, years and years ago. Beautiful, peaceful; just as it is now. It hasn’t changed at all. That’s why I thought of this place.”

“I love it,” said Honora.

“We can have some pleasant days here before returning. There should be a rowing boat in the shed. We can bring it down here, or rather you can. There’s fishing tackle if you’re interested. Or we can take a walk through the woods there.” They all agreed that the choice had been fine—quiet, unspoiled, entirely tranquil.

The next three days were a summer idyll. The weather held out, and time seemed suspended as they swam in the lake, picnicked under the spreading oak, drifted in the rowing boat, or went on long walks in the cool fern woods. Burns in particular loved to stroll in the woods, along narrow pathways winding between giant ferns, with the echoing rap of an unseen woodpecker as descant to his students’ conversation. He liked to stroll with each of them in turn, probing, challenging, teasing them with his gentle irony.

They would return from these walks shaking their heads at the breadth of his knowledge, waiting for him to fall asleep in his deckchair before relaying an impression of their discussions to the others. It seemed that he could talk with authority about anything, pick up their own arguments and generously advance them before dismantling them with an opposing view. Lee found him fascinating on the psychosexual meaning of fairy-tales, of all things, and stalked the woods discussing the sexual imagery of Beauty and the Beast; Ella could listen all day to his analysis of revolutionary history or to his satirical monologue on the psychology of the fascist disposition; Honora found him an expert on Surrealism; and Brad had his eyes opened on everything from football to the pharmaceutical industry. Though they never did see a unicorn in those dense, aromatic woods, the possibility of doing so had never seemed so close.

Burns was generally content to sit quietly in his deckchair, watching events take their predictable shape. There was little in the splashing and cavorting of the four young students to make this grey-haired scholar of human behaviour raise an eyebrow, but he saw—where they might not—the doomed infatuation of Lee and Ella, too hot not to burn itself out too soon; Brad’s persistent and not unsubtle advances on Honora, gently but firmly deflected; Brad’s disguised interest in Ella, secretly recognized and shrugged off by her but completely missed by Lee; and the subtle affection Lee and Honora reserved for each other, prompting more speculation by others than it ever did for them.

And while he watched all this with fond interest, it added to, rather than detracted from, the uninhibited delight of three perfect summer days. How could it be otherwise, when the place itself was a kind of dream? But beyond that which he would always see with his trained eye, he could never have guessed at, nor would he ever have permitted, the growth of those strange forms already tightening round that close circle of four, like snaring vines in a wood, or like dangerous weeds reaching from the bedrock of a lake to the thrashing ankles of careless swimmers.

TWELVE

In the following weeks, the group made five almost effortless rendezvous experiments on dreamside. The dreamside location, the site of their recent summer trip, was easily called to mind during bouts of ordinary dreaming. Appointments were made and were kept.

Burns resisted their impatience to return and return again to dreamside, so hot was their excitement, and insisted that the rendezvous took place no more frequently than once per week so as not to fatigue their powers or jade the sharpness of the experience. For him it was a time of furious note taking and exhaustive post-dream analysis, questioning the four ever more assiduously, pressing more closely in his collection of minutiae for the construction of a theory that held little interest for them. Their direct experience was like bathing in incandescent light, while the professor wanted to grope in the shadows. He became at times irascible, frustrated at their inability to crystallize the unbearable excitement of the elusive, drifting experience of their dreamside rendezvous.

“To be there is to know,” Lee tried lamely during one post-dream analysis, “and to know is to be there.”

Burns threw down his notepad and pencil. “So, Lee, you’ve had a few nice dreams and now you’re a Zen Master.” He leaned forward, a crimson rash spreading over his forehead as he spat the words, an iron-grey lock of hair loosening and lashing at his face. “Look; God or nature equipped you with the most accurate and poetic language in the history of nations. You have at your disposal the precision of the Latin and the expressiveness of the Germanic, and you were born lucky enough to ride the confluence of both. Why don’t you use it because I DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING TIME FOR YOUR MORONIC BABBLING UNDERGRADUATE BUDDHIST LAMENT”

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:

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:

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

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, remember? 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:

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

THIRTEEN

“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.

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—

—Oh yes?—

—Yeah! there’s no sin on dreamside—

—I don’t know about that. Let’s just take the boat on the lake instead—

Brad didn’t regard that as much of an instead. At times he took to following Lee and Ella around, making a crowd of himself even in the vast space of dreamside. Lee and Ella got as tired of Brad’s prurient interests on dreamside as they would have done in waking time. It wasn’t simply a question of finding a quiet spot out in the woods somewhere, because space and distance didn’t count the same. Brad was just a thought away if he wanted to be, and he often did, warm on their warmth, breathing on their breath. Until then neither a cross word nor an unkind thought had passed between them on dreamside, but Ella this time thoughtspelled it out for Brad.

—Can’t you leave us alone we’ve got some private experiments to conduct which require the presence of two people only—

—Don’t mind me. I’ll make notes—

At which Ella turned and spoke to Brad. Not in the thinkspeak unique to dreamside, but in clear loud English as she successfully transmitted an old and unambiguous message: “FUCK OFF, COUSINS!”

Brad was deeply shocked, as was Lee, at the waves of hard energy that radiated from the violence of Ella’s words. Ella too was surprised and held her hands at her mouth as if to stop anything else which might want to come out. The very air around them seemed appalled; but to their surprise the dream absorbed the dull explosion of Ella’s words as if they were shells detonating against the membrane of its walls, leaving Brad to turn his back and cross some threshold which would dissolve it all for him anyway.

FOURTEEN

Was it before Ella dreamcursed Brad Cousins, or was it sometime after his rupture of the dreamside idyll that events there took a dark turn?

“Something’s not quite right about the place,” Ella said to Honora about dreamside. “Not quite the same as the real place, the original place. Something I can’t put my finger on.”

“No birds for one.”

Ella instantly knew that Honora was right. No birds for sure, try that out for size; and therefore no insects either to play on the mirror surface of the lake. But it wasn’t only that, there was something in the substance, the resin of the place, under the surface of things. It was a constant presence, attendant and right in front of you, but which only became more elusive the more you tried to identify it.

What was it?

But no one could recall exactly when the first elementals started to take hold. One rendezvous ran into another with no sense of chronology to slice them apart, no sequence of night or day. There was only the dreamed sun that never burned, and all note-taking discipline had gone.

Now they were able to sustain and control the dreaming long enough to feel tired by their efforts, knowing that their energies were sapped by the work of fixing and holding the dream in place. This fatigue always came as a signal that perhaps they had stayed too long this time, and in the form of a lapse in control of events, a confusion, a loss of purpose. Then, in one deep-dreaming fog, Honora laid her head back on the grass under the protection of that giant oak and closed her eyes.

Shaking her mass of brown curls from under her she felt the touch of the warm grass and the exposed knots of tree root on her neck. She could feel the warmth of the fixed sun on her face. The lapping water spread a deep sense of calm, and she thought that even within sleep it might be possible to test for another sleep, dream within lucid dream.

The other three had moved off somewhere, faded into the periphery of the dream, her dream or their dream. In the peace around her she heard a drowsy whispering, a rustle like a breeze in the leaves of the trees but something more intimate, almost a murmuring coming from the lake or from the tree roots, but soothing, and whispering unrecognizable, comforting words. She relaxed, letting go completely. The air was scented with balm and she felt good about the warm grass and the exposed tree roots touching her white neck like the gently exploring fingertips of a lover’s hands, then intertwining in the spilled ringlets of her long hair, stroking, winding into her hair, gently pulling her deeper into the grass, weaving her hair into the grass and the roots of the tree, pulling it downwards and into the black soil. It was easy just to go with it, let it play, let it take you down, become part of it, let it become part of you. Honora heard a tiny splash from the lake far off, and realized what was happening.

She had to swim her way back to consciousness. It was a fight. It felt as if she were actually struggling to pull her hair from the grass and the roots dragging her down. It became impossible to distinguish between the loom of hair, grass, root and soil, so perfect a woven fabric had they made in the natural carpet at the foot of the tree. Honora fought for breath in a rising panic, thrashing wildly, her heartbeat echoing aloud in the earth from which she tried to tear loose. At last she felt her hair snapping and her scalp searing as she wrenched herself upright, screaming, arms flailing, to find Brad, Lee and Ella all stooped over her.

—Was it a dream, a nightmare? I mean within this dream, did you close your eyes and sleep?—

Lee helped Honora to her feet. They could see wisps of her hair still entangled in the roots.

For a while the horror of it shook them, until they dismissed the event as some kind of nightmare taking place within the wheel of the dream. They were wrong. Their complacency was further shaken when Lee had a similar experience of his own.

Lee and Ella were out on the lake, drifting in the small boat, its keel not piercing the still skin of the water. While the excitement of being on dreamside never waned, the exhaustion of consciously sustaining the dream was closing in. They lay in the boat, fighting off the second sleep, the surrender that might take them back, Ella humming softly, Lee dipping a hand in the water over the side of the boat. The scene was lit by a pallid disk that could have been the moon but was the unshifting sun burning without energy. Lee sensed a low breathing from the trees or the water, or maybe from the gentle swell and fall of his own lungs. Maybe the secret was inside him, so easy was it to be at peace, to merge with the background, give up, yield and become fluid, like the stir of water between his fingers. A gradual loss of temperature permeated his hand, blood pulsed gently at his fingertips, his veins leaking, flesh and blood dissolving without pain and commingling with the lake water in a sweet seduction that could take everything.—NOOO!— Lee sat up in the rowing boat and screamed. His arm was paralyzed. He struggled to lift it from the water, his muscles refusing to unlock until, gasping with pure terror, he felt his arm release with a scorching pain and a sound like newspaper tearing.

—What is it? What happened?—Lee’s scream had caught Ella mid-song, and now she sat up in the boat taking Lee’s head in her hands.

—I don’t know I don’t know—Lee looked in horror over the side of the boat at the thin eel-like trails of blood already diffusing into the blue-black water.—I want to get out—

There the dream broke.

They all experienced it in different ways. For Brad it began with a perspiration that grew into a sweat which threatened a melting as if he was made of plastic; for Ella the earth, seeming to want to become part of her, reconstituted her feet as the warm soil.

These lucid nightmares were more terrifying than anything in ordinary dreaming: for what might happen if the absorbing process continued to its conclusion? The implications for waking time were not to be contemplated. So, they guarded themselves. Their dreaming became circumspect, as they proceeded in fear of another attack.

It was Brad who showed them how to deal with these elementals. He called them together on dreamside.

—Watch—he said, bringing them over to the trunk of the oak, and pressing the palm of his hand against its rough bark. He closed his eyes as they watched. At first nothing happened. Then his fingernails slowly took on a glaucous colour, changing slowly to moss-green, which moved imperceptibly down his fingers until the lines and folds and knuckles of his hand deepened and cracked, and his fingernails split. Then his hand absorbed the texture of solid bark spreading across the back of his hand to his wrist, his fingertips transforming into a stunted branch of the tree itself: gnarled, knotted, living tree:

— Stop it—Honora whispered.

—Not yet—The creeping bark inched up his arm, cracking and resetting his bones as it went, twisting at a point below his elbow.

—Stop it!—

—Now!—said Brad, and the metamorphosis stopped dead. His hand was organically joined with the trunk; the rough bark texture of his limb indistinguishable from the bark of the tree. But the process had been halted.

—You’ve become sloppy! Forgotten the art of lucid dreaming!—said Brad with contempt.—There’s no time here, you just have to think it back, reverse the process, think it back, just like rewinding a film. Watch—

The growth which had taken possession of Brad’s limb retreated exactly as it had advanced, moving back down the arm and across the hand like a long glove being peeled off, the rough texture dissolving, the moss-green tincture vanishing until his hand reformed itself entirely.

Brad held up his unscathed hand for all of them to see.—Learn it—he said.

FIFTEEN

Harmony and security were restored to dreamside, at least for a while. Brad had demonstrated, and the others were able to reproduce, the powers that would keep the frightening encroachment of those elemental forces at bay. Lee and Ella were free to persist with their “orgasm project”: the sexual adventure of making it happen on dreamside. But they had difficulty with sustaining the dream long enough to contain such a high pitch of excitement. The dream always seemed to crack at a crucial moment.

This left Brad to look on, and Honora to resist. It wasn’t long before Brad decided that just being on dreamside wasn’t enough.

—Know what they’re doing, Honora?—

—Of course. Enjoying it, I hope—

—Doesn’t it make you curious?—

—About them? No—

—No, not about them. I mean about it. It. It must be different here. Incredible. Different. The end of the world—

—I wouldn’t know—

—No, you wouldn’t would you? Maybe you should watch them, find out how it’s done—

—I don’t think they’d like to be watched; any more than I would—

—C’mon. There’s just you and me here—

—Perceptive—

—Know what? I want you badly—

—Don’t start—

—Don’t start? It never stops! What am I supposed to do? What about me?—

—Poor Brad; he isn’t getting any—

They had rehearsed this discussion before, both on dreamside and in waking time.

—Am I so obnoxious?—

—I prefer you as a friend—

—I hate people who say that—

—So if you hate me you can’t want me—

Uninterested as she was, Honora knew anyway that Brad’s real feelings were for Ella. She could see what Ella would have dismissed out of hand; what Lee preferred not to see; and what Brad could never admit. Yet there was no question. Brad was secretly in love with Ella, and because he had no chance of getting close he made a mask of perpetual antagonism towards her. He was the only one suffering from this conspiracy to deny the obvious.

Honora felt some sympathy for him, if only because she alone could see what was burning him up. Brad could only vent his feelings destructively. When Ella was around, he would mock or goad or challenge her in ways which at least won some form of contact, even if it was negative. He drew strength from the friction. And when Ella disappeared with Lee, he paced around Honora in a froth of agitation. He was a danger to himself.

—Honora, think of what you could be missing!—

—I thought of it—

—And?—

—I’ll pass—

—It’s an experience denied to other people! It’s like being specially chosen for something! It’s one of life’s great miracles and it’s only available to us! Don’t throw it away!—

—Still, I’ll pass—

—You’re a stupid naive silly little country virgin who doesn’t know anything—

—Oh I’m not so naive; all the other things maybe—

She got up and moved away from Brad’s hot attention, leaning her back against the oak tree. She thought of Lee and Ella, briefly, naked in the long grass.

—I’m not that naive—she said again.

For Lee and Ella were only a thought away, stretched amid the daisies and the long grass, shivering at each other’s hot breath and warm touch. It was as if they had cast off not just their clothes but also their living skin, leaving them a bundle of exposed nerve endings, detonating at every breath of air, kiss, or light caress. Achingly sensitive to subtle changes in the air currents around them, Ella leaned across Lee and pressed her tongue on his stiffened penis, flicking at the dome with her tongue, here is the church, her lips settling and lifting and resettling on him like a butterfly’s beating wings, here is the steeple, Lee in an agony of tumescence, the unstoppable swelling, the ecstatic unknowable voice in his ears until he thought the whole thing would explode, not just his cock but his brain, his head, his body, the dream, life outside the dream, life beyond that, until Ella brought him sharply back under control, coaxing and reminding him to hold it together.

—Slow it—she said.—Slow. Breathe deep. Imagine I’ve got a knife at your throat and I’m making you do this, now do it, put it inside me—

—Prove it—said Brad.

—What?—said Honora.

—Prove that you’re not. Not naive—

Brad stood up. His gaze locked on her and she felt unable to look away, mesmerized, as if he were holding her head so that she couldn’t turn away. The air around was absolutely still, not a whisper of wind in the air, but she felt a strange shift in the currents, something akin to a breeze lift gently at the nut-brown curls nestling on her neck. Although he stood fully ten feet away, she knew it was some force that Brad was exerting.

—What are you doing?—

—Prove it to me—Brad said again.

—Don’t—said Honora, unable to take her eyes from his.

Brad didn’t take a single step closer, but he continued to fix her with his gaze. She was unable to move. She felt the silver buckle of the patent leather belt around her skirt open, the belt passing itself through the loops of her skirt, moving off her like a live thing, like a snake which dropped at her feet. Then she felt a button of her blouse gently popping open above her breasts, followed by the next, and the next down to her waist, and the blouse being lifted back from her shoulders exposing her breasts to him.

—Don’t—Honora said again, her arms fallen at her side, held down by a strange paralysis, not knowing how to resist, wanting to fight back and reverse what was happening, think it back as with the elementals, but not finding the strength.

—You can stop it any time you want—he said.

—God, I just can’t move! Don’t you see I don’t want this?—

—Any time you want—

Was he right? Could she stop it? She tried, but couldn’t. There was nothing she could do. Then she felt the button go at the side of her skirt and heard the tooth rasp of the zip opening, and the skirt fell around her legs, lying in a hoop at her feet. At last she felt the elastic of her panties being rolled down her thighs and falling to her feet.

Brad stepped forward.

Control. Lee fought for control, imagining that Ella’s sharp fingernails on his throat were indeed a knife, until in the dream it was the gleaming blade she would plunge into his neck if he failed to please her; open the door, I love you for ever, he pushed inside her and she squeezed him to her, laying her head back on the grass. It was unbearable this dreamside sex, like making love on a live cable of electric wire. Stay with it, she was whispering, stay with it, but he knew it would have to finish or stop or the dream must break. He was clenching handfuls of her hair in his fists and the grass and daisies growing at the side of her head were mixed up in her hair, and she became a human shape of glittering white-hot energy, pulsating and glittering and burning. He felt they were making love astride a howling wind and over a rushing current and then when he felt her coming he gave in to the current and the wind and felt his body spurting light from every pore of his body as the dream imploded and was over.

The next morning Lee woke up next to Ella, feeling strange, dislocated and energized. She was still sleeping. He kissed her, and in her hair he found a daisy head, two daisy heads, and torn blades of grass. He woke Ella to show them to her.

Grass and daisy heads on the pillow: evidence in the day’s eye of what had been transported from dreamside.

Honora Brennan woke up alone in her bed and pushed back the bedcovers to inspect the speckled crimson stains on the sheets, as if a pressed flower had been squeezed into the linen.

Honora felt inside herself for the blood of the broken hymen.

SIXTEEN

Honora was not seen on dreamside again. It was obvious to the other three that she had made a conscious decision not to return there. It must have taken some struggle. Entry into dreamside had once required considerable discipline and effort; now they were caught in an undertow which delivered them there unasked, and not to be drawn there whenever they slept required serious resistance.

Ella had her suspicions about what was happening. She sensed that Brad Cousins was in some malevolent way responsible, though she was unable to guess why. And he wouldn’t be drawn.

“What happened between you two?” she asked for the fifth time. They sat in a pub with ultraviolet strip lighting and a jukebox belting out Motown classics. Brad offered a shrug.

“Don’t try to dismiss the question, Brad.”

“I’m not trying to dismiss the question, I am dismissing the question.”

“Something happened on dreamside that’s made her cut herself off from us, and I know it’s something you did.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you’ve the guts of a sewer rat.”

“Ease up Ella,” said Lee, bringing in the beer. “Tell us what happened when you went to her room.”

“She was in there. I know it. She pretended she wasn’t. I even shouted that I knew she was there, but she wouldn’t open the door and she wouldn’t speak to me.” She jabbed a finger dangerously close to Brad’s face. “He’s responsible.”

“It’s been nearly five weeks,” said Lee.

“You know what it’s about, don’t you Brad?”

“Get off my back. Go and ask her for Christ’s sake.”

“No, I’m asking you.” Ella turned to Lee. “Honora won’t speak to us, so we’ve only got this reptile to tell us.”

Brad suddenly slammed down his pint glass sending a tide of beer cascading across the table. Lee and Ella jumped back. “Why don’t you get a muzzle on that rabid mouth of yours, jealous bitch.” He stormed out of the bar, slamming a foot into the jukebox and bouncing the stylus into silence.

“You asked for that,” said Lee.

Ella had actually paid three unanswered visits to Honora’s room. Each time there had been a light on and a radio playing, but Honora had consistently refused to respond. They never saw her around the university campus and she didn’t attend lectures.

Visits to dreamside were never quite the same again. There was a marked down-turn in the excitement of just being there. The sense of expectation had died. Before, the place had always been seeded with the scent of honeysuckle. Now it was flat and perfumeless, and troubled by underlying anxieties more felt than understood. They never referred to this anxiety, and the more it went unspoken, the more it grew. Without saying anything, they found themselves resisting the powerful undertow that had been taking them unasked for so long. They were shocked at the effort required to stay away, but eventually their visits thinned out, then dried up completely.

In waking time, things started to go badly for Ella and Lee too. Perhaps this deterioration in their relationship caused the dreamside sag. When it came down to it, the best part of their romance had been conducted on dreamside, and sometimes, now, they were at a loss with each other’s ordinariness.

One afternoon Lee looked at Ella, and where he had formerly seen an exotic priestess, there was now a girl with scuffed shoes and hastily applied lipstick.

Ella woke up one morning, and where she had once lain with a young warrior bearing a flaming torch into the dark labyrinths of the psyche, she now found herself in bed alongside a boy with a fluffy beard, who hadn’t much to say for himself.

Problems were compounded when Brad “confessed” to Lee that he and Ella had, on occasion, successfully conducted their own dreamtime rendezvous. Lee was genuinely shocked. It had never occurred to him that other dreamtime activities might have been going on in his absence.

“It’s a lie,” Ella protested, “and it’s ridiculous.”

“Maybe that’s what he meant when he called you jealous.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this! You take in any lie that ape comes out with, and you don’t believe a word I say! How can you do that to me?”

Lee let the idea niggle him. Ella was livid. They argued, ridiculously and histrionically, but most of all badly. After that they didn’t see each other for over a week.

Lee made the first conciliatory move, driven by some news he had heard in the union bar.

“She did what?” Ella went white.

“She took a load of pills. They had to pump her stomach.”

“Oh God! Can we go and see her?”

“Apparently she’s already gone home.”

“What? Ireland home?”

“Yes, Ireland home.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Four or five days ago.”

“But what about her course? Her exams?” Lee only shrugged. “Why did I know that something like this was going to happen? We never paid enough attention to her. We were too wrapped up in ourselves.”

“Yes.”

Ella sat down and began to roll a cigarette. “Please stay with me tonight,” she said, without looking up. “I get frightened at night and I’m having bad dreams.”

Lee nodded. “You know I want to stay with you.”

They made friends again, and made love again. The news about Honora made them vulnerable, and for a while they were gentle with each other.

The day after Lee broke the news, Ella got Honora’s home telephone number from the university registrar. Honora’s father answered, asked who it was and went to fetch his daughter. He came back on the line to tell her that Honora wasn’t well enough to come to the phone, but that she was much better and thank you for calling.

Lee, on going to find out how much Brad knew, discovered that he had cleared out of his bed-sit without notice. It had been some time since he had turned in for a lecture, and none of his fellow medical students had seen him in weeks. Lee got Brad’s landlady to unlock the door of his room. She stood over him, shaking her keys and listing complaints against student tenants while he inspected the abandoned room. There were a number of medical reference books and a shelf full of sci-fi paperbacks; a battered mono record player and a handful of scratched and sleeveless albums; an oil-fired roadwork lantern, a police bollard and the amber dome from a Belisha beacon, plus other trophies and street paraphernalia which for some reason he felt happy to keep in his room; and a few clothes, though all the decent stuff had gone along with his suitcase and bags. There was nothing there he wasn’t better off without. Lee told the landlady differently, but he knew for certain that Brad wouldn’t be coming back.

With two of them gone, it didn’t come as a complete surprise to Lee, when, towards the end of the spring term, a pink handwritten envelope appeared in his room one morning. It had been shoved under the door sometime during the small hours:

Though it was half-expected, Lee was devastated. The four of them had been isolated from the rest of the university, and now he was left completely alone. Honora had been carried out on a stretcher; Brad had bolted; and now Ella had run away to hide. It was exactly a year since he and Ella had come together. He knew he would never get over her.

Like a good boy he stayed at the university and completed his studies. From the end of that term he lived like a monk, got his head down and caught up on a year’s neglected reading. He worked hard and was awarded a respectable but undistinguished degree.

He didn’t expect to see the others again. Three postcards from Ella arrived in the first couple of months. They showed pictures of brilliantly whitewashed houses against an improbably blue sky, classical temples and definitive Mediterranean sunsets. On their reverse sides were tightly written, difficult-to-read messages with excited descriptions and introspective diversions, all thoroughly impersonal. But Lee kept the postcards and pinned them on his wall close to his pillow as if they would act as a charm against bad dreams and a remedy for spoiled memories. No more arrived.