Dreamside (10 page)

"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.

_{S I X}

Learn from your dreams what you lack
—W. H. Auden

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."