Dreamside (8 page)

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

Only people with no imagination

have
to resort to their dream life

—Fransisco
Umbral

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

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

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