Graham Joyce - Dreamside

“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.

The silence was embarrassing. The second meeting of the luciddreamers 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.