Graham Joyce - Dreamside

“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.

The dreamwork seminars continued, measured against theadvance 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.