Graham Joyce - Dreamside

Cousins’s gluey eyes were pressed against the window. He stank. Lee stepped back, looked around at the filth and debris of the room, wondered what he was doing there. There was no trace of light in the other cottage. He had had enough.

“To hell with it. I didn’t see anything. And I’m going. I shouldn’t even have come.”

It was as if a spell had been lifted. He was appalled that he had allowed Ella to pack him off on this fool’s errand. This confrontation disgusted him. But what really vexed him was not that Brad was a sot but that there was something about Brad’s slither into alcoholic slush that was only superficially different to his own dash for stiff conformity. Both of them were casualties—Ella’s word for it: men whose souls leaked through the corrosion which followed brilliant dreaming.

Now Ella had got him scurrying down here rattling chains and locks that were turning to dust in his hands. He felt alone, he wanted his neat home, his hermetically sealed box, wanted not to be confronted with this degenerate version of himself where the only distinction between them was a full set of buttons and a splash of cologne.

“You can… put your head down here for the night…” Cousins said, suddenly sheepish.

“What?” A mirthless laugh. “Is that a funny? Thanks, old friend, but no thanks. I’ll take my chances of roughing it at The Plough, back down the road.”

Back behind the steering wheel, he turned his headlamps up full on the derelict cottage. He had let Cousins spook him. He could still see him watching from the window. Turning the car around rapidly he drove back on to the road, switching on the wireless for the comfort of a Radio 4 voice.

At the Plough, with barely more customers than staff, he had no difficulty in getting accommodation for the night. He was shown to a room with an uneven floor and heavy Victorian furniture. Before turning in, he opened a window and looked out across the moonless, starless valley, wondering why he had bothered to come, but already knowing the answer. In the comfortable bed he fell into a fitful sleep; a seamless patchwork of dreams crossing easily from past to present and back again to the past.

The poster, hand-written in bold red marker pen, was displayedin 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.”