Dreamside (15 page)

There
was one drawback. This developing skill was accompanied by an increase in
frequency of the false awakenings. It was not uncommon for three or four such
unpleasant and disturbing experiences to be stacked one on top of the other.
Another word of special significance crept into the dreamer's argot:
the
repeater.

Burns
persisted with his interest in information transmission, so rigorously that
they began to joke that he was working for the intelligence services, or
perhaps for some foreign power. Burns took this in good part,
camping
it up and telling them that they would never know,
would they, but he was not to be deflected from his purposes. Then he suggested
that one of them might take a book, any book, to dreamside, and attempt to read
it.

The task
was beyond their capacity. But, although it proved a failure, it failed
spectacularly, yielding some interesting information for Burns, and generating
further passionate scribbling.

To begin with, no one could ever "remember"
to transport a book to dreamside. Though they planned it conscientiously
enough, even selecting a particular work by a favourite author and placing it
by their bedsides, the task never occurred to them until they had returned from
dreamside and awakened to see the volume lying nearby. After several failures
of this kind they told Burns that they thought the books had been too
"heavy" to "carry," and Burns said he thought he knew what
they meant by that.

Then, after the task had been dropped, Brad arrived on
dreamside holding a book, though, disappointingly, it turned out not to be a
book that he had ever chosen to bring with him. Brad and Lee inspected it
together. They opened the pages at random and read:

I d
reamt
that I dwelt in marble halls
With
vassals and serfs at my side,
And
of all who assembled within these walls
That I was the hope and the
pride

Neither of them recognized the verse, but when they
looked at the lines again a few moments later, those very same lines had
changed, now reading very differently:

I
dreamt I dwelt in marble halls

Where each damp thing that
creeps and crawls

Went wobble-wobble on the walls.

The transformation produced much hilarity. But when
they looked back to check the lines a third time, they were changed yet again:

I'll dreamt that I'll dwealth mid
warblers’ walls when throstles and choughs to my sigh
hiehied
.

This metamorphosis of the words went on endlessly. All
they had to do was look away, and then look back at the page, for the words to
undergo another completely new transformation.

When they reported this to Burns, they were unable to
recall any of the words at all, only that they changed continually. Burns was
fascinated, but ultimately concluded that the effort was wasted and that the
exercise with the books could stop.

"It's disconcerting," Brad was saying,
"you don't know whether to bother to wash your face in the morning in case
you have to do it again." The
repeaters
were beginning to disturb
them.

"Sometimes it's not pleasant," Honora
agreed. "You can spend a whole day thinking that you might be going to
wake up any time. You only feel sure when you put your head down to go to sleep
again, and even then you're not so sure; you know: dreams within dreams."

Burns became concerned. "All I can suggest is
that you use some signal demonstrably external to your dream to wake you, a
telephone call or more practically an alarm clock which you set at different
times each night so that you are jolted out of your dream. Beyond that per
haps you should try to enjoy, and live to the
full, your other new 'lives'."

"Thanks," said Brad.

Of course, it was possible to dream of being awakened
by an alarm clock in repeaters, but in general the professor's advice was
useful, and although the repeaters did not abate, the experience of them became
less sinister. Then Burns recalled the failed exercise in reading. He reminded
them of the instability of written information on dreamside, and suggested that
they might turn to printed material as an acid test of whether or not they
were awake. If they read a line or two from a book, then reread it to find that
it remained constant, they could assume to have awakened. They found this practice
successful, and adopted it as a critical test. Somehow the test eluded them
when actually inside the repeaters, but it was easy to remember when awake. It
was felt to be an encouraging remedy, and so kept much of the anxiety about
repeaters at bay.

Term time came around and students returned
en
masse
to the university. For Honora, Lee and Ella this was to be their
final year. On the first day of the new term Ella called around at the
professor’s house to deliver her dreamwork notes. The door was answered by his
cleaning lady, who told Ella that the professor had been taken to hospital and
was in the coronary unit.

Burns was sat up in bed, propped by a mound of
pillows, smiling faintly.

"How
did I know you would come?"

"Has
no one else
been ?
" asked Ella.

Burns
shrugged. "I just hoped one of you would come."

"They
told me I could only see you for a few minutes. The others will come when they
hear that you've been brought in like this. Is there someone to get things for
you? I mean I know there isn't, what I'm saying is, can I get anything . . .
?"

Burns
seemed to have barely enough strength to turn his head. He opened and closed
his mouth but no words came out. Then he beckoned her to come closer, and as
she leaned forward he grasped her wrist with surprising force. He spoke in a
hoarse whisper. "I was dreaming.
Dreaming of Lilly.
My wife, you remember I told you about her that day by the lake?
My lovely wife.
You were teasing me, remember?
Lilly."

"Yes,
I remember you telling us about her."

"Listen
to me. I was dreaming of Lilly. She kissed me and she gave me a telling-off.
She said I was to leave you young people alone."

Ella
shook her head. She was a little frightened by his intensity.

"Listen,
Ella. I'm very happy with what we achieved but I would like the dreaming to
stop now.
Lilly's right, as usual.
She's right. I want
you to tell the others that it has gone far enough and that now it should
stop." He let go of her wrist, his own hand falling onto the bed.

"I
don't understand, Professor. Is there anything wrong with what we do?"

"Just
understand that I don't want you to continue."

"We
wouldn't unless you wanted us to."

"That's
right. Now I'd like to sleep."

"I'll
come tomorrow." But she wasn't sure if he was already asleep.

Ella
returned to the campus and to Lee’s room. They climbed into bed, talking about
Burns. At some time during the dark hours close to morning Ella dreamed—and
knew that she was dreaming—that Burns came through the door of their room. His
right arm was stretched out towards her, his palm open, and he said:

He
hath awakened from the dream of life.

In
the morning Ella phoned the hospital, and an anonymous voice confirmed what she
already knew.

T
H I R T E E N

/
can never decide whether my dreams are the

result
of my thoughts, or my thoughts
the result of

my
dreams

—D. H. Lawrence

"I say we carry on,"
said Brad. The four had assembled in
Lee's
cell-sized
room. Brad was peering into the mirror, where he seemed to have found something
of enormous charm, and couldn't tear himself away,

"We've
heard ten times what you say; we're trying to find out what others might
think." Ella was perched on the one available chair looking at Honora, who
sat on the bed with her knees drawn up under her chin. Lee lay on his back on
the floor blowing smoke rings while balancing an ashtray on his stomach.

Brad
continued to address his own reflection. "It's just beginning to get
interesting. It will all have been for nothing if we quit now."

"I feel like I made a kind of
promise to L. P.," said Ella.

"You shouldn't have."

"No,
Brad, but I did. I'm not inclined to stop the dreamwork; it's the most exciting
thing that's ever happened to me. But he got a bit spooky that night in the
hospital.
A kind of warning.
He was really quite
anxious."

"Lee
thinks we should carry on," said Brad.

"Yup,"
said Lee.

"Is
that all you've got to say?" Ella gave Lee a look intended to be
intimidating.

"Yup."

"Honora?"

"I
think we could continue. But we should be careful."

"Careful of what?"

"Just careful."

Brad
turned from his reflection to face the others. "Let me just say this and
it will be my last word on the matter."

"Wonderful,"
said Ella.

"Hear
me out. You all saw how important this project was to L. P. It became a
consuming interest for him, almost an obsession. We're involved in a major
breakthrough in the field of parapsychology research: he knew it and we know
it. L. P. was an academic and what do
they
want except to go down in
academic history as being at the
head of
their field, even if it means exploiting a few talented students on
the
way ... all right, all right," fending off a few weak protests from the
others, "I liked the old boy as much as any of you, but what I'm saying
is, he knew the absolute
fucking potential
of this thing.

"That's
why his brief to us was to keep working on the passing of information; while we
were caught up in the excitement and pleasure of what happens on dreamside he
wanted information. If we were ever capable of controlling this message transmission...
use your brains!... the telephone would be as obsolete as the carrier pigeon,
governments would pay fortunes for knowledge of this ability, they'd pour
millions into research, and what's more we would be indispensable. Know what
I'm talking about?"

No
one answered, so Brad continued. "Lee, Honora, what have you got in mind
for your careers.
Teaching?
Selling? What about you
Ella ?
Full time revolutionary?
What I'm talking about could be a way of life."

"I
got the point."

Lee
stubbed out his cigarette and sat up. "I've got a proposal. We continue
with the experiments, but in a disciplined way. If any one of us becomes
unhappy about the way things are going and wants to stop, then we stop, and
what's more all four of us stop."

"Why?"
said Brad. "Why should just one person be able to pull the plug on all the
others?"

"I
can't explain it properly, but you know—you
know
—that there's something
about this whole dreamwork enterprise that has a
corporate
feel to it.
An entanglement.
On dreamside if one person shivers, the
others feel it. That means a special responsibility, so I say: One
Out
All Out."

Ella
and Honora were nodding vigorously in agreement.

"OK,"
said Brad.

"No, not just OK.
If we're doing it at all, we're doing it with a
commitment."

Ella
sighed. "There goes my promise to L. P."

"A
deathbed promise," said Honora.

So
they continued. Interest in their final-year studies was suspended as they
attempted to make progress on dreamside with the same air of discipline with
which the professor had moderated and controlled their earlier experiments. The
dreamside rendezvous took place once a week, with clear objectives and
exercises to be conducted in the dreamtime scenario of the lake, the
over-arching oak tree and the adjacent woods. It was followed by rigorous
recording and reporting and the assembly of copious notes. Post-dream meetings
were discussed and analysed, and progress was monitored.

But without
the detached observation and charismatically imposed discipline of Professor
Burns, this academic rigor came to seem empty. Measured against the intensity
of the dreamside experience, the four began to feel as though their notebooks
were nothing more than a shrine to Burns's memory. The excitement of the
encounters had not blunted: they continued to experience everything as they
had described it to the professor, shivering on the edge of orgasm, on the
brink of some overwhelming discovery which would come—not yet, not quite yet,
but which
was
there and which
would
come.