F I V E
Romeo: I dream'd a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Romeo: Well, what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie
—Shakespeare
Two episodes of explosive excitement had been touched off in Lee Peterson's life, one seeming to detonate the other. In the daytime he and Ella skipped lectures in favour of a program of sexual exhaustion, Ella's acrobatic invention matching Lee's ardour. In the nights which followed, either with numb satiated bodies entangled as they slept or with restless limbs disturbing all deep sleep when they lay apart, Lee found his awareness during dreaming beginning to grow. He was able to arrest the progress of ordinary dreaming whenever it occurred to him to look at his hands. From that moment he would always know he was dreaming, and that he would shortly wake. From this awareness he progressed rapidly to a level of control over the substance of his dreams of which he had previously thought himself incapable. In the dream state, the awareness of hands turned into simple exercises recalled from childhood but generating profound excitement:
Here is the church here is the steeple
Open the door and here are the people
It was as though he had opened a real door to a parallel physical dimension, a door through which he could actually pass. These hand manipulations gave way to the conjuring of small objects from nowhere, like a stage magician. In the dream it was possible to make a silver coin, a rubber ball, an ace of spades appear. The objects which could be summoned were limitless; the only difficulty was to sustain control. A kind of forgetfulness would take over him after a few seconds, a veil would be drawn over the lucidity and control of the dream, and all would be lost as the dream shifted or stopped.
Lee made copious notes in his dreamwork diary and told Ella everything, as if he were passing on hard news. Ella listened intently to his feverish reports, nodding occasionally but neither probing into these accounts of his abilities nor inviting comparison with her own experiences. Indeed, Ella stopped remarking about her own lucid dreaming experiments beyond the reports which she reserved for the formal dreamwork seminars. Meanwhile, Lee was in a state of high excitement, massively stimulated by the curiously related developments now pushing back the boundaries of his experience. The bouts of lucid dreaming had an aphrodisiac effect on him and Ella reciprocated time and time again with unwavering energy. In turn the dizzying sex sessions acted like a thunderous backdrop to Lee's dreaming, an amphetamine boost to his struggle to assert control over the substance of his dreams. It was a struggle in which, step by tiny ominous step, he felt himself nearer to victory.
The weekly meetings of the lucid dreamers continued, and Lee became one of the most dedicated and most vocal attendees. Professor Burns could always be relied upon to smuggle some new box of tricks into each session. At one meeting he introduced the practice of dreamwork re-entry, an attempt to reactivate a dream in which lucid dreaming had taken place by using relaxation techniques and the gentle guidance of his semi hypnotic prompts. There were some successful results in reactivating dream associations in this conscious state, but the main requirement for these sessions was for the group to create a hypnotic atmosphere of stillness and peace. There was one main obstacle to this:
"I can't help it; when everyone goes so quiet and po-faced I just want to laugh." Brad had spent an hour in the bar before the session.
"We will allow you a minute or two to giggle it out of you Mr. Cousins." Burns was beginning to lose his secret smile at this third interruption. "And then we will try again."
"Doesn't anyone else see the ridiculous side of it?"
"No. Only you." Lee had become Brad's sparring partner in the sessions, but at this remark Brad started snorting again, pretending to suppress his guffaws by stuffing a grimy handkerchief into his mouth.
"Couldn't we etherize Brad and use him as a subject for re-entry?" Lee was serious.
"Rear entry? Not my line, mate."
"Ether is a very old-fashioned method . . ." said Burns.
"But we share the sentiment," said Ella. "What about carefully placed electrodes?"
"Mind-expanding drugs?" suggested another, warming to the subject.
"Too ambitious," said Ella.
Brad snorted derisively.
"If we're finally ready to start," said Burns, "let's have Honora."
"Let's have Honora!" shouted Brad.
"That's enough vulgarity," Burns retorted sharply.
"Rear-entry!” countered Brad.
"I think all of the assembled company would deeply appreciate it, Mr. Cousins," said the old professor in his most formal voice, "if you would be so kind as to shut your consummately tedious gob."
The session continued in peace.
Sleeping alone that night, dreaming his bauble-juggling tricks, Lee got a whiff of some of the possibilities of this dreamshaping, as it had been dubbed. He began to feel the potency of his control and was ready to try something new, a major progression, like conjuring another person to his dream. But suddenly, his grip on the dream loosened, not by loss of concentration as usual, but by a sound like hail on a tin roof. The sound woke him and he realized that someone was rapping frantically on the window of his cell-sized room.
"What does it take to wake you up? Let me in, I'm soaked."
"It's four in the morning Ella, what are you doing?"
"I'm standing in the rain trying to bloody well get in!" Ella's hair was plastered to her head, raindrops bubbled on a face red from running, blue from cold. She wore a long raincoat, collar turned up and clutched at her throat. "Jesus! Let me in!"
"Yes right. I'll come round and open the door."
"Just push the bloody window up."
Ella half-climbed half-fell through the opened window, bringing with her fresh grass cuttings pasted to her boots and the smell of spring rain. As she kicked off the boots Lee could see that she was wearing nothing beneath her coat but her knickers, which she threw off before leaping, shivering and complaining, into his single bed. Lee climbed in with her.
“You're as cold as the grave, Ella."
"Never mind that," teeth chattering, pressing herself to him, "it happened and I ran over to tell you."
"What happened? Ella, you ran two miles practically naked in the pouring rain in the middle of the night, what for?"
"Can't you guess?"
"No."
"Guess!"
"You're not—?"
Ella thought. "Christ no, I'm not pregnant; I wouldn't tell you if I was!" Lee felt a thin shadow of disappointment. "I came to tell you about the dream I had. I mean the lucid dream, it happened, I made it happen."
"I don't understand."
"I made it happen. By myself. I did just what you described, with the hands, I made objects appear in my hands in the dream, and then I made them go away again."
"What?"
"What, what?" Ella mimicked heavily.
"But what about all the other times." Lee sat up. "All your other lucid dreams. All that stuff in your dreamwork diary. All those lurid accounts you gave in the seminars."
"No," pinching his nipple between her teeth, "this was the real thing!"
"The real thing? What was the other stuff then?"
"It was . . . not the real thing."
"Wait a second. You mean you made it up?"
"Sort of."
"What do you mean sort of? You don't sort of make up things like that! You mean it was all lies. Jesus! All your stories of lucid dreams were all a pack of lies."
"Not exactly lies. More kind of half-lucid dreams."
"Day dreams more like! It was all bullshit!"
"Don't get so f*cking superior—you've only just started lucid dreaming yourself, remember! You strung people along at the beginning."
"But not with Technicolor big-budget cast-of-thousands pornographic epics like yours! Christ I believed every word; so did all the others. I'm going to enjoy telling them. I'll enjoy telling Brad!"
"You won't say anything. The important thing is that it really happened. I made it happen."
"I'm going to tell them all! Miss Lucid Dreamer of the Year! I can't wait to see their faces!"
"You won't tell on me," said Ella. She took his cock in her cold hands and rolled it like dough. Rain swept against the outside windows in great gusts, coming in through the open window, soaking the curtain and dampening the disorderly heap of books.
"Here is the church," she said, "here is the steeple."
He promised not to say anything.