EIGHT
To dream of creeping up a mountain signifies
the difficulty of the business at hand
—Astrampsychus
For some time the project was a singular disappointment. Not only did the four fail to keep their dreamside appointments, but the dreams themselves failed to come. Or at least, they couldn't remember them in the morning. Whatever the reasons, they felt as if a power had suddenly been switched off at source, a cable disconnected, a fuse blown.
They tried a number of strategies to reactivate the circuit, all of which proved futile. Ella and Lee tried sleeping apart; another night Ella disappeared and returned an hour later with a small brown wedge of hashish in the hope of encouraging vivid dreams; they tried a program of rampant exhaustive sex, which, while enormously enjoyable, remained sadly ineffective; and they began a regimen of difficult-to-digest foods last thing at night, strong cheeses with exotic names and an array of pickles, all of which produced nothing more than bad breath. Finally they had to conclude that dreams rode on horses which, while they could be led to the dark waters of sleep, could not be made to drink.
Honora and Brad, inquiries revealed, were having similar problems. Nothing was happening. Honora, however, had a different theory about why her dream diary was gathering blank pages. She complained that Brad Cousins had taken to inviting himself back to her room every night for the past week, flatly refusing to leave until the dew was up on the grass. Honora's device for beating back his advances was to make a fresh mug of coffee every twenty minutes so that she might have something—a caffeine curtain—to draw between them. These massive doses of caffeine and the attendant lack of sleep did no more to remedy Brad's or Honora's current dream amnesia than any of the desperate nostrums employed by the other two.
"Let's run through all of the original exercises," said Burns, "from the beginning."
Ella stifled a yawn. They met more frequently now, and always at Burns's house. If they had thought that the extended 'grants' which Burns had miraculously engineered would promise them an easy summer, they had been mistaken. Burns proved to be rigorous about punctuality at meetings, exhaustive in his questioning and insistent upon meticulously kept journals charting the daily progress of their dreamwork. "This is not like studying for a degree," he said more than once, "this is real work."
Burns was trying hard to give them some uplift to beat the sag in the development curve.
"But we've been through all of those exercises," Ella protested. "That's not what's blocking things."
"So what is, exactly?"
"I don't know."
"Precisely. You don't know. I don't know. We all don't know. So we go back through it again, from the beginning, following our previously successful formula until something breaks for us; and what's more, we keep a diary every day charting the exercises and the results."
"But there are no results!" said Lee and Brad in chorus.
"So we carefully chart our exercises and note that there are no results, and we explore our lack of results. What's the matter with you?" Burns's exasperation was becoming more apparent. He marched over to the sash window and pushed it open.
"It's boring," said Honora.
"Oh! I do apologize if this scientific method of research is not a glittering parade of fun and spills involving one big kick after another. Pardon me." He sat down again abruptly.
"That's not what I meant."
"Then why say it?" The four stared glumly at the carpet. "So, as I said, we return to the beginning, repeat our original procedure and generate a new level of lucid dreaming."
Ella muttered something under her breath.
"Yes Ella, I know that you all belong to the Me generation and that you are accustomed to having everything you want exactly when you want it, instant coffee, instant money, instant gratification, a spoonful of this, a splash of that. Well let me tell you that this thing damn well won't make like that do you see? It's something you have to actually work for and only then might it work and even then only might." He got up again and stormed over to the sash window, this time slamming it down. "Now I think you'd all better go since you're not in the mood for work. Come back tomorrow when you're ready to be serious."
They walked slowly to the end of Burns's street, an avenue of three-storey houses with great gables prodding at the dusk.
"What's getting to him?" asked Ella, affecting cool but obviously stung.
"Maybe we asked for it," said Honora, stopping at the corner.
"Naw," said Brad, "he's just a constipated old grump who didn't get his dish of prunes today."
"We should be more methodical," Lee cut in, "if we're serious about it."
"Doesn't matter how serious," said Ella, flushing, "I can't dream to order. You don't turn dreams out like cakes hot from the oven; you have to wait until they come to you."
"Ella's right," said Brad, "what does Burns know about it? We're the ones making and delivering the goods, he's just the warehouseman with a pencil behind his ear hassling us about his invoices."
The post-mortem went on, with Honora and Lee becoming divided from the other two in defence of Burns. Then Lee began to mistrust Brad's motives and Ella to suspect Honora. It also caused some resentment between Lee and Ella, and neither desisted from tapping home the wedge that they set up between themselves. It seemed at times like these that the dreamwork project had become a vain and profitless obsession.
"Why did you side with her?" Ella asked Lee as they made their way home.
"I didn't side with her; she was right."
"That's the same thing."
"I just think we shouldn't play at it."
"Which means what exactly?"
"I think it needs a serious edge. Some of us aren't making the effort, and that's what's holding us back."
"And you think I play at it?"
"Sometimes; yes."
At that Ella turned away and walked off. Lee pretended he was not concerned, a self-deception that lasted five minutes. He thought he could punish her by not running after her. So he went home and got into bed alone, lying sleepless in the shadows, suffering agonies about where she was and what she was doing and whether she was with someone else. Then, after a few days, when he thought she had been punished enough, he went to her, to be readmitted to the scented cave, where he sulked for a few hours until their differences were forgotten. At least for the time being.