T E N
Our dreams are a second life —Gerard de Nerval
Then something astonishing happened. It was the morningof their next scheduled meeting with Professor Burns. Near the waking moment, with the darkness peeling away, the flakes of light stealing between blinds and through the partings in dreams, Lee was lying asleep in his own room away from Ella, dreaming vividly and with clear control. In the dream he looked down at his hands and remembered, with absolute clarity, the appointment. There was a whisper from somewhere, a message: Do it.
With ease he dissolved his surroundings and found himself in the park, standing by the cherry tree close to the tennis courts where he and Ella had had their first sexual encounter. The place was absolutely still, cocooned in the grey light of a false dawn. A mist hung around like wisps of cotton, as if trailed by a wind. The air seemed unbearably tense. Lee could feel, physically feel, the dawn about to crack, to split the light and open up a terrible, joyous new day.
He waited. He had no sense of impatience. In the distance, taking shape through the mist, or perhaps just from the mist at the end of the path, he could see someone walking towards him. It was not Ella but Honora. She seemed somehow uncertain, hesitant. Then, as she got nearer, he realized he was mistaken. It was not Honora after all, but Ella. Ella had found her way to him! They were going to meet.
When Ella reached him, she smiled and stretched out a hand to touch his cheek; she was not shadow, nor phantom, but flesh and blood, warm and vital. He could feel the palm of her hand against the coolness of his cheek. He was gripped by a rage of excitement; he wanted to embrace her and shout. But at the same time he was caught in a kind of paralysis that inhibited and slowed his every move. His limbs were locked, his muscles contracted, the air around him congealed and thick, inhibiting movement and constraining all action, though his brain raced and his skin crawled, and a fist squeezed inside his belly. He wanted to shout, This is it! We did it! This is the meeting! But something happened to the breath that contained his words, and instead, in a voice that hardly seemed his own, he said: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Ella smiled back at him, wordlessly, unmoving. They stood like that for some time, without discomfort, and then the dream dissolved.
Lee woke with a dull headache but with the dream clear in his mind. Shivering with excitement he pulled on his clothes and ran the full distance to Ella's house. Before hammering on the door, he leaned against the wall, panting heavily, trying to recover his breath, still shaking with anticipation; praying that Ella would confirm that the rendezvous had taken place and yet terrified that she would prove that all he had experienced was delusion cupped in a dream. He found the front door of the house ajar, and went through to Ella's room. Inside he found Ella already dressed, sitting cross-legged on her mattress bed and writing in a book. She got up.
"I left the front door open for you."
"So," said Lee, "you were expecting me."
"There are more things in heaven and earth . . ."
Lee released a triumphant roar and took hold of Ella, the two of them dancing around the room in an ecstatic jig. He ran out into the yard, leaping and punching the air like a Cup Final goal scorer, then returned to Ella for further acclaim. "You summoned me!"
"I did?" said Ella.
"You called me; it was your doing! I heard you. You did it!"
"I did? Really?" Ella allowed herself to be persuaded.
"Think hard," said Burns, "what was it, Honora, that you saw that made you lose the picture?"
Honora held her hands to her mouth, palms pressed together like someone in prayer. "I was on my way to the meeting place. I saw the path and the tennis courts; and then, by the cherry trees, I saw someone waiting. I remember thinking it might have been Lee, but I wasn't sure. Then I lost my way. That's all I can say. I lost my way."
"So when I thought I had mistaken Ella for Honora, it could actually have been Honora on her way to the rendezvous?" said Lee.
"It's possible; but it's not what I'm getting at. There is some block for Honora that made her 'lose her way' as she put it; otherwise she was clearly on the path to meeting up with you and Ella."
"We could try guided re-entry," suggested Brad.
"No," said Burns. "I don't want to surface any more of this material just yet. We may run the risk of disturbing a delicate process of development in dream control. My instincts tell me to let it incubate. Ella, tell us again how it felt for you." He leaned forward, eagerly.
"I had the know, in the way we've talked about before, the dreamside way of knowing. That sense which is more than a belief, it is a confident knowing that such-and-such is so, and in that way I knew that Lee would be waiting. There was no question about it. I didn't pause to think of Honora or Brad. The feeling of excitement was overwhelming. It was elation and anxiety mixed: that's what it was, that's what caused the kind of paralysis we both felt." Lee was nodding vigorously. "It was sexual too; we've discussed it and we both felt almost like the moment before orgasm. The tiniest mundane things were incredibly stimulating, and exciting things were unbearably so. That's why we hardly did anything, we were paralyzed by this feeling. When I touched Lee's face it was the most I could do; I mean the most. That's why, when he started quoting Shakespeare I thought it the most clever, profound and appropriate thing that could possibly have been said at that moment—less so now but at the time it was overwhelming!"
"But like I said, I didn't seem to have anything to do with it," said Lee, "and I wasn't trying to be clever. I went to say something like 'hello Ella' and the other stuff is what came out."
"But what was remarkable," Burns observed, "is that not only did you meet, as previously agreed, but you also passed on a gift, a token, a message which you then brought into the objective reality of waking life. Do you realize what you've done? You've punctured a tiny hole in the membrane that separates the dream world from the waking one. Now we have to keep that hole open, and get Honora and Brad involved.
"Now; why that choice of place? Did it have resonance for Lee and Ella, but not for Brad and Honora? What we have to do now is find a tree where all four of you can, as it were, scratch your initials. I'll give the matter some thought. Meanwhile, see if the experience can be repeated. It should be possible to do something to overcome the paralysis you describe. The potential to think and move and act on dreamside, just as you would here, must ultimately be available to you. Brad and Honora—you must familiarize yourself with this particular spot in the park. At the moment that's all I can suggest. We may be moving towards a point where I can no longer give you advice. After all, you four are the practitioners, and my few theories are quickly being left behind. All I can do now is offer you an objective critique of the experiences you describe, evaluation at a distance. "Now I'm feeling tired. Shall we call it a very big day?"
With the four of them gone, Burns sits hunched over his study desk, his window open to the thickening dark and the smells of moon-washed grass and earth. His Anglepoise lamp throws the disc of light around the paper on his desk and illuminates his skeletal hand scuttling back and forth. The pencil whispers to the page as it delivers its looping longhand scrawl, whispering, whispering as it goes, stopping only occasionally, like a creature listening for prey or predator; until the scuttling hand moves back in action to effect the compulsive writing of the old academic who fears he might have found more to say than he has time in which to say it.