T W E L V E
And I too in Arcadia —Anon
In the following weeks, the group made five almost effortless rendezvous experiments on dreamside. The dreamside location, the site of their recent summer trip, was easily called to mind during bouts of ordinary dreaming. Appointments were made and were kept.
Burns resisted their impatience to return and return again to dreamside, so hot was their excitement, and insisted that the rendezvous took place no more frequently than once per week so as not to fatigue their powers or jade the sharpness of the experience. For him it was a time of furious note taking and exhaustive post-dream analysis, questioning the four ever more assiduously, pressing more closely in his collection of minutiae for the construction of a theory that held little interest for them. Their direct experience was like bathing in incandescent light, while the professor wanted to grope in the shadows. He became at times irascible, frustrated at their inability to crystallize the unbearable excitement of the elusive, drifting experience of their dreamside rendezvous.
"To be there is to know," Lee tried lamely during one post-dream analysis, "and to know is to be there."
Burns threw down his notepad and pencil. "So, Lee, you've had a few nice dreams and now you're a Zen Master." He leaned forward, a crimson rash spreading over his forehead as he spat the words, an iron-grey lock of hair loosening and lashing at his face. "Look; God or nature equipped you with the most accurate and poetic language in the history of nations. You have at your disposal the precision of the Latin and the expressiveness of the Germanic, and you were born lucky enough to ride the confluence of both. Why don't you use it because I DON'T HAVE THE F*ckING TIME FOR YOUR MORONIC BABBLING UNDERGRADUATE BUDDHIST LAMENT"
They were shocked into silence. Burns had obviously learned how to swear. He looked ill.
"Forgive me, I'm raving," he said at last, "I do apologize."
"No," said Lee, "I was being sloppy; you're right. Let's start again."
"Maybe a short break for coffee?" Ella suggested.
It was during this break that Honora complained of something peculiar which had happened to her that morning. "I woke up, washed and dressed, went out of the door and—"
"You woke up," said Brad.
"You had it too?"
"Couple of times."
"More than a couple," said Ella.
All four of them had experienced what they called "false awakenings," dreams of waking up which were so prosaic that they could not be distinguished from the actual experience of waking into the real world. Lee testified that he had even experienced the false awakening twice in the same morning.
"It can get so you don't know if you've woken or you haven't."
"Or whether you are just about to," Ella put in.
"An interesting side effect," said Burns. The others weren't so sure how interesting it was.
Their dreamwork analysis continued. They could easily describe how they had managed to rendezvous on dreamside, how they had touched or talked or even how they had once swum together. But these adventures held no particular fascination for Burns. He was far more interested in the fact that on dreamside most of the events took place without words: if there was an agreement to swim, they simply dived in, it was understood, and if there was an idea to move off in one direction together then it was communicated at some mysterious subverbal level. Burns set them the exercise of passing on messages during dreamtime, usually slogans or proverbs or short quotations. Such a task required considerable discipline. Words would sometimes come, but as with Lee's original breakthrough, not always the intended message. Results were mixed and communication was unstable. Burns became more demanding.
At last, another breakthrough was made. It did become possible to stabilize the dreamside scenario and deliver the appropriate message which was then generally recalled upon awakening, but this required tremendous efforts of concentration on both the part of the giver and the receiver, quite often with the result that the weight of concentration would itself break up the dream. This difficulty notwithstanding, the four became increasingly proficient at stabilizing the flow of the dream and passing on or picking up the words which had been selected for them by the professor.
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 dreamt 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 perhaps 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.