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 f*cking 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.
And it was how it felt that mattered. Physically it felt like the skin had been peeled back to expose nerves that sighed at every breath of wind. The mere proximity or movement of others made teasing waves in the air. Every pore ached with pleasure. Yet underneath this sensuous carnival lay something else. It was an anxiety, a misgiving; one which they all felt but to which, curiously, they never referred. This anxiety was always there, like an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and grew in proportion to the level of excitement or pleasure they experienced.
Ordinary and trivial details seemed exciting, and exciting things were overwhelming. So, when Lee kissed Ella and put his tongue into her mouth, the fabric of the dream broke, like a bubble rising in the air and bursting soundlessly. And it broke not just for Lee and Ella but unaccountably for Honora and Brad as well.
It was against this degree of intensity that the message-passing experiments were conducted. Competing against the narcotic pleasures of exploring other dreamside powers, it became a dismal chore. Without the influence of the professor, interest in these experiments degenerated into a games sequence of feats and tricks performed only for amusement, such as Lee's discovery of how to disappear behind the oak tree and reappear immediately somewhere else, like an actor who could exit stage left and enter stage right. Then they found the rowing boat drawn up against the shore as if they had conveniently left it. Floating the boat on the water became an absorbing pastime. When at first the touch of the boat on the skin of the water had been enough to puncture and end the dream, it became possible to float the small craft and to clamber into it, before the dream burst. All of this was enchanting and bewildering, and altogether more fun as the discipline of scientific observation was neglected.
Autumn term passed in a goldening and withering of leaves barely noticed by the four students, whose disdain of studies did not go unnoticed by university authorities. But written warnings only became certificates of bravado in the collective dreamwork enterprise. At Christmas that year they went home on shortened holidays, returning early to recommence the programme of dreaming.
Then came a disruption to the scheduled program, introduced so naturally that if anyone was immediately aware of its irregularity they forgot to, or chose not to, comment on it. At least not until later. Somewhere between the strict pattern of the weekly rendezvous a second meeting quietly inserted itself and became established as if by tacit agreement. No such additional rendezvous had ever been discussed in waking time, yet the four arrived at that same lakeside location in no state of surprise, as if washed back there by cool currents or unnoticed tides. Then one unofficial rendezvous became two or three, or more, until any regular pattern or monitored schedule was lost.
The second disruption was of a more human order. Brad started to look upon Lee and Ella's amorous dreamside behaviour with a dangerously jealous eye. Honora meanwhile was determinedly preserving from him the virginity she thought worth keeping. She had so far managed to resist Brad's playful and charmless advances as emphatically on dreamside as she did in waking time.
Brad's seduction line—delivered in the thinkspeak of dream-time, a combination of thoughts and mouthed utterances into which millions of ambiguities and misunderstandings could seem to fly— failed to persuade her.—You're the luckiest girl ever to have lived— he murmured to her on one dreamside encounter—I mean have your cake and eat it won't you; have the beauty of knowing what it's like and still being a virgin, it doesn't count on dreamside—
—Oh yes?—
—Yeah! there's no sin on dreamside—
—I don't know about that. Let's just take the boat on the lake instead—
Brad didn't regard that as much of an instead. At times he took to following Lee and Ella around, making a crowd of himself even in the vast space of dreamside. Lee and Ella got as tired of Brad's prurient interests on dreamside as they would have done in waking time. It wasn't simply a question of finding a quiet spot out in the woods somewhere, because space and distance didn't count the same. Brad was just a thought away if he wanted to be, and he often did, warm on their warmth, breathing on their breath. Until then neither a cross word nor an unkind thought had passed between them on dreamside, but Ella this time thoughtspelled it out for Brad.
—Can't you leave us alone we've got some private experiments to conduct which require the presence of two people only—
—Don't mind me. I'll make notes—
At which Ella turned and spoke to Brad. Not in the thinkspeak unique to dreamside, but in clear loud English as she successfully transmitted an old and unambiguous message: "F*ck OFF, COUSINS!"
Brad was deeply shocked, as was Lee, at the waves of hard energy that radiated from the violence of Ella's words. Ella too was surprised and held her hands at her mouth as if to stop anything else which might want to come out. The very air around them seemed appalled; but to their surprise the dream absorbed the dull explosion of Ella's words as if they were shells detonating against the membrane of its walls, leaving Brad to turn his back and cross some threshold which would dissolve it all for him anyway.