Heads nodded, some nostrils snorted, all in agreement with this sound judgement. Embarrassed but not offended, Honora smiled timidly at Lee. But if his new powers failed to impress the group as a whole, they had an interesting effect on Ella.
After the session, as the reduced group trailed out of the professor’s house, Lee hung back to talk with Honora, worried that he might have embarrassed her by blurting graphic descriptions of her lurid behaviour in his dreams. But his concern also had something to do with the fact that the intensity of his dream had conferred an enhanced radiance on Honora. She looked different.
It was while Lee was talking to Honora that Ella dropped back and inserted a proprietary arm under his.
“I just told Brad and the others that we were going on somewhere,” she said.
“Oh,” said Lee.
“Right, then,” said Ella.
“Right, then.”
For a moment they stared dumbly at each other.
“Next time,” said Honora, already a shadow hurrying to catch the others.
Lee and Ella walked along the side of the cemetery as dusk fell, then out across the park towards Ella’s house.
“Where is this somewhere we are going?”
“Nowhere different,” said Ella, “I didn’t want to do the usual; chew the fat, all that stuff.”
It was a mild spring night. When they reached the row of cherry blossom trees by the tennis courts, Ella stopped abruptly, and turned and kissed his lips. She quickly slipped his arm, skipped away from him and leaned against the bough of one of the trees.
“That dream,” she said.
“What?”
He took a step towards her but she reached up for a low branch and scrambled up to sit on it. She looked back at him. Her eyes were like gleaming obsidian and her hair fell across her face. She was a spirit in the tree.
“Do you know what I can do?”
“What can you do?”
“I can do this.”
Clasping her calf muscles tight against the branch she let herself fall backwards, hanging from the backs of her knees, swinging slightly as she dangled there upside down, her hair falling away from her ears and neck, her outstretched arms almost reaching the grass.
Lee was mesmerized. “Yet it’s not the same.”
“Do it.”
Lee put his hand on her stomach, creamy white in the darkness, and unbuttoned and unzipped her faded blue jeans. He undressed her against gravity, pushing up her jeans and pants to her knees to reveal the upward-pointing black triangle of hair, where in the dream he had wanted to put his tongue, and where here he did so. Ella shivered, and asked him to lift her down.
They walked across the park to Ella’s house, most of the way in silence. When they got there Ella made her room even more like a cave by switching off the lights and lighting candles and turning the place into a flickering nimbus of joss scents. Only then would she let Lee undress her, this time with gravity in support. She pulled back a sheet on her mattress on the floor. Lee thought he might be dreaming, but he wasn’t.
FIVE
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.