“Too ambitious,” said Ella.
Brad snorted derisively.
“If we’re finally ready to start,” said Burns, “let’s have Honora.”
“Let’s have Honora!” shouted Brad.
“That’s enough vulgarity,” Burns retorted sharply.
“Rear-entry!” countered Brad.
“I think all of the assembled company would deeply appreciate it, Mr. Cousins,” said the old professor in his most formal voice, “if you would be so kind as to shut your consummately tedious gob.”
The session continued in peace.
Sleeping alone that night, dreaming his bauble-juggling tricks, Lee got a whiff of some of the possibilities of this dreamshaping, as it had been dubbed. He began to feel the potency of his control and was ready to try something new, a major progression, like conjuring another person to his dream. But suddenly, his grip on the dream loosened, not by loss of concentration as usual, but by a sound like hail on a tin roof. The sound woke him and he realized that someone was rapping frantically on the window of his cell-sized room.
“What does it take to wake you up? Let me in, I’m soaked.”
“It’s four in the morning Ella, what are you doing?”
“I’m standing in the rain trying to bloody well get in!” Ella’s hair was plastered to her head, raindrops bubbled on a face red from running, blue from cold. She wore a long raincoat, collar turned up and clutched at her throat. “Jesus! Let me in!”
“Yes right. I’ll come round and open the door.”
“Just push the bloody window up.”
Ella half-climbed half-fell through the opened window, bringing with her fresh grass cuttings pasted to her boots and the smell of spring rain. As she kicked off the boots Lee could see that she was wearing nothing beneath her coat but her knickers, which she threw off before leaping, shivering and complaining, into his single bed. Lee climbed in with her.
“You’re as cold as the grave, Ella.”
“Never mind that,” teeth chattering, pressing herself to him, “it happened and I ran over to tell you.”
“What happened? Ella, you ran two miles practically naked in the pouring rain in the middle of the night, what for?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“No.”
“Guess!”
“You’re not—?”
Ella thought. “Christ no, I’m not pregnant; I wouldn’t tell you if I was!” Lee felt a thin shadow of disappointment. “I came to tell you about the dream I had. I mean the lucid dream, it happened, I made it happen.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I made it happen. By myself. I did just what you described, with the hands, I made objects appear in my hands in the dream, and then I made them go away again.”
“What?”
“What, what?” Ella mimicked heavily.
“But what about all the other times.” Lee sat up. “All your other lucid dreams. All that stuff in your dreamwork diary. All those lurid accounts you gave in the seminars.”
“No,” pinching his nipple between her teeth, “this was the real thing!”
“The real thing? What was the other stuff then?”
“It was… not the real thing.”
“Wait a second. You mean you made it up?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean sort of? You don’t sort of make up things like that! You mean it was all lies. Jesus! All your stories of lucid dreams were all a pack of lies.”
“Not exactly lies. More kind of half-lucid dreams.”
“Day dreams more like! It was all bullshit!”
“Don’t get so fucking superior—you’ve only just started lucid dreaming yourself, remember! You strung people along at the beginning.”
“But not with Technicolor big-budget cast-of-thousands pornographic epics like yours! Christ I believed every word; so did all the others. I’m going to enjoy telling them. I’ll enjoy telling Brad!”
“You won’t say anything. The important thing is that it really happened. I made it happen.”
“I’m going to tell them all! Miss Lucid Dreamer of the Year! I can’t wait to see their faces!”
“You won’t tell on me,” said Ella. She took his cock in her cold hands and rolled it like dough. Rain swept against the outside windows in great gusts, coming in through the open window, soaking the curtain and dampening the disorderly heap of books.
“Here is the church,” she said, “here is the steeple.”
He promised not to say anything.
SIX
Learn from your dreams what you lack
From that night Ella stopped her I’m-more-lucid-than-you games. She was a fast learner, and her genuine skills developed accordingly. She contrived to disguise the substantial change in the accounts she offered to the weekly seminar, and if anyone was made suspicious by her later reports being more modest than her early claims, nobody said anything. Even so, an unacknowledged hierarchy did develop in the group, with Lee, Ella, Brad and Honora clearly emerging as the people with the strongest ability to influence the course of their dreaming. Each of them progressed, without major effort, from being able to conjure small objects to switching locations and settings in which dreaming took place.
Professor Burns, when pressed, admitted that, despite several years of trying, he, like most people, had never experienced the state of self-awareness during dreaming which would allow him to manipulate the course of dream events. “I think I’m too crusted over by a life devoted to academic pursuits,” he confessed, admitting to more than a little envy of their abilities. “Besides which,” he added, “I don’t have the modern swagger of youth in the face of fear.”
End of term beckoned, and the round of dreamwork seminars was held to be a moderate success. Their efforts, Burns asserted, while not having lit up the skies of science and progress, had contributed to a growing body of research in the increasingly important field of parapsychology. To conclude matters, he added cheerfully, a miserly wine-and-cheese celebration on the expenses of the parsimonious departmental budget would be arranged for the final week of term.
The students made their arrangements for a long summer: Ella and Lee planned a backpacking expedition around the Greek Islands, sleeping on beaches and living on tzatsiki and feta cheese salads; Honora a trip home to beautiful County Fermanagh where she hoped to make a few pounds sketching portraits of tourists boating on the Loughs; while Brad, as a medical student, had work which would keep him at the university. Meanwhile June warmed the nights in which they lay in their beds and dreamed their lucid dreams.
Invitations to the wine and cheese party came as promised. The students dutifully spruced up and went along to the house. A stiff performance with an early finish was predicted, but they were surprised to find Professor Burns racing around in high spirits, his eyes enlivened by whatever share of the drinks he had already consumed, exhorting everyone to get stuck in to the crates of wine that had been provided along with the standard party fare of cubes of cheese and French loaves.
“Drink! It’ll probably be the last time we can get this out of the miserable blighters!” Burns danced around, lavishly topping up any glass within arm’s length, everyone’s congenial host. “Don’t be shy Brother Cousins, there’s another crate through there!”
Some group members had brought their partners, swelling the numbers to twenty or more young people freely availing themselves of the generous flow of wine and filling the house with noisy chatter. Burns held forth to a knot of students in the corner, his steady stream of university anecdotes and outrageous disclosures producing waves of raucous laughter. After an hour or so he noticed Honora standing alone in the middle of the room with an empty glass. He cha-cha-cha’d his way over to her. He had obviously been making the most of the departmental wine while the going was good. His jewel eyes blazed merrily and a long thin lock of iron-grey hair had become displaced from its habitual coiled groove across the top of his head. It hung gamely down the side of one ear.