“There’s a difference,” Brad muttered, “between shifting locations inside our own dreams and in bringing four different dreams together.”
“It can work; I know it. I just know it.” Honora surprised them with her enthusiasm. “Have faith. Just choose a place.”
They all stared back at her, and for the first time Ella recognized the attraction which the Irish girl held for the two men. She saw them watching as Honora shyly averted her eyes and lifted her glass to her mouth. Honora was the one who talked least about the dreaming, who was the least inclined to speculate, but Ella sensed that she was also the one who dreamed deepest. She spoke as if she knew the coinage in that strange, different country. Ella warmed towards her and felt saddened by a simultaneous pang of jealousy.
“Honora’s right,” she said, breaking the spell, “we’ve got to believe it to be possible. If you’ve got any more doubts, Brad, keep them to yourself.”
“Choose a place,” Honora repeated.
Brad tapped the table in front of him. “This pub, preferably after hours when we can help ourselves.”
“Be serious.”
“I am being serious!!”
They walked home across the park. A full moon sat low in the sky. They walked past the tennis courts and along the row of cherry trees that some weeks ago had hung heavy with pink blossom. Brad aimed a full-throated howl at the appalled moon.
“This would be a good place to meet in dreamtime!” Ella still had strong associations for the place, as, she knew, did Lee.
“Are you sure?” said Lee.
“What’s so special about this place?” Brad wanted a more dramatic setting.
“It’s easier to make an outdoor scene appear than it is to shift to an indoor location.”
“Is it hell,” said Brad.
“Anyway this place has a certain intensity.”
“Maybe it has for you two,” he smirked. “It certainly does nothing for me.”
“What do you mean by ‘intensity’?” Honora wanted to know.
“It probably means they fucked here,” said Brad. “But that’s no help to us two.”
“The place suits me,” shrugged Honora. “Seems as good as any.”
So a plan was formed and the group went their separate ways, hoping to meet there again, but in very different circumstances.
Brad insisted on walking Honora home, against all her protests. Ella saw Lee watching them go.
“Poor Honora,” he said.
“Yes.”
The night was hot. They propped the windows open with text books, but even then the air was close and uncomfortable, making sleep difficult. They lay on the mattress, discussing the night ahead. What would be the possibilities if they did rendezvous in dream-time? Excitement kept them awake. Eventually, sleep took them.
Lee awoke with Ella leaning over him. “Did you dream? Did you go there?”
“No,” Lee still dazed, blinking stupidly, “I didn’t even dream.”
“Me neither. Nothing.”
“Maybe we tried too hard.”
“Maybe.”
EIGHT
To dream of creeping up a mountain signifies the difficulty of the business at hand.
For some time the project was a singular disappointment. Not only did the four fail to keep their dreamside appointments, but the dreams themselves failed to come. Or at least, they couldn’t remember them in the morning. Whatever the reasons, they felt as if a power had suddenly been switched off at source, a cable disconnected, a fuse blown.
They tried a number of strategies to reactivate the circuit, all of which proved futile. Ella and Lee tried sleeping apart; another night Ella disappeared and returned an hour later with a small brown wedge of hashish in the hope of encouraging vivid dreams; they tried a program of rampant exhaustive sex, which, while enormously enjoyable, remained sadly ineffective; and they began a regimen of difficult-to-digest foods last thing at night, strong cheeses with exotic names and an array of pickles, all of which produced nothing more than bad breath. Finally they had to conclude that dreams rode on horses which, while they could be led to the dark waters of sleep, could not be made to drink.
Honora and Brad, inquiries revealed, were having similar problems. Nothing was happening. Honora, however, had a different theory about why her dream diary was gathering blank pages. She complained that Brad Cousins had taken to inviting himself back to her room every night for the past week, flatly refusing to leave until the dew was up on the grass. Honora’s device for beating back his advances was to make a fresh mug of coffee every twenty minutes so that she might have something—a caffeine curtain—to draw between them. These massive doses of caffeine and the attendant lack of sleep did no more to remedy Brad’s or Honora’s current dream amnesia than any of the desperate nostrums employed by the other two.
“Let’s run through all of the original exercises,” said Burns, “from the beginning.”
Ella stifled a yawn. They met more frequently now, and always at Burns’s house. If they had thought that the extended ‘grants’ which Burns had miraculously engineered would promise them an easy summer, they had been mistaken. Burns proved to be rigorous about punctuality at meetings, exhaustive in his questioning and insistent upon meticulously kept journals charting the daily progress of their dreamwork. “This is not like studying for a degree,” he said more than once, “this is real work.”
Burns was trying hard to give them some uplift to beat the sag in the development curve.
“But we’ve been through all of those exercises,” Ella protested. “That’s not what’s blocking things.”
“So what is, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
“Precisely. You don’t know. I don’t know. We all don’t know. So we go back through it again, from the beginning, following our previously successful formula until something breaks for us; and what’s more, we keep a diary every day charting the exercises and the results.”
“But there are no results!” said Lee and Brad in chorus.
“So we carefully chart our exercises and note that there are no results, and we explore our lack of results. What’s the matter with you?” Burns’s exasperation was becoming more apparent. He marched over to the sash window and pushed it open.
“It’s boring,” said Honora.
“Oh! I do apologize if this scientific method of research is not a glittering parade of fun and spills involving one big kick after another. Pardon me.” He sat down again abruptly.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then why say it?” The four stared glumly at the carpet. “So, as I said, we return to the beginning, repeat our original procedure and generate a new level of lucid dreaming.”
Ella muttered something under her breath.
“Yes Ella, I know that you all belong to the Me generation and that you are accustomed to having everything you want exactly when you want it, instant coffee, instant money, instant gratification, a spoonful of this, a splash of that. Well let me tell you that this thing damn well won’t make like that do you see? It’s something you have to actually work for and only then might it work and even then only might.” He got up again and stormed over to the sash window, this time slamming it down. “Now I think you’d all better go since you’re not in the mood for work. Come back tomorrow when you’re ready to be serious.”
They walked slowly to the end of Burns’s street, an avenue of three-storey houses with great gables prodding at the dusk.
“What’s getting to him?” asked Ella, affecting cool but obviously stung.