“Did you dream lucid dreams L. P.?” Lee asked lazily.
Honora said, “You were talking in your sleep.”
Ella giggled. “We heard everything. You named names.”
“Lilly? Did I say Lilly?”
“Yes.”
Burns smiled sleepily and settled back in his chair. “Lilly was my wife. You know, she died more than ten years ago. I’ve been dreaming of her a lot lately. Good dreams, nice dreams. We used to come here, often, years and years ago. Beautiful, peaceful; just as it is now. It hasn’t changed at all. That’s why I thought of this place.”
“I love it,” said Honora.
“We can have some pleasant days here before returning. There should be a rowing boat in the shed. We can bring it down here, or rather you can. There’s fishing tackle if you’re interested. Or we can take a walk through the woods there.” They all agreed that the choice had been fine—quiet, unspoiled, entirely tranquil.
The next three days were a summer idyll. The weather held out, and time seemed suspended as they swam in the lake, picnicked under the spreading oak, drifted in the rowing boat, or went on long walks in the cool fern woods. Burns in particular loved to stroll in the woods, along narrow pathways winding between giant ferns, with the echoing rap of an unseen woodpecker as descant to his students’ conversation. He liked to stroll with each of them in turn, probing, challenging, teasing them with his gentle irony.
They would return from these walks shaking their heads at the breadth of his knowledge, waiting for him to fall asleep in his deckchair before relaying an impression of their discussions to the others. It seemed that he could talk with authority about anything, pick up their own arguments and generously advance them before dismantling them with an opposing view. Lee found him fascinating on the psychosexual meaning of fairy-tales, of all things, and stalked the woods discussing the sexual imagery of Beauty and the Beast; Ella could listen all day to his analysis of revolutionary history or to his satirical monologue on the psychology of the fascist disposition; Honora found him an expert on Surrealism; and Brad had his eyes opened on everything from football to the pharmaceutical industry. Though they never did see a unicorn in those dense, aromatic woods, the possibility of doing so had never seemed so close.
Burns was generally content to sit quietly in his deckchair, watching events take their predictable shape. There was little in the splashing and cavorting of the four young students to make this grey-haired scholar of human behaviour raise an eyebrow, but he saw—where they might not—the doomed infatuation of Lee and Ella, too hot not to burn itself out too soon; Brad’s persistent and not unsubtle advances on Honora, gently but firmly deflected; Brad’s disguised interest in Ella, secretly recognized and shrugged off by her but completely missed by Lee; and the subtle affection Lee and Honora reserved for each other, prompting more speculation by others than it ever did for them.
And while he watched all this with fond interest, it added to, rather than detracted from, the uninhibited delight of three perfect summer days. How could it be otherwise, when the place itself was a kind of dream? But beyond that which he would always see with his trained eye, he could never have guessed at, nor would he ever have permitted, the growth of those strange forms already tightening round that close circle of four, like snaring vines in a wood, or like dangerous weeds reaching from the bedrock of a lake to the thrashing ankles of careless swimmers.
TWELVE
And I too in Arcadia.
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 FUCKING 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.