“I was just trying to fit things into a way of understanding it.”
“Don’t try! I’ve been trying for thirteen years and all it gives you is the shakes before you go to bed at night.”
“Do you believe in the sins of omission as in those of commission?” said the priest.
“Of course,” said Honora, “that is I understand the difference. As for belief, well I don’t know where I am with that these days.”
“The sins of commission, the things we have done wrong, belong to the world as it is, as we have made it. The sins of omission, the things we have failed to do, belong to the world as it might have been. Isn’t it the same with your dreams? They belong not to this world as it is, but as it might have been.”
“But the miscarriage… and I tried to kill myself. That was all real.”
“Honora, perhaps everything is a dream,” he leaned his face closer to hers, still smiling, “but a dream in the mind of God.
“Consider,” he said. Heavy spots of rain began to fall, tapping loudly on the roof. Honora made an effort to concentrate. “Consider that the world, the universe, is a dream in the mind of God. When He awakes, it’s all over. But maybe it’s not a universe, but a multi-verse, what about that? You know, dreams within dreams within dreams, smaller and smaller or larger and larger whichever way you like. Meanwhile, us sinners go about our business in His dream, dreaming ourselves. Here’s where it gets complicated. If our dreams are out of our control, that’s one thing: and wasn’t it Saint Augustine who thanked God that he was not responsible for his own dreams! But if we start to be able to control our dreams, and therefore are able to choose between sinful and righteous acts at this other level, that’s another. Only in the multiverse, you would have to make a choice. Which level, I mean. And you would choose Him and His dream.”
“Are you telling me it doesn’t matter what happens in the dream world, even if you know what you are doing? That there’s no right or wrong in the kind of dream world that I’m telling you about?”
“I’m telling you that God has placed it beyond the range of our theology,” he said, still smiling.
“Father, has the Church changed at all in the last thirteen years?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Because you don’t sound like the priests I used to know in Ireland. I mean, are you sure, about this dreaming thing, that there’s nothing… demonic?”
“Is that what they taught you in Ireland?”
“No. I didn’t mean that.”
“Then I wish you hadn’t said it.” His lovely boyish smile had faded. He went cold on her. “Look, I thought we could better exorcize… pardon me, chase away these dreams of yours by talking it through. If you prefer we could pray and I could give you a penance.”
The priest made this last remark as if he were a village GP offering to prescribe coloured water to another doctor. Honora felt as though she had let him down. “Whatever you think best, Father,” she said meekly.
“Let’s kneel together under the statue of Our Lady,” he said gently, evidently reconciled to the idea. They went and kneeled together in the shadows of an alcove, under a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. It frightened Honora a little. It was too realistic, the blue-robed, white-cowled icon hovering over her, one hand raised in doubtful benediction. It seemed to glow slightly in the candlelight of the darkened alcove. She avoided its gaze.
“Close your eyes,” said the priest, “and I want you to think of these dreams. Then I want you to empty your mind of them, and fill it with thoughts of God.”
With Ella and Honora out of the house Lee found it easier to discount anything he had ever believed about dreams. When you added it up it didn’t amount to so much. These recent disclosures about a dreamside conception and a dreamside birthright… it was all so far back. At best he wouldn’t be prepared to swear that they didn’t invent most of it, or, to be more accurate, didn’t deceive themselves into believing things. The point was that they had all wanted to believe in it, badly wanted it. So when you came to check it out, what exactly happened?
There was the undeniable fact that some kind of out-of-body liaisons were taking place, and at some consciously agreed location which they had come to call dreamside; but the corroboration of this could only ever happen after the event. Maybe the agreements they all reached were not concerned with a secondary plane on which real experiences took place, but were no more than the result of a rough telepathy in the group. Certainly the results achieved in the days when the professor was around would square with this theory. It was only after the death of Professor Burns, when discipline was lost and things started to slip, that the whole experience went haywire.
As for the four of them, hell they were so wrapped up in their bloody experiments that they hardly spoke to another soul. They were always prepared to support—uncritically—the most outrageous claims about what could be accomplished. A classic case of isolation sustaining a group delusory system. Was there a real basis for thinking that anything had happened at all? Had they just fired themselves up into a frenzy of delusion?
He climbed the stepladder and pushed open the trap door to the attic. He switched on the torch and flashed the beam around the unplastered walls. There was something there he wanted, something he’d stored there years before, after dreaming had been forgotten—or had been pretended to be forgotten… Lee’s attic had not been disturbed for years. Opening the hatch was like breaking into someone’s sleep.
In the most recent episode of dreaming, when he and Ella had accidentally drifted back to dreamside, they had not found the place where all their previous rendezvous had occurred but somewhere different. This confirmed for him that dreamside was not a real place, but a projection. Sometimes our needs are so strong, he thought, they will stop the sky from falling.
And now Honora claimed to have left something behind on dreamside. Plainly she was ill.
Making love on dreamside: what was that all about? He and Ella had been so obsessed with the projection of their relationship on this other level that their real relationship, the one made of blood and tears, had been eclipsed. Perhaps it had all been a way of making themselves seem more important. Incense and candlelight can only ever transform the cave so far. Then you need help in the fantasy game, and they had gone out and called in the heavy artillery.
Lee crossed the attic floor carefully, stepping from one unboarded joist to another. At the far side was a tea chest draped by an old blanket. A small dust storm billowed up in the beam of the torch as he removed the cover.
Brad snorting, sweating, turned in a fever somewhere between sleep and stupor, swimming against a tide that pulls him back and back to that dreaded place. His sea of sleep is full of sharks these days and he gulps down mouthfuls of salt water as he swims frenziedly. He woke up shivering and felt a warm patch turning icy on his leg. He’d pissed himself again in his sleep.
Through the window all he could see was the mist rolling in from the moors. It was 11 a.m., Easter Saturday, and the mist had laid thick trails of moisture over the grass outside and had breathed vaporous patterns on the windows. He was cold. He looked for the tiny cone of blue flame in his single paraffin heater and saw that it had gone out. He buried his head in his hands and allowed himself the luxury of tears.
Then he remembered Lee Peterson. Or was that all another dream? Another bad dream? He had woken up on the sofa to find Lee standing over him like a boxer who’d just put him on the canvas. Thirteen years older and looking more, gone a bit porky, with hair thinning and face fattening, stiff with respectability, but more than that, looking like someone who had never been capable of dreaming in his life.