Lee shifts in a half-sleep, perspiring heavily, unable to find the elusive groove. Honora doses herself with another of her pills, frets, hugs her knees, stifling her own whimpers. But long after sleep has finally taken them, Ella lies awake. She curls stiffly in the darkness, disturbed by a stroboscopic flickering behind her closed eyes. Responsibility weighs on her. She feels accountable for them all, a burden which comes from being the strongest of the four dreamers. She suspects that in the end they might stand or fall by her efforts alone.
“Make us a thread,” Lee had pleaded. “A golden thread. Something to take in with us that might lead us out.”
She dredges the limits of her memory. There had to be something from which she could create Lee’s golden thread. A special kind of thread. A thread which could span from outer world to inner mind like a glittering bridge, as light and fluid as dream itself.
She swoops back over her encounter on the motorway. There is only a vague conversation, leaving here with nothing more than instructions to undo what was done.
It’s hopeless. There’s nothing there. Nothing.
Night marches on, and sleep eludes her. Occasionally, one of the others stirs under their blankets. Ella looks up briefly and sinks back on to her own bed of nails.
She can see Burns with perfect clarity, offering her his unhelpful advice and wringing his hands in anguish. In her feverish vision he grows more and more impatient, more anguished, twisting his arthritic fingers together: Can’t you see, Ella, it’s you, it’s you, I can’t do it for you, can’t you see that it’s not in my—
HANDS.
Ella sits bolt upright.
There’s a moment of panic. She’s terrified that the idea which just came to her might slip away, snuff out like a candle flame. She’s trying to hold on to something. Hold the idea there, gently, carefully; she looks at the other two sleepers for help. They don’t stir. She leans back on the pillow.
Yes Ella, its in your hands.
That’s what Burns was trying to tell you all the time.
The dream exercise comes back to her. The hand manipulation game. It’s a fragment of childhood, something taken from the bottomless toy chest of the mind at play. The dream exercise. The one they had created between them. The one that had formed the original bridge, the bridge between early lucid dreaming and true dream-side control.
That’s how it was, how it always was. Dreaming from the head through the hands, miraculously working to transform the external world… Slow down! thinks Ella. Slow down! Her mind is struggling against something which wants her to deviate from the track, stray off course, lose her fix.
Undo what was done, Burns’s phantom had said to her. But what was done? And how was it done? Let’s take it slow. Very slow. And with all the power of childlike lucidity. For this is how it was.
Here is the church.
She sees two women talking in the ruins of a bombed-out cathedral. They are disputing, or perhaps testing out, the reality of a dreamside birth. A child, a thing—no, a child—was conceived and delivered on dreamside. The church, that’s the womb, the woman, thinks Ella, her eyes raking the darkened ceiling. And the tower, the steeple tall and erect, that’s the man. It’s so clear. Here is the church, here is the steeple. A woman and a man.
Open the door. Yes, that’s lovemaking all right. Open the door, call it by another name, sex, or here a violation where love is absent, but open the door. And here are the people. There it is, the birth, the propagation of the people, born to start the cycle of life all over again.
But where does all this lead? It’s just a child’s game, isn’t it? A shadow play, a sleight of hand. A little story with a twist and nothing else. Or is there more? Another strand to the thread? Like the words changing in the books on dreamside, can the thread change to give more?
Try again.
Here is the church. Why yes, that’s our belief, our faith in brave dreaming. Here is the steeple. There is our aspiration, the wish to dream, the soaring desire to make it happen. Open the door, the door of sleep, the door to the place of dreaming. And here are the people. Who are the people? We are the people. Born out of faith and desire, we are the dreamers, the dreamers of dreams.
It’s easy. The golden thread has as many strands as you care to make, as many as there are interpretations. Ella is feverish. She can see a golden thread spinning out to a point beyond her vision. Sparks of pure golden light shimmer and dart from it as it spins in rapid style from the turning of her mind. This is the thread they will transport to dreamside, as light and as fluid as dream itself. But there is one essential strand to the thread which must be strong enough to lead them out again afterwards.
She knows she’s on to something. If it can be found, it will be found here. Only now tiredness closes her in. It folds down on her. She feels the edges of consciousness retreat like the outposts of an empire. Now she has to fight sleep.
Perhaps it’s just a question of viewing the thread in reverse. Like examining the stitching on the reverse side of an embroidery. The question is, does the key fit the lock from both sides of the door? And can the thread pay out a third time?
Church. And if the church was our faith in dreaming, then mistrust must be its opposite. What if that mistrust itself has become the instrument of oppression? A church which has become a prison, wasn’t that the measure of their dreaming now?
Steeple. We made a Babel of vanity and an arrogance out of out desire to dream, to climb as high as God. Indifference is the opposite of desire, and the worst crime of all. And we fell asleep. We made a crisis of faith out of mistrust and indifference. Will we ever find our way back?
Door. How do we open the doorway back? How do we recover our faith and our desire?
But Ella can go no further. She is too drained to think it through; too tired to spin the thread any longer; too exhausted to finish weaving the strand. The last flickering candle has burned down to a gob of wax. Her mind closes down like a square of paper neatly folded in on itself, and then once again, and then again.
FOURTEEN
“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
Ella only knew that sleep had finally taken her when she became aware she was on dreamside. Lee was standing close by. He was looking at her strangely.—I’ve been waiting—he thoughtspoke.—You’re here. It feels cold—
He touched her, and brought her to him. In the embrace they rediscovered that shivering intensity, the tremulousness beneath the surface of things, but with something else, something extra.
A colourless, tasteless, odourless sense, oppressive and insistent. It grabbed like a hand inside the stomach, itching at the very membrane of dreamside. It was the claw of a dread anxiety. Something predatory hung watchful on the air.
—Is anyone else here?—Before Ella had even completed the thought, she saw Honora standing under the oak, looking out over the frozen snow-covered lake. She seemed carved from ivory. The scene was encompassed in still mists.