Lyndon shook sugar from Ersula’s letter. ‘Looks like she’s headed back your way.’
‘Which is not good, for the reasons I already stated.’
‘Whooosh?’
‘As an academic, Ersula believes nowadays in the power of the mind over the power of the spirit. Well, OK, she has a good mind and I’m stupid, and when you’re stupid all you got to fall back on most of the time is, like, the dream that some kind of spiritual earthquake will come along and get us out of all this shit.’
‘This may be getting too heavy and West Coast for a poor Brooklyn boy,’ Lyndon said.
Grayle stared at the river of blood seeping out of the half-eaten doughnut. For Ersula, nothing was an inexplicable phenomenon any more. So nothing was spiritually threatening.
She looked up, saw her own frustrated face in the mirror across the counter, lumps of blond hair all over the place, the Eye of Horus earrings swinging. Crazy Grayle Underhill, New Age Sub-culture Columnist, widely syndicated.
‘Huh?’
‘I said, if there’s some way I can help you,’ Lyndon McAffrey said patiently, ‘maybe you could just lay it out for me in moron-speak.’
‘Finish the letter,’ Grayle said. ‘I’m delaying you. Your wife will think you’re having an affair.’
‘Haw,’ said Lyndon. He picked up the second sheet of blue airmail paper and read it with obvious concentration before re-reading the first sheet.
‘Hmm.’ He grunted thoughtfully. ‘I begin to see your point.’At night, you discover, stone is always cold.Sleeping on stone — that’s not natural. You awake time after time, usually uncomfortable as hell and sometimes in a panic simply because of the stone all around you. Well, that’s good — it shouldn’t come easy, not at first. Without a challenge there can be no achievement.Which is just as well because this particular burial chamber, where I slept last night, is fully exposed, the earthmound which once concealed it having long since eroded. It is like a long, low stone table on little, stubby legs. Or maybe a clump of big mushrooms fused together. Kind of weird-looking, but not what you would call spectacular. Indeed, without a large-scale map you would not find it at all except by accident.Well, certainly not at night.Under your head is an old gray stone which you can feel as though there was no sleeping bag there at all. What it makes you think of is those petrified pillows supporting marble effigies on tombs in old churches. Creepy, huh?Hey, come on. This is a scientific experiment.Anyway, like I said, when you sleep on stone, sometimes you awake but you’re not awake, if this makes sense. You know you can’t be, because the stone isn’t cold, nor even hard; you’re sinking into it — so damn grateful it isn’t cold and hard any more that you just let yourself luxuriate in it. And down you go, quite painlessly, into the ground, into the earth. Your subconscious mind that is. Or whatever you want to call the part of you that admits the dreams.You come to realize that the very easiest phase is the letting go. I say easy … it was hard for me at first. I am, as you can guess, the odd one out on this course, most of the others being half-assed pseudo-mystics who are just here for the buzz. (You will notice, Grayle, that I have been at pains not to say ‘people like you’.)They tell you not to think too hard before you go to sleep, so maybe it’s just as well your main concern is to get comfortable. If you go into waking fantasies and your conscious mind influences your dreams, this is a bad thing, obviously.Before you know it, you’ve been gently awoken and the therapeute is whispering, Did you dream? Tell me … describe it to me…You feel wonderful then. You did it. You interacted.The actual interacting, the dreaming, often becomes, well … kind of scary, if you want the truth. Not at all what you’re expecting. Maybe it has occurred to you that this place where you’re sleeping, when it comes down to it, when you get beyond all the screwball stuff about secret energies and the healing powers of Mother Earth…… is a grave.A repository for bodies. Flesh has rotted here, bones have crumbled.The claustrophobia, at this point, can be intense. You start to scream inside. All you want is out of there. But, like I said, you have to stop your conscious mind getting a hold of you. What you are dealing with here is the unconscious and that must be left to find its own route to what you would probably call enlightenment.In relation to this, OK, there is one small problem, I am told.You know how, in nightmares, when you get into a very frightening situation — like, you’re about to fall a thousand feet onto rocks or you turn around to find the psycho with the ax was behind the door all the time — you awake?Well, sleeping in a prehistoric burial chamber, so they tell me, you can’t always count on this happening — implying that under these physical conditions it is possible to reach a deeper level of unconsciousness. This, I am convinced, is the first step to a scientific explanation of so-called prophetic dreaming, as supposedly experienced by Jacob and tribal shamans the world over, and it excites me profoundly.Before you say a word, sure I’ve heard that stuff about how, if you weren’t able to awake from a nightmare, when you got into a terminally tight corner you’d just die.Like I said, it’s important that it isn’t easy. That there are risks. Nothing significant is ever achieved without risk.
‘Your parents seen any of this?’
Lyndon McAffrey solemn now, maybe the old newsman’s antennae starting to vibrate.