THREE
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as
six impossible things before breakfast
—Lewis Carroll
The silence was embarrassing. The second meeting of the lucid dreamers had convened in Professor Burns's own lounge in a large house close to the university and across the road from a sprawling Victorian graveyard. They had turned up at staggered intervals, and after being warmly greeted by the professor were seated in one of the assorted armchairs drawn into a circle. Lee arrived late and suffered agonies on seeing Brad Cousins ensconced on a small, cosy-looking sofa with Ella Innes. Lee took a seat next to the shy Irish girl.
"Had any premonitions?" she whispered as soon as he sat down.
"Not one."
At last the group became aware that the professor was patiently awaiting their silence so that a start could be made. The whispering diminished in tiers until they were left gazing upon Burns, waiting for session number two to begin. But he didn't speak.
The professor remained with his gaze fixed steadily three feet above the head of a girl immediately opposite him. His face carried a perfectly neutral expression, neither hostile nor friendly, neither impatient nor uninterested. Fidgeting began and increased as the period of silence extended. A sigh, a scratch, a cough, the sound of someone twisting in their seat all punctured the embarrassing hiatus before it was immediately sealed up again with silence. After an agonizing five minutes of nothing, Brad Cousins spoke.
"If this is a psychological exercise designed to make us all feel uncomfortable, its working."
All eyes were turned on the professor, who did nothing to acknowledge the remark or deal with the implicit criticism. His expression remained consistent, as did his gaze. The group, exasperated, plunged into a silence more oppressive than the last. The silence seemed to expand, becoming more profound as it lengthened. Lee looked at Ella; Ella looked at Lee. Brad looked at Ella and Lee; Lee looked at Brad. The Irish girl looked at Lee; Lee looked at the Irish girl, Brad and Ella. Ella looked at Brad, Lee and the Irish girl. Now no one seemed to want to look at the professor at all, except sideways.
"If nothing's happening," Brad tried again, "maybe we should all go away and come back next week." His words fell like the sound of a small pebble tossed into a vast reservoir. Now everyone, with the exception of the professor, affected to be fascinated with their fingernails or their footwear.
At last, but not before the agonized hush had become a rack upon which everyone lay stretched, the professor spoke. "It might or might not be," he intoned, "that in fact a great deal more is happening in this group than if we were to pretend otherwise by speaking." A few there nodded heads in counterfeit sagacity; others looked around wildly for help. The pressure of the silence was redoubled.
He looked gently at the Irish girl sitting beside Lee. "Honora is it? Did you dream, Honora?"
"I did dream," said Honora, "and I was aware that I was dreaming."
"So you are now a card-carrying lucid dreamer. Did you keep a diary?"
"I did." Honora produced an open black ring-binder in which Lee could see large copperplate handwriting interspersed with fibre colour or lead pencil drawings. "I also made a few sketches of. . . situations . . . if you can call them that."
L. P. Burns was impressed and said so. He proceeded around the room, pressing everyone on the subject of diaries, which appeared to be more important to him than the cargo of dreams they carried. Lee claimed to have forgotten to bring his
."Forgot?"
"I didn't realize we would be needing them tonight," he said lamely.
"Even with your special foresight?" said the professor.
"Sorry?"
"Never mind. Next." He made the word sound like a bell.
Brad Cousins declared with a proud swagger that he hadn't had a single dream since the last meeting of the group, not even the night he got roaring drunk.
"Perhaps you're blocking, so that you can't remember.
"I don't think so; I don't want to miss the fun."
"But your largely unconscious reasons for blocking," said the professor, "might not find the dreams all that amusing."
"Possible."
"More than possible; believe it." The professor fixed his eye on him until Brad was forced to look away.
Another student digressed on her history of migraine and treated the company to a dismal saga concerning repeated visits to the health centre, including names, dates and times of day, in order to obtain prescriptions for sleeping pills of different varieties all of which failed in turn to produce the desired remedy. Burns listened patiently before moving on to Ella. Where the last speaker had numbed the group, Ella startled them into life again by bravely declaring that all of her dreams had been of an exotically sexual nature and that her self-awareness during the dreams had been acute.
"Funky!" yelled Brad Cousins, cutting Ella short.
"I'm not entirely sure whether Brother Cousins intends to encourage you or discourage you with that last shouted remark," said the professor, "but we might all feel relieved to remember that our interests are more concerned with levels of awareness than with precise anatomical descriptions."
A stifled giggle did the circuit before Ella protested, "It's just that I can be choosy about who I do it with!"
"Whom!" yelled Brad, trying in vain to whip up a group guffaw. "Whom you do it with!"
The professor leaned in towards Ella, and so did the rest of the group. "Can you genuinely control who takes part in your dream . . . encounters?" he asked.
"Sometimes; not always. Faces slip and change; it can be an effort to keep things fixed."
"Sounds like it's an orgy!"Brad Cousins being helpful again.
Burns held up an admonitory hand to Brad as he pressed Ella further. "You are actually conscious of an effort, a struggle to direct the dream along a course predetermined by yourself?"
"Yes."
"Struggling against what, exactly?"
"Well; against the natural flow of the dream."
"So you could make the choice to sit back as it were, and experience a different dream over which you would have no influence?"
"Yes."
Silence, as the group watched the professor turning over the possibilities of Ella's revelations. They waited for the nugget of his profound deliberations. "Sounds like pretty sophisticated stuff," he said.
Ella flushed her humility, uneasy at being rocketed to the top of the class. At the end of their discussions the professor set an exercise.
"Homework," said Brad.
"Yes, Brother Cousins," said Burns, "dreamwork. Continue to keep a meticulous record in your diaries. But now I have some exercises for you which may or may not lubricate the passage through to lucidity, by which of course I mean they may facilitate lucid dreaming; you too Ella, notwithstanding your superior control.
"Exercise one: ask yourself several times through the course of your day whether or not you are dreaming. I am sure that many students in this university if confronted with the same question would have difficulty in replying within a time period briefer than fifteen minutes, but I have nothing but faith in all of you here. Is it a matter of some amusement Messrs Cousins and Peterson? Good; be amused, but do it. And the second part of that exercise is, having persuaded yourself that you are not after all dreaming, to go on to tell yourself that you want to recognize and be aware of the fact that you are dreaming the next time a dream occurs. Clear?"
"Can I ask myself," said Brad, "if I am dreaming that you are really saying this to us?"
"Very witty, Brother Cousins, well done. Of course I don't mind where you ask it so long as you complete the exercise as I have described. The principle is quite simply that of leaving your unconscious mind so many messages and memos that it will eventually have to act on them.
"Exercise two: next time you wake up from a dream, try to imagine yourself going straight back into that dream. And when you are back in there, at least in your imagination, instruct yourself that the next time you dream you want to be aware of the fact. Tell yourself that you want to recognize that you are dreaming. Thus in approximating the dream state you are making your intentions very clear. More memos to yourself. That's all. As I said, keep a record of all of this and indeed of your ordinary dreams."
"What if you're not having any dreams?" asked Brad.
"Correction: what if you're not remembering any of your dreams. You need to know that if you're not remembering your dreams when you wake up, it is probably because you don't want to remember them. For some reason you are blocking the recall of those dreams. I don't know why you would be doing this; you must ask yourself. It may be because something in the dream frightened you and you don't want to remember it. Perhaps the dream contains a message asking you to change something about yourself that you don't want to change. Or you may be terrified of being in an environment where you are not in control of what is happening. Or perhaps you are just preoccupied with too many other things. I don't know. If this is happening to you, ask yourself why."
"Very helpful," Brad whispered to Ella.
"I'm sorry if I can't work this out for you. What I will say is that you will recall your dreams not through an act of willpower, but more by letting go. That is why I said that all you can do is leave messages around the place for yourself. Does that make sense?" Brad screwed up his face. "No? Something for you to think on. Meanwhile keep your diary by your bedside, and on waking scribble the first things that come to your head. This might give you some access to dream material. Try waking up after sleeping for a multiple of one and a half hours, which is the normal time between dreams. In other words if you go to sleep at midnight, wake at seven-thirty, not at eight o'clock; or in Brother Cousins's case at nine or at ten-thirty or whatever part of the day you can manage. Finally, last time I told you to set your alarm clocks to wake you up, but I want you to begin to train yourself to wake up without the intrusion of an alarm. This is because it causes a radical change of consciousness which I want you to avoid. You must learn to surface with your dream. Any questions?"
There were none.
The post-session analysis took place in the nearest bar. Lee, Ella and Brad had been joined by the Irish girl, Honora, and two other members of the group. Brad was complaining loudly.
"He's just taking the piss out of us. Seems to me that he's got us there under the pretext of doing something about this dreaming crap, while he's really using it for some other kind of study which will no doubt distinguish his own academic career and make monkeys out of us."
"He puts you in your place at any rate." Ella, with her head down constructing another of her liquorice-paper snouts.
"We wouldn't expect complaints from the prima donna."
"But we would," light, puff, puff, "expect them to come," puff, "from the clown prince."
"Never mind Ella's pornographic fairy-tales," said Brad, "what was all that crap at the start of the evening?"
"Perhaps he was just trying to create an intense atmosphere," said Honora.
"To make the dream stuff seem more real," Ella agreed.
"That's probably it, Brother Cousins," said Lee, raising a laugh.
"You'll agree with anything she says if it'll help you get into her pants," said Brad. Lee groped for the laser riposte, but it wasn't there.
"Looks like we've found our lowest common denominator," said Ella.
"Lowest what? You were the one who turned the discussion into a blue movie."
"You have to be honest if you're talking about dreams," Honora said angrily. "You shouldn't abuse people's honesty by taking advantage of what they say in the sessions."
Brad lamely mimicked Honora's soft Fermanagh brogue. "Would it be the priest or the professor gave you that idea now?"
"Honora's right, we've got to have confidentiality," said Lee decisively.
"So you're after the Irish one as well, are you?"
"If you intend to get f*cking mouthy about personal things said in the sessions no one's going to open up. That's the point."
Brad, taken aback by Lee's sudden aggression, shrugged. "I didn't realize we were such a serious bunch of kiddies."
"We are," said Ella, "is the point."
"Yes, we are, is the point," said Honora.