Free Dreamside by Graham Joyce

lie
    —Shakespeare
    Two episodes of explosive excitement had been touched
off in Lee Peterson's life, one
seeming to detonate the other. In the daytime he and Ella skipped lectures in
favour of a program of sexual exhaustion, Ella's acrobatic invention matching
Lee's ardour. In the nights which followed, either with numb satiated bodies
entangled as they slept or with restless limbs disturbing all deep sleep when
they lay apart, Lee found his awareness during dreaming beginning to grow. He
was able to arrest the progress of ordinary dreaming whenever it occurred to
him to look at his hands. From that moment he would always know he was dreaming,
and that he would shortly wake. From this awareness he progressed rapidly to a
level of control over the substance of his dreams of which he had previously
thought himself incapable. In the dream state, the awareness of hands turned
into simple exercises recalled from childhood but generating profound excitement:
    Here is the church here is the
steeple
    Open the door and here are the
people
    It was as though he had opened a real door to a parallel physical
dimension, a door through which he could actually pass. These hand
manipulations gave way to the conjuring of small objects from nowhere, like a
stage magician. In the dream it was possible to make a silver coin, a rubber
ball, an ace of spades appear. The objects which could be summoned were
limitless; the only difficulty was to sustain control. A kind of forgetfulness
would take over him after a few seconds, a veil would be drawn over the
lucidity and control of the dream, and all would be lost as the dream shifted
or stopped.
    Lee made copious notes in his dreamwork diary and told Ella everything,
as if he were passing on hard news. Ella listened intently to his feverish reports,
nodding occasionally but neither probing into these accounts of his abilities
nor inviting comparison with her own experiences. Indeed, Ella stopped
remarking about her own lucid dreaming experiments beyond the reports which she
reserved for the formal dreamwork seminars. Meanwhile, Lee was in a state of
high excitement, massively stimulated by the curiously related developments now
pushing back the boundaries of his experience. The bouts of lucid dreaming had
an aphrodisiac effect on him and Ella reciprocated time and time again with
unwavering energy. In turn the dizzying sex sessions acted like a thunderous
backdrop to Lee's dreaming, an amphetamine boost to his struggle to assert control
over the substance of his dreams. It was a struggle in which, step by tiny
ominous step, he felt himself nearer to victory.
    The weekly meetings of the lucid dreamers continued, and Lee became one
of the most dedicated and most vocal attendees. Professor Burns could always
be relied upon to smuggle some new box of tricks into each session. At one
meeting he introduced the practice of dreamwork re-entry, an attempt to
reactivate a dream in which lucid dreaming had taken place by using relaxation
techniques and the gentle guidance of his semi hypnotic prompts. There were
some successful results in reactivating dream associations in this conscious
state, but the main requirement for these sessions was for the group to create
a hypnotic atmosphere of stillness and peace. There was one main obstacle to
this:
    "I
can't help it; when everyone goes so quiet and po-faced I just want to
laugh." Brad had spent an hour in the bar before the session.
    "We
will allow you a minute or two to giggle it out of you Mr. Cousins." Burns
was beginning to lose his secret smile at this third interruption. "And
then we will try again."
    "Doesn't anyone else see the
ridiculous side of it?"
    "No. Only you." Lee had become Brad's sparring partner in
the sessions, but at this remark Brad started snorting again, pretending to
suppress his guffaws by stuffing a grimy handkerchief into his mouth.
    "Couldn't
we etherize Brad and use him as a subject for re-entry?" Lee was serious.
    "Rear entry? Not