Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,13

He'd been dozing over his reading, and his first sight of her had been enough to make him leave tooth marks in De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. How was anyone expected to study? So when he'd seen her here he'd had to go and stand behind her. He still hadn't thought of anything sparkling to say, when she turned from the poster and walked right into him.

"Sorry," he said. It was his best line.

But she and her friend had gone, leaving Lee defeated and slumped against the noticeboard. When he recovered he was able to read the poster for himself. He thought he was probably not a lucid dreamer (whatever animal that might be), but he had heard Ella saying that she was going and guessed that he could always do a good job of pretending; at least until he was found out, or for as long as it took to get on coffee-bar terms with Ella, whichever came first.

So why not? He set off across the university lawns. Spring was on him like a drug, as if the air was full of music, there until you tried to stop and make it out. Spring in the air, like the confirmation of a rumour.

Lee arrived at the small seminar room in a state of high anticipation. About a dozen people, none of whom he knew, sat around in a rough circle. Ella wasn't there. They sat whispering to each other while on one isolated chair, hands folded on his lap and gazing with expressionless interest at the floor, sat the Head of the Department of Psychology, Professor L. P. Burns.

Now nearing retirement, Burns had led a distinguished but unspectacular academic career, making a number of suitably perplexing contributions to educational psychology and parapsychology, although he always maintained that the latter interest ranked only as a hobby. He wore a drab mottled green suit. His hair was thin and his skin stretched like parchment across his face, but his eyes were alert, and the angular characteristic of his features dissolved easily when he smiled.

Lee was already thinking about how he could get out of this when the professor suddenly spoke as if he were addressing a full lecture theatre. "It is some five minutes after the appointed time. I don't think we are going to be joined by many more, given that we compete with the thousand and one delights offered by the university on such a spring evening, so we will make a start. But even as I speak I see I am to be contradicted. Come in, ladies, do come in."

Two girls hovered doubtfully behind the open door—Ella and her companion. They stepped into the room. Ella wore a black beret and black tights, and took a seat opposite Lee, crossing her legs as she sat down. Lee crossed his.

"Excellent," declared the professor, passing a list around the circle for everyone to sign. "This is almost a better turn-out than I get at my lectures." A polite titter went around the circle.

"Are any of you psychology students? I don't recognize anyone."If any of them were, they didn't own up.

"Excellent again!" said the professor. "We might just get some intelligent contributions." Another polite titter, dying after a single circuit. "So, you are all lucid dreamers? Yes? No? You all spend your nights dreaming lucidly in your beds? Yes? No?" He looked around jovially from face to embarrassed face. With no answer forthcoming he continued. "What is required is a corpus of willing volunteers, such as yourselves, prepared to take part in a scientific, accurately documented piece of research into the interesting subject of lucid dreaming; a phenomenon which, however commonplace it may seem to you," he smiled at Lee, "is not, after all, experienced by many of us. I for example am not a lucid dreamer. Unlike you I have never experienced the what to me would be thrilling prospect of controlling, manipulating, directing or merely influencing the course of my dreams; nor even the sensation of knowing that what I am experiencing is a dream, and of therefore being able to say to myself that shortly I will awake from this dream into another reality."

"Excuse me," a girl with an Irish accent said shyly, "I'm not sure whether I'm a lucid dreamer or not."

"We'll come on to that," said Burns. "What I would like to establish first is whether the people here would be prepared to make the necessary commitments involved. The research must be scientifically