Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,18

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