the edge of orgasm, on the brink of some overwhelming discovery which would come—not yet, not quite yet, but which was there and which would come.
And it was how it felt that mattered. Physically it felt like the skin had been peeled back to expose nerves that sighed at every breath of wind. The mere proximity or movement of others made teasing waves in the air. Every pore ached with pleasure. Yet underneath this sensuous carnival lay something else. It was an anxiety, a misgiving; one which they all felt but to which, curiously, they never referred. This anxiety was always there, like an unpleasant taste in the mouth, and grew in proportion to the level of excitement or pleasure they experienced.
Ordinary and trivial details seemed exciting, and exciting things were overwhelming. So, when Lee kissed Ella and put his tongue into her mouth, the fabric of the dream broke, like a bubble rising in the air and bursting soundlessly. And it broke not just for Lee and Ella but unaccountably for Honora and Brad as well.
It was against this degree of intensity that the message-passing experiments were conducted. Competing against the narcotic pleasures of exploring other dreamside powers, it became a dismal chore. Without the influence of the professor, interest in these experiments degenerated into a games sequence of feats and tricks performed only for amusement, such as Lee's discovery of how to disappear behind the oak tree and reappear immediately somewhere else, like an actor who could exit stage left and enter stage right. Then they found the rowing boat drawn up against the shore as if they had conveniently left it. Floating the boat on the water became an absorbing pastime. When at first the touch of the boat on the skin of the water had been enough to puncture and end the dream, it became possible to float the small craft and to clamber into it, before the dream burst. All of this was enchanting and bewildering, and altogether more fun as the discipline of scientific observation was neglected.
Autumn term passed in a goldening and withering of leaves barely noticed by the four students, whose disdain of studies did not go unnoticed by university authorities. But written warnings only became certificates of bravado in the collective dreamwork enterprise. At Christmas that year they went home on shortened holidays, returning early to recommence the programme of dreaming.
Then came a disruption to the scheduled program, introduced so naturally that if anyone was immediately aware of its irregularity they forgot to, or chose not to, comment on it. At least not until later. Somewhere between the strict pattern of the weekly rendezvous a second meeting quietly inserted itself and became established as if by tacit agreement. No such additional rendezvous had ever been discussed in waking time, yet the four arrived at that same lakeside location in no state of surprise, as if washed back there by cool currents or unnoticed tides. Then one unofficial rendezvous became two or three, or more, until any regular pattern or monitored schedule was lost.
The second disruption was of a more human order. Brad started to look upon Lee and Ella's amorous dreamside behaviour with a dangerously jealous eye. Honora meanwhile was determinedly preserving from him the virginity she thought worth keeping. She had so far managed to resist Brad's playful and charmless advances as emphatically on dreamside as she did in waking time.
Brad's seduction line—delivered in the thinkspeak of dream-time, a combination of thoughts and mouthed utterances into which millions of ambiguities and misunderstandings could seem to fly— failed to persuade her.—You're the luckiest girl ever to have lived— he murmured to her on one dreamside encounter—I mean have your cake and eat it won't you; have the beauty of knowing what it's like and still being a virgin, it doesn't count on dreamside—
—Oh yes?—
—Yeah! there's no sin on dreamside—
—I don't know about that. Let's just take the boat on the lake instead—
Brad didn't regard that as much of an instead. At times he took to following Lee and Ella around, making a crowd of himself even in the vast space of dreamside. Lee and Ella got as tired of Brad's prurient interests on dreamside as they would have done in waking time. It wasn't simply a question of finding a quiet spot out in the woods somewhere, because space and distance didn't count the same. Brad was just a thought away if he wanted to be, and he often did, warm