Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,79

hugs her knees, stifling her own whimpers. But long after sleep has finally taken them, Ella lies awake. She curls stiffly in the darkness, disturbed by a stroboscopic flickering behind her closed eyes. Responsibility weighs on her. She feels accountable for them all, a burden which comes from being the strongest of the four dreamers. She suspects that in the end they might stand or fall by her efforts alone.

"Make us a thread," Lee had pleaded. "A golden thread. Something to take in with us that might lead us out."

She dredges the limits of her memory. There had to be something from which she could create Lee's golden thread. A special kind of thread. A thread which could span from outer world to inner mind like a glittering bridge, as light and fluid as dream itself.

She swoops back over her encounter on the motorway. There is only a vague conversation, leaving here with nothing more than instructions to undo what was done.

It's hopeless. There's nothing there. Nothing.

Night marches on, and sleep eludes her. Occasionally, one of the others stirs under their blankets. Ella looks up briefly and sinks back on to her own bed of nails.

She can see Burns with perfect clarity, offering her his unhelpful advice and wringing his hands in anguish. In her feverish vision he grows more and more impatient, more anguished, twisting his arthritic fingers together: Can't you see, Ella, it's you, it's you, I can't do it for you, can't you see that it's not in my—

HANDS.

Ella sits bolt upright.

There's a moment of panic. She's terrified that the idea which just came to her might slip away, snuff out like a candle flame. She's trying to hold on to something. Hold the idea there, gently, carefully; she looks at the other two sleepers for help. They don't stir. She leans back on the pillow.

Yes Ella, its in your hands.

That's what Burns was trying to tell you all the time.

The dream exercise comes back to her. The hand manipulation game. It's a fragment of childhood, something taken from the bottomless toy chest of the mind at play. The dream exercise. The one they had created between them. The one that had formed the original bridge, the bridge between early lucid dreaming and true dream-side control.

That's how it was, how it always was. Dreaming from the head through the hands, miraculously working to transform the external world . . . Slow down! thinks Ella. Slow down! Her mind is struggling against something which wants her to deviate from the track, stray off course, lose her fix.

Undo what was done, Burns's phantom had said to her. But what was done? And how was it done? Let's take it slow. Very slow. And with all the power of childlike lucidity. For this is how it was.

Here is the church.

She sees two women talking in the ruins of a bombed-out cathedral. They are disputing, or perhaps testing out, the reality of a dreamside birth. A child, a thing—no, a child—was conceived and delivered on dreamside. The church, that's the womb, the woman, thinks Ella, her eyes raking the darkened ceiling. And the tower, the steeple tall and erect, that's the man. It's so clear. Here is the church, here is the steeple. A woman and a man.

Open the door. Yes, that's lovemaking all right. Open the door, call it by another name, sex, or here a violation where love is absent, but open the door. And here are the people. There it is, the birth, the propagation of the people, born to start the cycle of life all over again.

But where does all this lead? It's just a child's game, isn't it? A shadow play, a sleight of hand. A little story with a twist and nothing else. Or is there more? Another strand to the thread? Like the words changing in the books on dreamside, can the thread change to give more?

Try again.

Here is the church. Why yes, that's our belief, our faith in brave dreaming. Here is the steeple. There is our aspiration, the wish to dream, the soaring desire to make it happen. Open the door, the door of sleep, the door to the place of dreaming. And here are the people. Who are the people? We are the people. Born out of faith and desire, we are the dreamers, the dreamers of dreams.

It's easy. The golden thread has as many strands as you care to make, as many as there are interpretations. Ella is feverish. She