Dream Well
Jayesse is a land built on dreams; the dreams of those who dwell in it.
These dreams percolate down through the soil, deep underground, until eventually they reach the dream table, where they form a huge reservoir of lost dreams. In some rare, isolated spots they re-emerge as natural springs at the surface, but they can also be reached when a well of sufficient depth is dug, and thus be reclaimed. Such was the discovery of a single man.
This may never have become anything of significance but for one thing: the day that the people of Jayesse had lost the ability to dream. No one knew why; some blamed the totalitarian government and its attempts to deprive the people of their happiness and individuality. People who had dreams could not as easily be controlled, and the leaders of Jayesse wanted control above all else. But whatever the cause, the man who had discovered the dream well now had a new trade: that of a dream-peddler.
The girl entered the narrow, darkened alleyway, slipping in quickly in the hope she would not be noticed by passers-by, for she was ashamed to be there. She had a secret.
She looked to be about eighteen, with long, dark hair down past her shoulders, and large brown eyes; she would have been beautiful but for her haunted face and expression of despair, which bore testament to her terrible addiction. She, like many other inhabitants of Jayesse, sought escape from the drab reality of life under its harsh and oppressive government. She had found that escape – but her craving had come at a dreadful cost.
A few steps down the alley, she reached a wooden door in the wall; its faded paint was peeling and the wood was rotting, giving an initial impression that it was little used, but when she put her thumb on the latch and pushed, it swung open on well-oiled hinges, and she stepped into the dingy back yard that lay beyond with scarcely a sound.
It was only a few more steps to the back door of the house that the yard belonged to; she hesitated only briefly before knocking. She glanced round as she waited; the yard was weed-infested and had clearly lain unattended for some time. It was a dank and gloomy place, overlooked by blank-faced buildings on all sides. She pulled her clothing more tightly around her and shivered, but it was not mere cold that made her do so. It was a place that reeked of depravity and vice.
Then the door opened to reveal the face of a white-bearded old man. As he saw the girl he pushed the door wide, and gave a smile. It was not a pleasant one.
‘Ah, Indantatia,’ he said, rubbing dry hands together. ‘So nice to see you back. It’s been some time – almost a week.’ He smiled even wider, and Indantatia – for such was her name – gave an involuntary shudder of revulsion.
‘Simon,’ she begged, ‘please. You know how I can no longer afford to pay you as I have been. But I had to return. I must have more. I need more.’ Her eyes were wide and beseeching. ‘Is there nothing else I can offer you? Surely there’s something else you’ll accept? I’ll give you anything…’
Simon paused and scratched his armpits in a disgusting fashion, considering the young girl’s proposition. ‘You know what I want from you, Indantatia,’ he said at last, leering at her horribly. ‘But always you refuse me.’ He reached down to get something from an inner pocket of his musty coat, and brought into sight a small glass phial, the contents of which seemed to scintillate in the dim light.
Indantatia’s expression was transformed to one of ecstasy at the sight of the object, and she leaned forward, raising her hand to take it, but Simon drew it back, holding it tantalisingly just beyond her reach. ‘Now, now,’ he admonished her. ‘First you must yield to my demands – then you may have it.’
Indantatia wept, but Simon was ruthlessly obdurate, ignoring the innocent young girl’s tears, until at last she gave in. ‘All right,’ she sobbed, her tears wet on her cheeks at the thought of how she was about to degrade herself in order to satisfy Simon’s evil lust. ‘I will give you what you want.’
She reached into her purse and with the utmost reluctance counted some coins into his eagerly waiting hand. Simon half closed his eyes as he caressed the money with the tips of his fingers, a look of almost sexual ecstasy on his face. ‘Now why didn’t you give me that before, Indantatia?’ he said. ‘Was it so great a price to pay?’
Indantatia hung her head in shame, but said nothing. What could she say, now that she had lost what tattered shreds of dignity that had remained to her?
Simon, now that he had at last got what he wanted from her, gave an evil smirk and passed the phial to her. ‘Enjoy it, my dear,’ he said. ‘Remember me in your dreams.’
Indantatia snatched it from him before he could taunt her further, clasping it tightly in her hand and, turning, fled the dreadful house and its sinister occupant. She had paid: now she would be able to reap the benefits.
Once in her own bare apartment, Indantatia relaxed; she had kept the phial in her hand all the way back, as if afraid it would lose substance and vanish otherwise. Nevertheless, she could not properly settle until nightfall, and it was time. Time for her release.
Now in her hard, narrow bed, she uncorked the phial, looked at it momentarily with fascinated eyes, then swallowed its contents in one swift motion. Then, twined in white sheets and velvet darkness, Indantatia slept. And Indantatia dreamed.
She was standing on a grey beach beneath an utterly black sky. There was no sun and no moon, though it seemed as if everything were lit by cold, flat light that had no source. There was no colour at all, not in the sea that was breaking near her bare feet, nor in the gritty sand of the beach, nor the sere grass on the dunes further inland. There was a small wooden boat run up onto the beach nearby; had she arrived in it, or was she to take it in order to depart? She wondered whose dream it was, and why it was so bleak and empty.
She walked along the beach for a little distance, then, on a whim, she walked out into the water, and was startled to see flashing magenta phosphorescence around her feet. It was the only colour there. She walked further out and plunged into a deeper area before standing again, to watch the glowing water streaming off her body; it was as if she were coated with liquid light. Fascinated by its beauty, she swam, enchanted by the way her bare limbs became so brightly illuminated with each stroke she took, and by the scintillating spray of water droplets that scattered all around her. Heading back to the beach, she walked out of the water again, the light pouring off her, to stand beside the boat, where she stood for a moment, capturing the spirit of the remarkable place. How was it that the land and sea were illuminated when there was no light in the sky? But it was a dream, and nothing had to obey logic.
She stood beside the sea for a while, occasionally dipping her cupped hands into the water, raising them and letting the glowing water fall back into the sea, but she knew she had a limited time to dream, and, with only slight reluctance, she closed her eyes then opened them again.
This time she was standing on a lawn under a moonlit sky, surrounded by darkened bushes and shrubs: ahead of her stretched immaculately kept gardens, and beyond, a large house. Its rows of windows were all dark, save for a single one at one end of the second floor, which showed a yellow light. Was it her imagination, or could she see someone framed in the window?
Glancing down, she saw that she was wearing a long white nightdress, and her feet were bare. Wondering what awaited in the mysterious house, she made her way silently across the wide lawns, leaving a trail of dark footprints in the dew-covered grass. Was the house a real place? Whom had the dreamer expected to meet there? The thrill of anticipation increased as she drew nearer, and could observe more detail of the moon-washed masonry of the building. Seeing what was obviously the main entrance, a large, timber door with black iron hinges, she walked over the gravel-covered courtyard to it. It opened without resistance as she turned the handle; she would have been surprised if it had not.
Once inside she barely hesitated, making her way across the silent, empty hallway to the wide sweep of the stairs; as the dreamer had done before her, she knew where she was bound. The deep carpet felt comfortingly soft under her bare feet after the grounds outside, and even the smooth, cold marble of the curving stone balustrade was pleasant to the touch. Though the illumination provided by the moonlight through the windows was meagre, she could see clearly enough the coloured veins in the white marble, and the details of the carved balusters, and she again found herself wondering if this house was real in some other place – certainly there was nothing like it in the drab land of Jayesse, whose grim, oppressive regime allowed its people no such indulgences.
But she did not linger, and went on to the landing, and thence to a wide passage that appeared to run the full width of the house; floor-length windows with thin, pale curtains occupied one side, providing enough light to see, while a row of doors stood opposite them. She turned in the direction she remembered seeing the room with the lighted window, and, hurrying now, made her way towards it.
There was no light coming from under any of the doors except the one at the very end, as she had known would be; her excitement was higher than ever now as she laid her hand on the handle and turned it, before pushing the door open.
Beyond lay a room that was sparsely furnished, but which was lit by dozens – perhaps hundreds – of candles; they seemed to occupy almost every horizontal surface, some in elaborate candlesticks, others simply sitting in puddles of wax. However the main object to gain her attention was a figure standing in front of the uncurtained window, facing outwards across the grounds. It was apparently that of a young man, dressed in no clothing that she could recognise: again, nothing so exotic or colourful existed in Jayesse. She wondered whom he was awaiting, standing staring from the window, before remembering it must be the one whose dream she was reliving; inevitably she felt a frisson run through her as he began to turn, evidently aware of her having entered the room. How would he react to her presence? Who was the dreamer to him – a friend, a lover, a relative, or even an enemy?
But she was not to discover. The grey dawn light was filtering through her window back in her own bedroom, and she was awake. The dream was over, and the phial was empty.
NOTES
The premise of the story was the result of my mulling over the potential double meaning of the common expression dream well, but where the adverb well is replaced by the noun. All that was required next was for me to construct a story based on that premise. It also owes something to a vague memory I had of the Minroud Mine in Michael Ende’s book The Neverending Story, though I had to check back later – 20 years later, when I started to assemble this collection in my Into Slumber blog – to realise the resemblance was closer than I’d thought.
Yor shut his eyes and was silent for a while. Bastian didn’t know whether to repeat his question. Then he heard the miner whisper: “Nothing gets lost in the world. Have you ever dreamed something and when you woke up not known what it was?”
In that case the dreams took the form of delicate pictures lying on a snow-covered plain, ‘like jewels bedded in white silk.’ Yor asks Bastian what he can make of the jumbled, apparently nonsensical pictures, and if he can recognise any of them. Bastian says he can’t, and asks Yor what they are:
“They are forgotten dreams from the human world,” Yor explained. “Once someone dreams a dream, it can’t just drop out of existence. But if the dreamer can’t remember it, what becomes of it? It lives on in Fantastica, deep under our earth. There the forgotten dreams are stored in many layers. The deeper one digs, the closer together they are. All Fantastica rests on a foundation of forgotten dreams.”
Evidently I owe a greater debt to Michael Ende than I realised at the time I wrote the story, and despite decades of self-abuse my memory was for once quite accurate.
As to the name of the land, Jayesse, it should be explained that Journalspace was commonly referred to as JS by most members, but I chose the name of Jayesse, with its associations (to me at least) with the fabled land of Lyonesse. I typically either referred to Journalspace as either ‘that great, grey prison they named Journalspace’ for the more dystopian entries; or a mythical land, as in the case of Dream Well; or in more fanciful entries as a land covered with journals that had been carefully erected by its inhabitants from crude blocks of HTML and CSS.
Why the name Indantatia? Her real name was Shannon; she was, like Emily (whose JS name was Insane-Li), one of several girls I had befriended – wisely or unwisely – in my five years as a Journalspace inmate. This story was written at her request, though, as I see from my notes at the time, it took me a while to complete, and that I felt a faint trace of embarrassment at the sexual allusions in the first part.
This is the story Indantatia asked me to write for her some six months ago, completed at last. I apologise both for the delay, and for the smutty innuendo in the first half, which I found myself unable to avoid including.
As to the nature of the entry itself, it is because dreams have always fascinated me (which is why so many of my entries, stories or otherwise, are about dreams). The first two instances in Indantatia’s dream come from dreams of my own. The first was from November 1987:
The next, brief, reference to the phosphorescence in the water was from a year earlier:I was with a group of other blokes, sitting on the ground in an apple orchard, and, for some reason, we each had to tell a story. Mine was from Scandinavian mythology about Loki. In my story, which materialised as I narrated it, he was stepping from a small boat, little bigger than a punt, which was a ferry of some sort. He was standing at the edge of a body of water of indeterminate size, perhaps the sea, but very still, barely making wave on the flat, shingly beach. Everything was dull and grey, completely devoid of colour, beach, sea and the sky? Well, in the words of the narrator (me) ‘Loki stepped from the boat and looked up. There was no sun, no moon and there were no stars.’ It was utterly black. And what happened then? I can’t remember.
One tiny fraction of last night’s dreams had me with a group of friends, including Karen Claydon, messing about on a very large but low bridge (only just above the level of the water) across a wide river or estuary. The water was very calm and very clear. Karen had with her an unidentified girl with long blonde hair, about her age, very attractive. A bit of larking about resulted in the two of them ending up in the water, and they started plunging around, splashing and wrestling each other. As the blonde-haired girl surged around, sometimes almost leaping clear of the water, her body would be encased in beautiful, glowing magenta phosphorescence. Karen wasn’t affected, just this strange girl. It was getting on towards evening and the effect beggars description; it was as if she had liquid, transparent light streaming off her as she left the water. She looked breathtakingly lovely. It was a weird sight altogether, what with the phosphorescence itself, the way it only affected one of the girls, and its striking colour.
The scene that describes Indantatia approaching the house in the moonlight, wearing a nightdress, was shamelessly taken from the haunting opening scene to the first episode of the excellent 1988 BBC TV adaptation of Helen Cresswell’s children’s story Moondial, where the actress Siri Neal plays the part of Minty. The scene can be viewed on YouTube, though unfortunately the quality is rather low.
The rest, I am relieved to say, came from my own imagination, though it’s possible that the reference to the stone balustrade came from either the 1983 film adaptation of Angela Carter’s horror story The Bloody Chamber (a retelling of the Bluebeard legend that is sadly hard to find these days; it was beautifully filmed); or maybe one of a series of evocative photographs of Keira Knightley in a wedding dress, barefoot, descending such a flight of stairs (taken by photographer Mike Owen in 2002). There is evidently something fascinating about young women descending (or ascending) flights of stone stairs, ideally wearing a wedding dress.
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