St. Jacques stared at Seabury, trying to decide if the other had meant anything personal, then remembered belatedly that the psychology teacher had served as a subject in some sort of sleep-deprivation experiments once.
“How come?”
“REM sleep. Dreaming. You’ve got to get a certain amount of dreaming in every night. Missing a few days won’t really do you any harm, but after a while it creeps up on you.”
“I haven’t quite reached that point. Not yet, anyway. But I’ve got to get to class. See you later.”
“Sure. Bye.”
He spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Mother Isobel while compiling for himself a new set of images and fantasies for the night to come, not sure whether or not his morning memories would be available, since he’d already slept on them once.
Marcia was back in class. She seemed to have reverted to her normal behavior—which is to say, she ignored him as completely as possible—though she was quieter than usual. He, in turn, neither called on her nor paid any overt attention when he saw her whispering and passing notes, but he watched her out of the corner of his eye.
Once, when he was staring unguardedly at June, he realized both she and Terri were staring quietly and intensely back at him. After he jerked his gaze away, though, he realized they had just been pretending to pay attention and that their thoughts had been totally elsewhere.
As he was leaving the school after his next class he glanced over at the swimming pool, saw the girls on the swim team all lined up watching Veronica demonstrate a back flip off the high board. They had a meet that evening; Veronica wouldn’t be back till long after he was asleep.
He finished his work early and went to bed around seven. He didn’t bother to switch pillows: the spices were once again stimulating his imagination and sharpening his senses—if anything, their effect was more aphrodisiac than tranquilizing—but he knew he was too tired to be kept awake by them.
As soon as he’d finished his plummeting dive through the back of his head he looked at the bedside clock: 7:15. If he let himself return to the beginning of his French I class he’d have five hours and fifteen minutes before his dream progression brought him back to the moment he’d fallen asleep. That would be about 5:45, and he had no idea what would happen then.
He let the backward flow carry him along, his exhaustion decreasing with every hour subtracted from the day. On his way back to school he realized he would never be able to return to a point where he felt refreshed if he took control at 2:00, and that anyway he was staying conscious through the whole sleep period, not really giving way to his dreams despite the fact that he was immersing himself in the collective unconscious and sharing the dreams of others. What if he needed that relaxation of conscious control and the release it brought to stay sane?
But perhaps it was just the contact, the shared wish-fulfillment, that was needed, and the abdication of control was merely a means toward that end. He tried to remember what Jung—who, after all, had been the one who’d concentrated on the collective unconscious—had said about dreams. All he could come up with was an anecdote he’d read somewhere.
Freud and Jung had been at a psychiatric conference where Freud had been lecturing about phallic symbols. He’d claimed that nothing in a dream was what it seemed, that every apparent meaning cloaked a hidden, latent meaning. He’d stated that things in dreams—such as trains going into tunnels, pencils, swords, umbrellas, or whatever—had no meaning or importance in themselves, but were there to simultaneously mask and reveal what they
When question time arrived, however, Jung had demanded what the latent meaning of a phallus was when the phallus itself appeared in the dream, and Freud had been unable to answer him.
Which was all very well, and if St. Jacques’s unconscious had presented him with the information it had to mean something, but he couldn’t see what. Unless a phallus really
Watching Veronica come soaring back up out of the pool onto the diving board, he found himself appreciating her grace and control. She and the rest of the swim team would still be awake, so the scene had to be rigidly exact and immutable, but when he looked at her from this distance she seemed almost as young and graceful as her dream-self of the night before. Perhaps it was because she didn’t have to worry about the impression she was making on people, but poised on the diving board in her blue tank suit, completely lost in what she was doing, she seemed paradoxically less aggressively healthy, less solidly muscular, than she did away from her sports.
