Green Monkey Dreams (29 page)

An elbow digs her deep in the ribs.

‘Wake up,' Random hisses into her ear, half laughing. ‘You were making noises like a guinea pig on heat and the lecturer just looked up at you.'

Jilia straightens up, mortified. ‘I was dreaming.' She feels groggy and her mouth tastes bad.

‘Obviously,' Random says.

‘No, really,' Jilia says with soft urgency, waking up properly now. ‘I was having this weird dream that I was a kid again and I was wandering in this strange plain and you were there too.'

‘Me! I hope I was misbehaving thoroughly.' Random grins and it is so like the dream grin that Jilia has a sharp feeling of
déjà vu.

‘You left me behind. I was trying to find you and I went into this hut to ask directions and there were people in there hiding because flying monkeys were trying to get inside. And then I woke up.'

‘You mean I woke you. And you plagiarised my green monkey dream!'

‘I mean I woke up into
another
dream. I was still a kid, and my mother was telling me to get up, only it wasn't my mother. It was your mother . . .'

‘First she steals my green monkeys and now my mother.'

‘. . . and in the dream, something had happened to you. In both dreams. In the second dream you were dead. You fell off a cliff somehow and I had been there when it happened but that wasn't in the dream. I was remembering it.'

‘Jesus, thanks a lot.'

‘Idiot,' she giggles. ‘But in the first dream I was surprised to see you because I thought something had happened to you. Then you disappeared. In the second dream, I got up and went in the lounge room, only it wasn't my lounge room except for the sofa . . .'

‘Don't tell me it was
my
lounge room!'

‘No, you fool. It was nobody's. I mean I didn't recognise it. And there were a whole lot of people and one of them was him.' She nods towards the podium. ‘The lecturer, only he had another name . . .'

‘So you fell asleep in a lecture and then dreamed of the lecture – that's what I call dumb. Why didn't you go to Hawaii?'

‘But wait. In the second dream, my mother . . .'

‘You mean
my
mother!'

‘Yeah. She told me she had heard of some other kid dreaming of green monkeys like I'd been doing. Dreaming of dreaming of dreaming. Isn't that weird?'

Behind the podium, the lecturer stares pointedly at Jilia who stops talking and pretends she has been clearing her throat.

‘A man thinks of his brother on the other side of the world whom he has not spoken with for months and right then, the brother calls him on the telephone,' he says. ‘This might be seen as evidence of some sort of mind link between the brothers. Or is it mere coincidence?'

‘My own sister called me the other night when I was thinking about her. I said, “You must be psychic. I was just thinking of you”,' says the girl sitting next to Jilia to her friend.

‘This mental connection can be even more pronounced in twins who grew in the same womb and whose minds might be said to have been irrevocably linked from the beginning,' the lecturer says. ‘And in some so-called primitive societies, people saw themselves as possessing one mind, particularly in their dreams. They were not cut off from one another as we are now. They saw the unconscious as a vast country in which all were nomads and there were no boundaries.'

Jilia feels an odd sense of vertigo to hear the lecturer talking about dreams now. It is like looking into mirrors reflecting other mirrors, on and on into infinity. She turns to Random to say this, but he has gone without her noticing.

She looks around but cannot see him anywhere. ‘Did
you see where Random went?' she whispers to the girl next to her, who gives her a strange look. Jilia realises she was
one of the people in the dream hut, and is shaken.

Jilia tries to remember coming into the lecture hall and seeing the girl, but finds she can only see a small green paw resting on thick glass, and grape eyes peering into the light.

Her heart is beating very fast.

‘Are you all right?' the girl asks . . .

‘Jilia! Are you all right?'

Jilia blinks. Her older sister is leaning over her, a book open on her lap. It is getting dark and there are clouds in the sky. Jilia sits up and rubs hard at her eyes. She is confused by the dreams in which she seemed to be herself but was someone else.

‘You slept so heavily I was starting to think you had gone and died on me,' her sister says. ‘Imagine if you had. I would have been sitting and reading a story to a dead body. Disgusting.'

‘Why? It's not like I would have had maggots yet.'

‘Oh, you really are disgusting!' Her sister slams the book closed. ‘We better go back anyway. It's going to pour any minute. We should've gone sooner but you were sleeping and this book is so good. I can't believe you fell asleep. And right where the green monkeys were trying to get into the hut . . .'

‘I was dreaming the book,' Jilia says but it is half a question, because it seems to her that she has just experienced a sequence of dreams all containing the green monkeys from the book. The strange thing is, she can remember the hut and the face at the window, but she doesn't remember the story from the book.

Random appears at the edge of the field and trots over to the blanket. Jilia pats his black silky ears, thinking of her queer dreams in which he had been transformed into a handsome young man.

‘God, I hate this part of picnicking. All this sticky stuff you have to wash later. Yuk.'

Jilia is wrapping the sharp knife in a tea towel. ‘So what's happening in the book so far?'

‘I can't just tell it like that. Oh well, all right. The whole village goes to this hut and the monkeys come, thousands of them, and there is this one girl left outside . . .'

‘Her father left her.'

Jilia's sister gives her an impatient look. ‘No. It was an accident. She was up in the hills and she hadn't heard the warning bell. When she came down, the streets were empty and then she heard the wings and she realised . . .'

It starts to rain and they stop talking to throw everything hurriedly into the picnic basket. Grabbing up the blanket they make a run for the car. Inside the Volkswagen, they toot the horn to summon Random. Rain is making a drum of the car and Jilia's ears are hurting.

‘Damn dog! Did you get the key?' her sister asks. ‘I put it on the blanket.'

‘I didn't see it when I shook the blanket.'

‘Oh, no!'

‘Don't panic. It must be under the tree,' Jilia says. She opens the door, slams it behind her and runs. It has grown darker and is raining so hard now she can scarcely see, but the tree looms up as an unmistakable shape on the flat horizon. The ground under it is relatively dry because of the thick foliage and Jilia begins to hunt for the key. She is distracted by Random barking somewhere. The rain lashes against her face as she calls him.

‘Random!'

Jilia is pushing at the sleeping-bag. ‘Get up, lazy bones. We're toasting marshmallows.'

Random unzips the sleeping-bag and sits up groggily, rubbing his eyes. He is wondering at the tumbling dreams he has experienced in which he was a boy and a young man and then a dog. He doesn't think he will tell anyone that. But how weird to be dreaming from someone else's point of view. Especially Jilia's. He hardly knows her. He wonders what it means to dream of being dead and disappearing over and over. Was it some sort of weird search-for-identity dream? Probably it was sparked by all that talk of dreams during their hike that afternoon, and then him getting separated from the others. He is actually having trouble remembering what he dreamed and what Mr Allot really said about dreams.

He realises the tree the two girls were sitting under in the dream was the tree where his group ate lunch, and wonders if all this is the result of eating Jilia's crazy chocolate pie. How could anyone think of making a pie out of nothing but chocolate anyway?

‘Then there are urban myths,' Mr Allot is saying as he comes up to the campfire. He looks funny in shorts with those knobbly knees, but the old guy is surprisingly fit and it has made them all see him as less of a useless brain.

Jilia and some of the others are spiking marshmallows onto toasting forks and handing them around, and there is a sweet burning smell in the air that makes Random's mouth water.

‘What do you mean by urban myths?' Jilia asks.

‘I'll give you an example,' Mr Allot says. ‘How many of you have heard the story of a woman travelling home at night, who stops to get some milk from the shop, and gets back into her car? All of a sudden a man is following her in another car, flashing his lights . . .'

‘I've heard that one,' Jilia agrees, ‘but it was a paper she went to get, and she left the car door open . . .'

‘Yeah, and a killer got in her back seat,' says someone else. ‘And the man in the car behind saw him get into the woman's car with an axe . . .'

Random thinks he heard that story at a school camp, but it was a knife the man had, not an axe.

‘It was a gun,' Jilia says. ‘The axe was in the story about this man and woman crossing the desert and they run out of petrol so he has to walk back . . .'

‘The woman goes to sleep waiting for him, and when she wakes up there is a thumping noise and the police are standing some distance from the car and they tell her to get out and don't look back . . .'

Mr Allot says, ‘See – we all know how these stories go. Urban myths. But I would be willing to bet that most of you don't remember where you heard either of those stories. Researchers have tried to trace urban myths like these, which change in minor detail but not in substance, and have never managed to find the first person to tell the story, although sometimes they can locate the incident which might have spawned the story in the first place – often many generations back in time. I really think, as I said earlier, that the mind is a country which we choose to think of as fenced into individual and closed blocks, but it is not that way at all. We create these barriers and borders because we need them for some reason. But when we are in a dreaming state we often trespass. I would suggest that is how those urban myths travel from one mind to another.'

Random is thinking how much of life leaks into dreams, and wonders if it works the other way as well.

He has a sudden memory of a small green hand pressed against glass, and pale eyes in front of a blurred shiver of wings. The odd series of dreams in which he was not himself has made him feel unsettled, as if reality might be just another dream. And how do you ever know? Maybe in a minute he will wake again and find he is someone or something else.

‘What about recurring dreams?' Jilia asks.

Mr Allot nods. ‘An interesting phenomenon. I believe recurring dreams are far more common than we realise. In my experience, a recurrent dream of danger will be dreamed by many different people, but this can go unnoticed because people are reluctant to relate their dreams to life, for fear of being thought fools. We will never know of the dreams that recur and recur, rebounding through our universal unconscious all unnoticed, loud as a klaxon announcing the fall of a bomb, until dreams are taken seriously.'

‘But what about one dream recurring in one person?' Jilia asks, and Random senses she is about to tell them about his dream, and wishes he had not told her anything about it. That was the thing about these camps. You ended up getting much more intimate with people than you would have in a classroom. Which of course was the purpose of them. But still.

‘And what if a person were to dream of something that was right out of the ordinary – say flying green monkeys?' Jilia says. ‘And they dreamt this dream again and again. But it wouldn't be the same dream. Just the same image coming back and back in different dreams.'

Jilia does not look at Random, but his heart is pounding.

‘The recurring image is the key,' Mr Allot says, looking intrigued. ‘Green monkeys, eh? It's odd you should choose that image; it brings me back to dreams recurring from mind to mind. I was teaching in America at a school called Indian Valley High and I was having trouble with one of the students in my class. I called his mother in and asked if there was anything wrong at home. You see, he had been so good up until then. His mother said he was having nightmares, but that the doctor had given them pills saying it was because he was hyperactive. But the thing was, the dream was about flying green monkeys trying to get into his window. I had completely forgotten it until you mentioned flying green monkeys. Such a peculiar thing.'

‘What does it mean?' Jilia asks excitedly.

‘Did he let the monkeys in?' Random asks, without meaning to. Suddenly he is wondering
why
he never let them in.

‘His instinct was to keep them out,' Mr Allot says absently.

A tall skinny school counsellor leans forward. ‘What if these winged green monkeys are real creatures seeking refuge from their own dying dimension by entering our dreams? Again and again they try desperately to get in, but again and again our minds are closed to them . . .'

‘Do you want a marshmallow?' Jilia says, offering a singed pink blob to Random on the end of a fork. She does not like science fiction. Before he can take the marsh
mallow, mallow, a boy with very red lips leans across to put another
log on the fire.

Sparks fly up into the darkness.

‘Wake up. You almost fell into the fire,' the old woman says
urgently.

Jilia sits up. Her mind is full of vague strange dreams each tumbling into the other, but already the images are
fading before the reality of the crowded hut and the fire.

Old Man Random on the stool beside her frowns,
his eyes full of leaping flames.