The Valhalla Covenant
Chapter Three — Mind Battle

During the night, Reimas re-examined everything that had been said, and a new sense of conviction flowed from his thoughts. It was a buzz to see how ideas that had been looming on the fringe of his consciousness were finally taking shape.

Lately, his lack of an underlying sense of direction had been a thorn in his side, and this meeting — these events, all of them — had come along at precisely the right time, acting as the perfect catalyst to provide him with a renewed sense of certainty.

Erin was still asleep, but provocatively disrobed as she was under a welter of tangled sheets it was difficult to leave her. Even so, he grabbed his clothes and dressed in the en-suite to avoid disturbing her, and was careful to shut the bedroom door quietly when he left for a quiet morning walk up the hill.

On the way out, he dropped in at the treatment room to see Carl, or Seal as he was called in the field, but Stas couldn’t have made it clearer that he should stay away. With bullet wounds to his right leg and abdomen and a host of steel spines from the grenades still to be removed, she had to keep any possibility of stray infection to a minimum.

Yet before she turned Reimas away, she took the trouble to reassure him that if he’d taken Carl to any of the public emergency wards, things would have been a lot worse.

Once outside, it seemed to him that the clear sky had a special light. Last night’s storm had washed everything clean, but there was more — something in himself.

By the time he reached the island’s rocky peak, he’d done a lot of thinking and had gone a long way towards sorting out recent events in the light of his long-term objectives.

A new approach was required. Laurence, he conceded, was right.

Seeking him out as soon as he returned, Reimas found that work in the ‘dream lab’ had already begun for the day. After a casual welcome, Laurence asked him to look things over while he finished instructing Heidi, his assistant, in a new technical procedure.

At a casual glance, the lab was more than simply a first step in a new direction. It was a well-established research facility — a little too stark and clinical to be exactly comfortable for something like dreaming, but it obviously housed a lot more gear than would be needed solely for dream research.

Reimas, wondering how the surroundings might be improved, saw curtains and became curious about what lay behind them. When he pulled one back, Laurence shot an irritated glance his way but said nothing.

Behind the curtain was a sliding glass door, but what lay beyond that was obscured by a dense layer of plant growth. A good shove moved the door, ripping through the leaves and dirt that clogged the runners, and it came open. A loose curtain of creepers that had grown over the door remained in the way but was easily torn down.

A spacious and apparently long-hidden courtyard was revealed. Clearly it had been intended as a sort of secret garden set high above the ground within a stand of ornamental trees on the house’s north side. Shrubs, small trees and flowers grew in raised beds around much of the perimeter. Kept alive no doubt by an automatic watering system, it was now wild and overgrown.

Despite that, the concealed space was well positioned to receive the sun for a couple of hours either side of midday, and Reimas saw that it would filter pleasantly through the tops of the surrounding trees.

Jos probably knew nothing about the hidden courtyard. The house was huge, and over the course of the year or so that he’d been there he’d been busy installing the bunker amongst other things.

“If you’re going to ask me to nod off, Cort, I think it’d be easier out here,” he called out. “I’m not sure how I’d go having dreams in that lab.”

Laurence came to the door.

“I don’t know. Haven’t done anything outdoors before, but I guess it might be more relaxing. I’ll see what I can do.”

Heidi helped Reimas clear the leaves and some of the excess growth. Half an hour later, they dragged out a comfortable reclining chair, but progress was slower when Laurence set about adapting the monitoring apparatus.

It was surprising how much equipment was required. An audio stimulus bank occupied much of the back wall. Timers could be set to provide random sequences of sound from different sources and to replay them automatically if the monitors detected anything resembling a satisfactory response.

With the full set-up inside, lights and screens surrounded the subject couch, but in the outside adaptation, Laurence came up with the idea of using virtual reality games headgear to deliver relaxing sequences of audio and video.

Laurence observed with some satisfaction that the VR set-up might well be an improvement, given that it would reduce the incidence of random variables clouding the results. Temperature variability was something he had used to good effect in the past but that would be difficult to control outside.

Initially, he felt that nature’s input would have to be enough even though some of the factors could not be recorded, but in the end he rigged a simple video camera to provide an accurate record of any natural stimuli like passing clouds or a puff of breeze.

Everything was controlled and coordinated through central processors — inputs, regulators and monitors. Most of the bio monitoring was accomplished by means of a heavily wired skullcap and a hospital-style cardio array connected by wi-fi to a computer inside.

Adapting the equipment to Reimas’s request involved considerable work, but it did yield the fringe benefit of ensuring that everything could be rigged for easier relocation should the need arise, and Laurence wondered why he hadn’t thought of using the VR gear before.

With a last run over the equipment, he was sure he’d covered every feasible angle to introduce the sorts of changes that might affect the dreaming mind. In recent times there had not been much success, either with him in the chair or with others, but now he now felt more positive.

Being outdoors would probably improve matters more than he’d first thought, also. Up until now, he’d missed the importance of the actual surroundings and the environmental ambience, but on the up side he did credit himself with having sensed the general potential in Reimas.

When everything was in place and Reimas was all wired up, he looked over the equipment then performed the system checks.

“Right, Blaze,” he said when he was sure everything was working, “What we’re trying to do here is either bringing on a lucid dreaming state, or using the pre-sleep hypnagogic state to help you snap free. The only hint I can give you on how that might work is that it’s a highly energetic state — a mind state, so whatever you think you can use in your own mind’s eye…”

“You mean, like sounds or colours?”

“Sounds, yes, maybe — probably rhythmic sounds, if any.”

“I thought you were in control of all that.”

“At first, but the emphasis should move to within your own mind after a while.”

Laurence helped Reimas into the chair, and was pleased to see when he returned a few minutes later that he was dozing off in the pleasant autumn sunlight of the early afternoon. A quick glance at the monitors soon confirmed that he was asleep.

It was a good start. He had to be able to reach a clear sleep state under lab conditions before he could begin to explore the states between.

A vaguely coherent mural of wild colours formed in Reimas’s mind, sprawled as he was comfortably in the autumn sunshine that was just beginning to make its way between the treetops.

As his dream intensified and resolved itself, he found himself lying beneath an untouched deep blue sky. The colours around him were those of spring — tender green turf, the pink and white of spring blossoms, the yellow faces of delicate daffodils, the soft green and olive of the new leaves and the hard browns and greys of the tree trunks.

All this was set against the misty blue of mountains in the distance, and it seemed somehow like a homecoming.

Continuing to firm and brighten, the colours and lines of everything became surreal, distinct and vividly hued beyond that of normal perception. The feather-light early spring sunshine filtered through new green foliage, blending perfectly with the scent of sun-stimulated flowers and grass borne on a gentle breeze.

In his present state, nothing indicated that he was not actually in a beautiful mountain garden in springtime. There was little there in the waking arena to disturb the flow of the dream. The day was relaxingly sunny, and the neighbourhood was even quieter than usual so that no one disturbed the peace of Jos’s hidden garden.

In ‘normal’ consciousness Reimas would have welcomed some small stimulus that could give the dream a new dimension. As his first experience of chronicled dreaming, anything at least a bit lucid might be regarded as good, but he was not the man to be pleased with less than perfect results.

In the normal waking state, his consciousness of self was still primarily defined by his previous career in screen writing. That characterized him, in his own view, as a careful explorer of verbal definition.

More recently however, he’d become an activist agent of the freedom movement, and in that role he could rarely afford to ignore the immediate demands of the job — primarily hunting adversaries and being hunted in turn. Overall, his daily life was a strange dichotomy of experience and the current polar extreme was one that he enjoyed less and less as time went by.

In view of that, and the fact that he had come a long way towards consciously rejecting some of the more unpleasant aspects of the job, the gentle, surreal nature of this dream experience was a welcome surprise.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he began to perceive how much he was savouring the experience, and this was the first manifestation of conscious awareness. His cerebral character doubtless gave him a head start in making the transition to a more conscious state. Had he been less mentally disciplined and consequently more predisposed towards escapism, he might not have been able to build the required objective perspective.

In recent years, he’d developed an enduring passion for the precise discipline of phenomenology. That had led, by extension, to a growing interest in the careful observation of many things in life, including as it happened, his recent dream experiences.

Even so, he was not always entirely precise and unswerving in his focus, as was proven now by the way he drifted on in a delightful idyll, despite his intention to make the best of Laurence’s setup.

Although the current dream was clear, Laurence could see that Reimas was a little too deeply asleep to attain the truly transcendent sort of mind state they’d hoped for. The goal was to be aware of both realities at the same time — the key objective of choice dictated by waking consciousness and its needs, combined with the deep emotional release of the dream reality.

As these two things were fundamentally incompatible, the appropriate state of consciousness could only be attained through walking a mental knife’s edge.

After a while, the idyll did change, most likely because in the nature of things such ephemeral things always change sooner or later. Perhaps however, it was the cool breeze that sprang up around mid morning that provided some small impetus for change.

In the wake of it came a temporary indistinct darkness, but it was soon supplanted by dazzling vision of a golden beach nestled between two rocky headlands capped with grass and heath.

Again, the day was perfect — the colours too bright to be real, the ambience strong — but something unusual about Reimas’s perception nagged at his awareness.

Pursuing it, his attention moved towards the beach and the water. Impossibly large rollers pounded in, white manes combing out behind and falling into ruin as they dashed on the sand. The booming sound of their impacts echoed back and forth between the high cliffs of the cove with such force that it made his heart thrill.

Not far from the shore lay a sleek white schooner. As he looked, he became aware that it was quite large —almost a sailing ship. Hove-to, it lay barely far enough out from the beach to be safe. As he gazed at it, the desire grew within him to swim out and set sail, to feel the freedom and joy of the ocean.

If he’d been sufficiently conscious to seek a reason why the yacht was in his dream, it would have occurred to him that it symbolized release from material bonds, and liberation from all the ties and commitments represented by land — perhaps even by the material world itself.

What he did know was that the more he looked at the pretty vessel, the more certain he grew of the need to swim out to it.

Yet the huge surf was clearly dangerous — perhaps impossible. Then with sudden insight he was aware of the illusion. His faculty of sight in the dream was not as it should be and was in some way distorted. The waves were steep and foreshortened as if seen through binoculars but, looking again, they no longer seemed threatening.

With that, he ran down to the shore and dived in, and a flood of energy filled him — an almost supernatural vigour that made him feel as strong and as at home in the water as if her were a dolphin.

As he neared the yacht, he swam well below the surface then shot up again, leaping several metres clear of the waves. The arcing descent was in a strange magical sort of slow motion and he landed on the rolling deck like a cat.

Freedom of movement and the warm sunshine left him feeling ecstatic, but he was soon brought up short by a new awareness of how remarkably lucid the dream state had become. It left him with an illuminating sense of vastness and power, but as soon as it had come it was gone again, and was replaced by a sense of looming threat.

Clarity was eclipsed by a dark spectre of doubt and fear, and he was nearly taken off his guard when several shadowy assailants rushed toward him. They were not human — strange dark corruptions with peculiar appendages where their faces should have been.

The ferocity of their onset allowed for only one kind of response, and despite the oppression that clouded his mind he leapt with the discipline of hard experience to meet their attack. Their forms were vague and indistinct yet he threw well-aimed blows in quick succession as three figures surrounded him. Each connected squarely but strangely, made little impression.

Falling back, he was able to see that there were subtle differences in the strange shapes where their heads should have been. Noticing more of the detail of their appearance boosted his confidence and when began to fight again, it seemed to do more for him than simply strengthen his blows.

For a while things went well, but once the first assault on him began to fade, the figures refocused their attack with new elements.

A blade appeared suddenly in the hands of the first — a fluid mysterious thing that only took recognizable form when it was almost upon him. With barely enough time to spring back out of the way, the long blade arced just in front of him, its tip far too close for comfort, but perceiving the pattern of its most efficient trajectory, he leapt into the air in correct anticipation of the next attacking stroke.

As the blade swished beneath his feet, he wondered what effect it would have on him if it hit, but the thought didn’t bother him and did little to diminish the speed or accuracy of his reactions. Warming now to the situation, he flew through precise steps sourced in his daily discipline of martial arts.

Success was always its own reward, no matter what might be the consequences of failure. Just because it was a dream wasn’t any reason to hold back, and he knew that to engineer success he would need to employ every available faculty. Increasingly, he became aware that some crucial part of him was dormant and needed to be woken.

What was dormant was necessarily beyond the present — a sort of opposite to it perhaps, and the imaginative corollary of his wondering about the blade was to will into being his own — a vital experiment, as it turned out, in determining how his forbidding opposition could be damaged.

A long, bright sword appeared in his right hand. He spun and leapt high over another advancing figure then hurled his new weapon downwards in a long arc, carving exactly through the middle of the curious head-like symbol from top to bottom.

Surprisingly, it burst outwards like a balloon, but he flipped backwards and landed again in readiness. With that, the figure began to dissipate like a lifting mist.

While he watched, the curious masked shape resolved itself for a second into something like a dark cloud, vaguely in the shape of a horse’s head.

With newfound confidence in the weapon, he lunged at the next oncoming creature, twisting in the air at the last moment to avoid its rushing onset and slashing downwards to cut the shadowy figure in two across the middle.

It crumbled into pieces like falling stonework and, perhaps because of the image’s very clarity and his own surprise, Reimas was for a moment unsteadied.

In a flash the next one came from behind the foremast and he knew from its sheer speed that it was not to be trifled with. Rolling away, he leapt up in response to the moves of this lightning-fast assailant yet still could not evade injury entirely.

A glancing blow stung and an after shock passed through him that felt like poison. Aware that it had set his heart racing even in this current state of dreaming consciousness, he feared the injury was worse than it initially seemed — that it might in some way finish him. Yet as soon as he was aware of the fear, he slapped it down hard and felt a deep surge of energy within.

In that moment, he found his opponent’s weak point.

Flipping over and behind, he thrust the blade up into the place where the neck and the base of the skull would have joined if they had been clearly visible.

A slender gold crown clanged to the deck as the creature fell.

Before he could even note where the crown rolled to, another dark figure replaced the last, firming to a precise single jet of bluish flame, a source of searing heat that shot out at him with direct stabs.

Although the symbols had sparked his curiosity, he was hard put to deduce anything from their appearance in the midst of such a desperate contest. It was all he could do to see where the angry flame would come from next, and stabs came with lethal speed whenever the figure appeared in a new place.

Eventually he was able to come close enough to strike the flame a glancing blow across the side of its curve and, strangely, the mark remained there as a indent across the bulge of its broadest part. After that it sat there unwaveringly pointing to the heavens with the curiously angled line now a fixture across one side.

No more mysterious figures came at him and the decks were cleared. Relief poured through him but then the hard bright lines of the flame began to evaporate, as did the sea and sky all around.

A heavy darkness threatened to engulf everything, pouring into his dream like a vast malign embodiment of some omnipotent cosmic scourge.

With clear vision rapidly deteriorating, and the captivating beauty of the inner world failing, Reimas turned further within. As he did so, he recalled the age-old spiritual credo that no true battle could be fought successfully in outward terms alone.

Mental discipline allowed him, now, even in the dream state, to quickly seize upon the clear perspective of causal understanding and to know that the desperate external fight with the dark creatures had only been a feint. It had been a test of his capacity to overcome delusion; a thing of the mind, not even of the astral sphere within which he was operating.

Whether in the dream world or not, it was crucial to know that the real battle would always be to establish systematic awareness. Harmonizing feeling and logic into a state of intuitive perception made it possible to establish one’s position and, therefore, one’s strategy.

Within moments of stringing these thoughts together, a tantalizing new awareness opened up, and he began to think with the sort of fluid coherency that promised to unravel great mysteries.

More than half the battle had been to ask the right questions. The problem had been as with all battles, to understand the bigger picture in order to determine the most pertinent strategy.

And he still had questions. While the symbols he had encountered were clearly the main fighting pieces of a chess game, what was the one with the curious flame and the slash that had stayed on its side? The knight, the castle and the queen were more easily identified.

Only one main fighting piece remained, but how could a flame be the bishop?

Calling up a dim memory of his first examination of chess pieces as a small boy, he remembered noting the distinctive tilted slash on the top of the bishop — the flame shaped top, as he now realized. It had seemed curious then but now, in an instant, he at last knew what it meant.

An immense vista of consciousness opened up and expanded like a flower as insight came. With all traces of the lingering sense of menace finally swept away, he stood completely still, and the sea and sky became bright again. As he looked, the sails above were somehow flung loose to the freshening breeze and the yacht leapt forwards with an apparently conscious will.

How he’d become aware of it he did not know but Reimas knew now that the tilted slash on the flame-like shape of the bishop’s spire indicated something crucial about the spiritual world.

A spire, not to mention a flame, was an obvious universal icon for divinity, but the curious diagonal slash indicated insights well beyond characteristically simplistic Christian values.

What had likely been a pagan or druidic symbol for divine inspiration would have been recast as a Christian symbol — the bishop. The tilted slash had been included but its meaning had been lost.

A subtle but interesting visual feature of the bishop, Reimas was surprised that he had never before, despite noting the mark, sought to establish its meaning.

Now, with the benefit of having gathered considerable knowledge and experience, he knew that it signified the fundamentally dual nature of the world, and that the vital corollary of conjoining the opposite aspects would reveal some of life’s deepest secrets.

Along the same lines, the two equal and perpendicular lines of the pagan cross were no doubt intended to signify the opposite orientation of the spiritual and material spheres.

Was it too long a bow to draw to extrapolate that a line tilting at an angle between the perpendiculars might indicate an opening between those spheres, whereby the opposites might be conjoined?

Searching the fundamental relationship between the spiritual and material spheres alone could reveal heaven if there was one, and if such a symbol had been included in the symbology of a pre-Christian north European game, what it symbolized must have been a crucial element of ancient druidic spiritual understanding before violent Christian conversion had obliterated it. Clearly, the pagan culture had been far more sophisticated.

Pursuing a clearer understanding of the overall picture in his mind, Reimas reflected that the ability to conjoin opposites was a crucial element in the perception of any wider spiritual context, or even in the achievement of various skills and insights associated with creative goals. And, he thought, how could one more effectively come closer to the mind of god — the ultimate creative being — than to understand the most significant principles of creativity?

With that final understanding, he found that he was free both in the astral and in the physical. The earlier stressful elements of the dream had sown the seeds of comprehension in a vital area. His eventual ascendance into a state of causal understanding had resolved the conflicting elements and rewarded him with a spiritual panorama of astonishing clarity.

In the wake of those thoughts, and perhaps to help make the experience even more memorable, the wind then gathered strength and the ship responded in kind. The wind, the sea and the vessel were in a perfect harmony of speed, power and visual beauty.

Lifting to a series of larger waves that rose up in the stiffening breeze, the sleek vessel appeared to be cresting one moving mountain after another. After surmounting the largest, she tore down the other side like a mustang on a mountainside in a cloud of rainbow-filled spray.

Rising quickly to the top of another wave, she shot forth from the crest as if to break free of the very water that was her element.

With a strange turn of the mind that felt to Reimas like the instantaneous passing of tens of thousands of years, the experience changed from sweet and thrilling to outright wild.

Akin to the momentum of a careering freight train, the experience then became overwhelming, and the roar of wind and ocean became a maelstrom of sight, sound and sensation.

Any longer in the dream and he would have allowed himself to become completely sidetracked from the purpose that had brought him thus far.

Knowing, courtesy of long cultivated self-discipline, that this was the optimal moment to return with the most complete memory of the experience, he asserted his will to wake.

A brief blankness fell over his mind before a gradual return to physical awareness.