Dreamside is a fantasy novel by British author Graham Joyce, first published in the United Kingdom by Pan Books in 1991.

[2] Dreamside was later translated into French by Thomas Bauduret and published as L'enfer du rêve in France in May 1995.

The study group dwindles over the span of the semester until only four students, Lee, Ella, Brad, and Honora, are left.

Led by Professor L. P. Burns, the remaining students accept the role of paid researchers for an experimental field of study: shared lucid dreaming.

But venturing to Dream-side has a number of unexpected side-effects: it becomes increasingly difficult for the dreamers to separate their lucid dreams and reality.

They thought they could escape Dreamside only to find that over ten years later, it is once again worming its tendrils back into their lives.

Believing that either Brad or Honora is travelling to Dreamside and causing the effects to manifest in the others, Ella convinces Lee that they must find their other two classmates.

The novel flashes back twelve years earlier to April 1974 when Lee, wanting desperately to start a conversation with Ella, joins a lucid dreaming study that she shows interest in.

Burns' decision to select two pairs of the opposite sex may have been deliberate: over the course of the study, Lee and Ella become intimate.

The Professor, wishing to set the foundation for a share dream space between the four, takes the students for a weekend vacation to a rural cabin owned by a colleague of his.

If they stop paying attention to themselves, the dreams begin to meld and sink into the ground, water, or tree.

Honora confides with Ella that she had a miscarriage in the real world, but gave birth to a daughter in Dreamside.

These outbursts—although Burns would never admit it—may be the emotional leftovers of a man who suffers from loneliness after the death of his wife, Lilly.

Wearing jackets three sizes too large, driving her convertible with the top down in the middle of winter, willing to travel long distances at the drop of the dime, she is a fairly unorthodox woman.

Brad is a boisterous, tactless man who has spent his post-college years moving from one country to another, to one company after another.

In managing to tap four individual subconsciousnesses and conjoining them into a single dreamscape, Joyce has created a literal occurrence of the phrase "collective unconscious."

The students' decision to continue the experiments without the controlling factor of the professor's oversight opens them up to possibilities and dangers that they lack the maturity to handle.

The eventual conclusion to the experiments is that tragedy occurs and all four students attempt to leave it behind as they did with other follies of their youth.

[5] He said it is not a "twee study of youth [with] a happy ending", but a story about very ordinary people dealing with their "broken lives".

Emsley praised the "maturity" of Joyce's writing, in particular the way he "disorientates the reader as the relationships between the two worlds shift from being intertwined to being polar opposites, moving the perception of the threat.

"[5] Reviewing the novel in Interzone, science fiction and fantasy author and critic John Clute stated that while Dreamside may not be very original, it is "a beautiful little book".

[6] He said that although Joyce tends to evoke Lewis Carroll "too slavishly", and the ending is "a little too neat", Dreamside "is a welcome read": the story "wells up inside itself" and "[t]here is more to this book than it can hold".

"[7] The entry for Joyce in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works stated that the integration of emotional trauma and the supernatural in Dreamside "is an innovation that redeems [the book's] many problems.

"[8] On 1 August 2006, Joyce noted in a blog entry that he had optioned the film rights to Dreamside to a French producer.