Trevor Elder

I read the first book in this series (10202040: The Dream Dialogues #1) and almost tuned into that, then continued with this next instalment to see where it was going. This novella is an improvement and it’s even funny in places, yes there are good bits, although you need to be the sort of person who doesn’t mind confusion and is prepared to go with the flow.

I would predict that people who like their stories to keep to an established genre and be eminently predictable within those boundaries (stories that replicate what they liked before) will give this a low star rating. I’d put it at a three and a half. On the whole, I think most people do not like to experiment or discover anything new (despite what they claim in this regard) and this work is clearly a refusal to follow anyone else’s narrative pattern. If you gave a control-freak a dose of LSD or put them on a roller coaster, they’d react badly and not see the purpose of it. Ditto this little experiment – because to get to the same headspace the author occupies, you would do well to suspend disbelief, take the critical brakes off reality, immerse yourself in the surreal and anecdotal experience and stop searching for anchor points. It is surrealism, dreamscape, pure and simple. Learn to enjoy being lost.

I thought the mental health aspect was well accomplished, making it difficult for the audience to disentangle what was a dream and what was a living reality for a damaged mind, since they had so much in common. The sequences where We The People write their demands and complaints to the Queen and she replies “Dear We The People” in a ping-pong battle of absurdity is the highlight of the work, remarkable enough to make the stop-start epic flow of unreality worthwhile.

It was a bit too loose for me, deliberately obscure and incoherent, irrelevant passages and dream anecdotes around a loose story that becomes apparent long after the start. It had value, but much was hidden in a tangled matter that didn’t really resolve or declare its intentions. I don’t need genre but I follow clues about what to look for and didn’t get my usual trail of breadcrumbs.

This excerpt is wonderful, however:

After the doctor had gone, Astronauticus went for a walk.

“Morning,” he said to the chess master Zugzwang as he passed his table.

“Check,” replied Zugzwang.… (mais)

You need to be very persistent to get anything from this book. Let’s just say the kind of person who couldn’t finish Ulysses wouldn’t finish this. The dream dialogue aspect makes for a lucid and confusing start, where there’s so much conversation about egg plants that it’s hard to gather the clues about where the story is going. What happened to the structure? That can be explained because people who feel the need to describe their dreams are only doing so because they need another opinion to make sense of them. However, the reader didn’t ask to be the character’s shrink. It’s a full blown, huffin’ and puffin’ lost train of consciousness that you might feel is so far off the rails that it’s never coming back. There is a master plan though, but you have to work your way through to the end to comprehend it.

The story centres upon a mystery. Why did more than 20 people all lose their memories about a single calendar day? What happened to them? What did they have in common? Is it going to happen again? Initially, people look at the shared dream motifs and try to figure out what they stand for (in reality, they say if you dream of wasps, the interpretation is that that’s a symbol for burglars so you’re feeling vulnerable). What’s the wolf or eagle? Is it a Nostradamus reference or Jung’s animism? What is Mother? Gradually it is revealed that in order to make society safe, there are no public spaces that are not monitored and the feed is broadcasted live for anyone to see online. Some people have implants which facilitate this sort of connection between biology and IT infrastructure. Huge swathes of the population have, naturally, taken up the hobby of stalking famous people full-time, or watching murders happen, although crime as a whole has been deterred by the millions of eyes everywhere. Advertising revenue for live streams incentivises people to want to be watched.

There’s so much lucid thought in this, so many characters susceptible to madness, that dialogues soon become uncontrollable and switch lazily between insight and nonsense. The reader may wonder what they’re doing in this experimental urban exploration fantasy, whether they are truly welcome in this guy’s brain. That’s it, I think; the reader is invited into the writer’s brain without any editing, which mirrors the public in the story being invited into strangers’ lives with no barriers or editing. Are they wasting their precious lives of will they see something that makes it all worthwhile? As with any good mystery novel, a big reveal comes in the last couple of pages. Some readers won’t complete the journey to this point, but for those who do, the madness eventually makes some weird kind of sense.… (mais)