April/May 2002
|
DREAMER Reviewed by Lynne Lamberg |
|
Santa Fe dream researcher Jody Nightwood thinks she can prove dreams are objectively “real.” She doesn’t suspect that the hefty grant she got to pursue her research, ostensibly from a pharmaceutical company, really came from the CIA. CIA staffer Benjamin George believes better understanding of dreams will help him create a computer capable of rational thinking. He launches a covert operation called “Operation Dreamer” to spy on Jody and other dream researchers. George’s rival within the agency, determined to thwart this project, brings in his own spies to find out what dream researchers know, and then kill them. Readers first have to get past the notion that dream researchers strive to conceal rather than reveal their findings, a premise that’s often wrongly applied to dreams themselves. After that, the story line resembles an X-Files scenario. Like the TV show, it dishes up mysterious strangers, unlikely coincidences, pseudoscientific jargon, and false leads. At the Center for Dream Control, Jody serves as one of her own dream study subjects. She’s awakened at the end of REM sleep episodes to report her dreams into a tape recorder. Her supposedly state-of-the-art lab lacks one common piece of equipment: a camera in subjects’ rooms. Jody likes to sleep nude, separated by only a clear pane of glass from the watchful gaze of her male sleep lab technologist. The technologist evidently has plenty of time on his hands, enough to write a novel about—no surprise—a handsome young sleep lab assistant who has a passionate affair with his good-looking female boss. While monitoring sleepers, he likes to sip rum-laced coffee. A technologist would be fired for that in a real lab, but Jody doesn’t object. Seeing the rum bottle on the technologist’s desk, she takes a swig herself on her way out of the lab. Jody draws on theoretical physics and mathematics,
with a generous dollop of Carlos Castenada and American Indian lore,
to devise a muddled theory she claims shows that dreams exist in space
and time. Though she speculates endlessly on the nature of consciousness,
anyone who’s taken Psychology 101 won’t gain additional
insight here. Entranced by lucid dreaming, Jody exploits her ability to know she’s dreaming while she’s dreaming almost every night. In her dreams, she enjoys a passionate affair with an imaginary lover, Ish, who makes her alpha waves “go crazy.” Jody is torn between Ish and a mysterious stranger she encounters while skiing alone one night who later appears in one of her dreams as a vampire. One of the more bizarre subplots of this novel is that the guy, John Shade, is a vampire. He ventures out periodically to do what vampires do, though, fortunately, he spares Jody. He also works for the CIA. Like Shade, many characters in this book have double identities, including a cop/shaman, and hermit/philosopher. Various sexual pairings, including those of gay spies, lesbian parents, and Jody and her wake-time/dream-time lovers, offer further riffs in the novel’s exploration of waking and sleeping as alternative realities. Shade and some others in this book appeared in Nightshade, an earlier novel by Jack Butler, who teaches creative writing at the College of Santa Fe. The writing, though often graceful, doesn’t compensate for shortcomings in plot and character development. |
Copyright (c) 2002
Websciences |