The Dream Sickness
“Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.” – from Prelude of Nemonymous Night
I had genuinely forgotten some of the now possible relevances in this book, but I have just been reminded on Facebook to look for them in my long novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chômu Press 2011) — and I found this:
“The dream sickness – like a ‘flu pandemic – caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered …”
**See more in the comments to this post below**
EDIT: The great cover is by Heather Horsley
I had genuinely forgotten some of the now possible relevances in this book, but I have just been reminded on Facebook to look for them in my long novel NEMONYMOUS NIGHT (Chômu Press 2011) — and I found this:
“The dream sickness – like a ‘flu pandemic – caused queues at doctors’ surgeries for tablets intended for an illness from which they didn’t know they suffered …”
**See more in the comments to this post below**
EDIT: The great cover is by Heather Horsley
25 thoughts on “The Dream Sickness”
More possibly Covid-related quotes from this 2011 published novel…
Separate quotes from ‘Nemonymous Night’, and future ones discovered will appear in the comment stream below…
THE MAIN COVID (2011) ‘DREAM SICKNESS’ PAGE IS HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/the-dream-sickness/ FROM WHICH THIS PAGE BELOW IS A CONTINUATION AND SHOULD BE READ ALONGSIDE IT.
He was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on… and eventually extinguish with a dying wink… which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from Mike’s mine. It was all this… and more. Mike would only discover the ‘more’ when the time was ripe or if he became mine, if not me, himself.
Mike often reminisced about the time he worked in an office, mostly as an administrator, but also as a consultant or salesman, a business that often concerned very complex financial matters. He used to entertain clients at sporting events or orchestral concerts, lunched important representatives from other Companies, attended Board Meetings across the country, driving all manner of distances in a day. He couldn’t do this now, but, in those earlier days, he used to manage stress much better. It was almost like a dream.
the audience who, eventually, clapped as one entity: one nemonymous creature of applause with the merged thought that they remained single entities.
At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.
The covered market had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not strictly open-air or covered.
the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty. Air-liner? Hmmm. He laughed.
“It’s like that TV programme, Suse, isn’t it—you know the one. Where they evict people from the house gradually. But this is the other way round, where people are voted into a scheme of reality which fits the reality as we see it…”
This dream, then, was simply knowing—within the dreamer’s mind—that it was a horror film and that all the people in the dream were really actors, but they were unaware, apparently, of this fact. So when the dreamer him- or herself saw the birth of a baby ape, it was simply known—without equivocation—that this would grow into a giant monster. Indeed, looking through to the hall (to where the “baby ape” had fled), there were seen various people treating a gigantic human figure with some respect and unsurprise, not knowing it was a monstrous creature quickly grown from the “baby ape” and that it was pretending to perform on the stage in the hall as part of some talent competition. It towered above all the normal people. The dreamer fled from the hall—where these things had been seen—to warn the rest of the town of what was happening under their noses. Was waking, however, before or after being caught by the monster relevant?
chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?” “Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid—unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.
More quotes will appear in the comments stream below…
19 responses to “More possibly Covid-related quotes from this 2011 published novel…”
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CL: Dream sickness, yes, but nobody admits to it existing. Nobody actually says those words in public.
O: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!
CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.
O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?
(Jules Verne holidays to the Centre of the Earth which fit in as a potential way to avoid current ‘lockdown on holidays?!)
-
One part of the dream wasn’t so clear—it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it—and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.
(A lockdown-busting pub?!)
-
: except this underlay was a surface—but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. He wanted one of his special carpets to be beige-coloured to match some future required necessity of appearance, one that fitted in with a retrospective destiny. There were mounds of these vexed textures of surface: each a fire-wall—or, rather, fire-floor—as if he were readying them to serve as an insulation device that even time couldn’t penetrate.
-
The western airport area—now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course—reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research.
(There are derelict airports throughout the rest of NN, I recall.)
-
But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they are lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. […] “A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses—and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.
-
This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.
-
If he thought the destiny of the whole world depended on the outcome of his thoughts, he would have been more careful with those very thoughts or just tried to be less thoughtful altogether.
-
The headlines of the newspaper in his hands spoke of the mysteries of Angevin which had taken away most of his customers—and even those who remained in the city stayed in their houses these days dreaming of drinking Angel Wine… or even drinking it for real.
-
….some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial… some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing…
-
….to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
-
D (walking over to the curtains on silent runners making as if to open them): Out there are many situations that need fixing.
R: I know.
D: Such as that tower block—as you’ve just suggested—being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.
R: I believe you.
-
These airports were always benighted even in their respective hey-days. One theory was that they only served each other, i.e. short-haul flights between them taking place for their own sake, because it was easier to travel across the city by other means, even if one wanted to travel across the city at all. These airflights were later assumed to be merely acting as cover for their real flights—beneath the ground, with the main runways leading steeply down tunnels into the earth from each airport.
-
…brainstorming has indeed eventually become the norm—with even written documents (where one should normally have inferred a responsible writer of such documents or, at least, an editorial chief/steering-committee) being considered just as bad as pub talk. Equally, the inverse may be true, i.e. when something is written down it lends credence even to pub talk. It depends on one’s point of view.
The optimum, the fail-safe assumption, is to believe nobody is in control.
As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many documents since discovered have touched on ash clouds, dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us.
-
Which brings us straight back to the question of why there were two airports in the city, where even just one airport would have been redundant.
-
…craft skimming across the city from airport to airport, complete with scary droning just upon the hearing threshold. Simply to call them ‘scary’, however, doesn’t necessarily *make* them scary. You had to experience them to know how really scary they were.
-
It is difficult to imagine the world being better or worse than it actually is. However, without humanity to stain its pages, who knows what will then become imaginable or even real? There is a theory—to which I subscribe—that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one… time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse… or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
-
”…in the Core’s scatter-orange light…”
(There is much about the CORE in NN, and when within the Earth it’s seen as another SUN in another sky. Cf Covid as CORona.
Also see my own Core Mythos in some of my published stories in the 1990s)
-
….any mechanical aircraft whatsoever now grounded (perhaps meaninglessly grounded—and do keep listening to the news on the radio and all may be explained).
-
CL: Dream sickness, yes, but nobody admits to it existing. Nobody actually says those words in public.
O: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!
CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.
O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?
(Jules Verne holidays to the Centre of the Earth which fit in as a potential way to avoid current ‘lockdown on holidays?!)
O: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!
CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.
O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?
(Jules Verne holidays to the Centre of the Earth which fit in as a potential way to avoid current ‘lockdown on holidays?!)
One part of the dream wasn’t so clear—it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it—and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.
(A lockdown-busting pub?!)
(A lockdown-busting pub?!)
: except this underlay was a surface—but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. He wanted one of his special carpets to be beige-coloured to match some future required necessity of appearance, one that fitted in with a retrospective destiny. There were mounds of these vexed textures of surface: each a fire-wall—or, rather, fire-floor—as if he were readying them to serve as an insulation device that even time couldn’t penetrate.
The western airport area—now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course—reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research.
(There are derelict airports throughout the rest of NN, I recall.)
(There are derelict airports throughout the rest of NN, I recall.)
But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they are lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. […] “A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses—and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.
This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.
If he thought the destiny of the whole world depended on the outcome of his thoughts, he would have been more careful with those very thoughts or just tried to be less thoughtful altogether.
The headlines of the newspaper in his hands spoke of the mysteries of Angevin which had taken away most of his customers—and even those who remained in the city stayed in their houses these days dreaming of drinking Angel Wine… or even drinking it for real.
….some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial… some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing…
….to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
D (walking over to the curtains on silent runners making as if to open them): Out there are many situations that need fixing.
R: I know.
D: Such as that tower block—as you’ve just suggested—being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.
R: I believe you.
R: I know.
D: Such as that tower block—as you’ve just suggested—being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.
R: I believe you.
These airports were always benighted even in their respective hey-days. One theory was that they only served each other, i.e. short-haul flights between them taking place for their own sake, because it was easier to travel across the city by other means, even if one wanted to travel across the city at all. These airflights were later assumed to be merely acting as cover for their real flights—beneath the ground, with the main runways leading steeply down tunnels into the earth from each airport.
…brainstorming has indeed eventually become the norm—with even written documents (where one should normally have inferred a responsible writer of such documents or, at least, an editorial chief/steering-committee) being considered just as bad as pub talk. Equally, the inverse may be true, i.e. when something is written down it lends credence even to pub talk. It depends on one’s point of view.
The optimum, the fail-safe assumption, is to believe nobody is in control.
As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many documents since discovered have touched on ash clouds, dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us.
The optimum, the fail-safe assumption, is to believe nobody is in control.
As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many documents since discovered have touched on ash clouds, dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us.
Which brings us straight back to the question of why there were two airports in the city, where even just one airport would have been redundant.
…craft skimming across the city from airport to airport, complete with scary droning just upon the hearing threshold. Simply to call them ‘scary’, however, doesn’t necessarily *make* them scary. You had to experience them to know how really scary they were.
It is difficult to imagine the world being better or worse than it actually is. However, without humanity to stain its pages, who knows what will then become imaginable or even real? There is a theory—to which I subscribe—that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one… time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse… or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
”…in the Core’s scatter-orange light…”
(There is much about the CORE in NN, and when within the Earth it’s seen as another SUN in another sky. Cf Covid as CORona.
Also see my own Core Mythos in some of my published stories in the 1990s)
(There is much about the CORE in NN, and when within the Earth it’s seen as another SUN in another sky. Cf Covid as CORona.
Also see my own Core Mythos in some of my published stories in the 1990s)
….any mechanical aircraft whatsoever now grounded (perhaps meaninglessly grounded—and do keep listening to the news on the radio and all may be explained).
nullimmortalis
A cruise liner was halfway up the steep side of a cliff, dry-berthed if not literally shipwrecked. This was a concoction of several dreams, if she had but realised or known she was effectively (at some unconscious level) sharing in a vast communal vision just below the threshold of knowledge or even belief.
A cruise liner was halfway up the steep side of a cliff, dry-berthed if not literally shipwrecked. This was a concoction of several dreams, if she had but realised or known she was effectively (at some unconscious level) sharing in a vast communal vision just below the threshold of knowledge or even belief.
Why had nobody thought of daylight fireworks before, so potentially au fait with the way the world was now going, with street riots meaning there was always a strict curfew during any dark hours.
anyone sleeping next to me would have been infected by the same dreams that had just beset me… or were still besetting me.
As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in the right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.
When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself.
“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I’m trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it.
“To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape—until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox—that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”
“To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape—until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox—that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”
By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us.
- You can’t destroy evils without having set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.
*
Tears came to my eyes as I looked back at the various paths I could have picked on… chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so I could make the turning towards the goal I had once set myself.
If there is such a thing as global warming, then it’s not inside outwards, it’s outside inward, as the ‘atmosphere’ became colder and colder—until, just for a nonce, we were slightly warmed by a clearing of the darkness and a sudden thrilling vista of the Core: it was like a sun in the roof, a roof that was, in hindsight, below us as a floor. But then the spherical light vanished just as quickly, with the re-onset of darkness. I knew we would catch glimpses of this from time to time on the journey, the disc-light growing bigger each time, but equally less warm.
It simply proves that whatever we did, we did successfully, because I am here now to tell you about the important matters: the journey and its eventual repercussions for us and the rest of the world.
Dreams are often too late to throw any light on more important matters that have already arisen.
It was almost midday by Corelight, a lightsource that the inhabitants seemed to call the Sunne…
- They had indeed intended to view Sunne-Stead from the marigold-window. The moment came and went. The Sunne, rising from West to East, shuddered to a halt, poised in the white hell of the ‘sky’ for what seemed almost a minute and, then, returned East to West.
- Two Sunnes in balance, a monster between their rims – like a merged Corona? –
….like my Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing site that for a while I called Parhelion.
Otherwise, there would be some danger of his novel becoming the victorious prevailing reality: a fact which would be a vast disappointment to us all, as my own novel was the only novel that contained a happy ending. Hawling, after all, is dragging positive from negative and crystallising it. A novel is shorthand for a novelty trying to find its permanent fixture or berth as a well-established truth. And my scatter-brained extrapolations from all manner of different truths and fictions were—and still are—trying desperately to fit their novel jigsaws of shard into the ultimate picture of probability and, from probability, learning to summon the sinews of certainty… carving the perfect dimensions (inner and outer) of the sphere where we can live forever happy and content, having defeated those who wanted to smash it to smithereens even before it was formed.
- nullimmortalis
- The real City itself, the one around him with covered market, Dry Dock, derelict zoo etc., was perhaps itself a living creature preparing to lift its airport arms and follow its own corpuscles’ flightpaths to the essential Core of things. But then fantasising was a thing you could take to the Nth degree and still allow the brain to survive to deal with more down-to-earth concerns…
- The importance of number 19 to Stephen King
https://darktower.fandom.com/wiki/19
And here is where I first referred to it in my gestalt real-time review on 18 April 2011 of The Dark Tower series…
https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/the-dark-tower-the-dark-tower/
-
Dognahnyi had returned to his pent-flat and stared at a flatter day that welcomed him back from a short unexpected strobe-holiday: stared, too, upon an even flatter threadbare carpet, which he had not bothered to replace for years, despite being otherwise surrounded by hi-tech equipment together with what he boasted to be an original Rubens on the wall opposite to the other wall where glowed the closed drapes-on-silent-runners.
-
…and such as the contaminations. Dream spam. Riots in real life between dreamers from different nightmares. Dream terrorism—where no cause was too slight to warrant dream-suicide in its pursuance. Day-dream junk of confused waking.
-
—and Corelight would skim through like real sunshine to reveal the sorrows of mankind, but also illuminating a way to heal them.
-
I scribbled in my bright red Silvine ‘Nemo Book’. I spent much of most nights exploring (wandering)—mainly the two disused airports on the eastern and western sides of the city—areas called the City Arms. They inspired with their direct emptiness and spent force. Bleak and windswept, I imagined the roaring of the jet engines, the clacking of old-fashioned propeller vanes, the residual sorrow and misused heroism of war veterans that still filled the air with poignant empathy. -
Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream. These viruses are similar to birds with revolving beaks like drillbits, each a little pesky explorer. They multiply by ease of dreams being soaked into the birds’ lubrication-pores. Filters can and do work both ways. Each ‘bird’ burrows from, say, my dream into, say, your dream. It takes a bit of me to you, and a bit of you to me—mixing reality and dream, as well as you and me. Then extrapolate that at a geometric progression. Each ‘bird’ (or dream virus) has its own consciousness but that also multiplies as its mutation increases, not changing its Drill’s body so much, but changing the clouded specifics of its mind, each specific mind becoming a human mind that thinks it has got a human body—plus interaction with other ‘human beings’ of their own kind as if it is real life on the surface of our world, but really they are self-imagined figments within the bird’s cockpit as it lays waste the skins of dream throughout a mass Jungian consciousness. I know it is difficult to grasp these concepts. I have faced the situation in my own mind that I myself may be one such dream virus (or, at best, a harmless dream spam): and I’m easing the skins to open up to the manifold plankton of dream-interstitialists. Birds of Plague riding their luck…
-
Going to the only cinema left open in the city, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in derelict parks…
-
“It was you, Hataz. You were inside the body of somebody else, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever.”
There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Hataz’s flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from a forgotten airport. -
What he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.
Nobody.
The Nobody who was ever the essence of loneliness. -
Amy was now hoovering the carpet of our Quarantine Quarters in Agra Aska. The Askan authorities had decided—a bit late in the day—that both visiting parties should be held together in camera, to ensure no leakage of disease or, indeed, of dream from the surface. Hataz and Tho, the emblematic pair of young lovers from Agra Aska (and young lovers in actual fact) were also necessarily quarantined in the same room as us—bearing in mind that they had already come into skin-to-skin contact with the dowagers, Edith and Clare.
-
…sharing their literary passions with the others, should there be periods during the Quarantine when there would be time for all of us to kill.
-
Being inside that Quarantine room was worse than any hedge-shriving—but we were eventually evicted one by one, having proved our ‘purity’…
-
Ogdon was tripping the light fantastic down one of the city streets. Even at these darkest times, people like him shaped up larger-than-life and became a bigger-hearted version of themselves simply to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
-
A hawler is many things. It also means dragging things from inside other people as well as from yourself.
-
This book is in honour of that recurring dream, in the hope that it gratefully remains a dream, and that, as a dream configuring new dreams, doesn’t mutate into a worse dream, perhaps forever, to become a dream threaded with the surfaces of reality.
-
I subscribe—that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one… time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse… or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
- THE FINAL THIRD OF THIS NOVEL IS APOCRYPHAL….
- where pylons in a terrestrial metal garb were like vertical gantries or simple lamp standards with outspread feet,
- Cross-referenced to PALE FIRE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/pale-fire-vladimir-nabokov/#comment-18862
-
The sirens were strangely in advance of the emergency.
*
The Death entered Klaxon City. -
How else can deaths be imagined other than by imagining them, because if real… well the rest is common sense.
-
chivvying dream-stewards ensuring that dreams were correctly threaded in the correct order on any particular ribbon of reality or strobe-strand…
-
a global-warming turning inward on itself with a heat so over-bearing several incremental levels of dream were needed to intervene as a combined firewall to guard against its ferocity. Dream-fighting on a superhuman scale.
-
Can a planet from which I am able to be thus created, i.e. one called Earth, be more than just the head of the person who first imagined it? An Earth from the Ear to the Ground Who first imagined this Earth? Meanwhile, who imagined the head that imagined another head like the Earth?
-
“They’re the Healing Chambers.”
Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them—but now suffering from Bird Flew. -
The word ‘indelibly’ was added in brackets. It may be rubbed out later.
- Beth: Now we’ve rediscovered our love for each other, I get the feeling that they’re splitting us up again by forcing us to be on different sides in a war.
Greg: I didn’t understand all this about a war, until someone mentioned it in a cavé the other day… off the cuff almost. Klaxon seemed so peaceful when we first arrived.
Beth: (Laughs) Peaceful!
Greg: Well, you know what I mean. Citizens at peace with each other, at least, if not with this flipping racket of air signals! (Laughs, too.)
Edith: The war was second thoughts, I gather. Things were getting too boring… and tension *is* required for anything creative to work properly. Even Proust realised that as he created friction as well as fiction between levels of time.
- This war, for example. I hear it’s where a person becomes a Flew person and those who are not Flew are still themselves—and they open veins in their bodies to see if they can merge the meats between them—coming together in hugs that blend as genuinely as hugs of love always tried to be.
Beth: Or sex. Not love. Yet, it’s a war. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s not a love-in.
Edith: A love-between?
Clare: That’s a better expression—a love-between, but the meats weren’t meant to merge, because some people have become poultry—some even giant insects—leaving some other people as genuine human meat. And when they try this love-blending business, the meats reject each other. Like transplants in the old days.
-
but, luckily, Greg and Beth happened to be together when the war first ignited and they had the combined nous to take the path of least resistance (albeit the most unlikely for safety) where the interior of this particular Lethal Chamber, by dint of a lateral irony (an expression that bears repeating), turned out to afford a relative immunity.
(Greg and Beth like myself and Denise today in our own ‘chamber’ of immunity during Corona or as this book might call it, Sunnemo…?) -
Turkey-halting, I call it.
-
The Weirdmonger—upon his now legendary rite of passage through Klaxon’s peripheral mudparks—came across a dreamcatcher hanging in the sky.
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a carrier of the bird-sickness in a more virulent form, encouraging people-to-people contamination instead of mere bird-to-people contamination.
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The sickness has now reached the surface via man-city—Viet Nam, Rumania, Turkey, later London, even Clacton—then New York, the whole globe infected
-
Null Immortalis.
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‘Nemonymous Night’ ostensibly deals with many current matters (as they happen) and today bird sickness has fallen lower in the sky—and we can only hope that the fiction itself is helping to lower influenza’s temperature and eventually eradicate it.
- Even fiction has its own version of pitiful senility amid the other realities to which it ever tries to cling.
- The Art of Fiction needs, therefore, to progress towards a stricter and more verifiable account of what happened or what will happen in the final war between humanity and a terrible foe and, subsequently, by extrapolation, to become a means to the end of neutralising the results of that very war.
- One day, the absurdity of it all might make them laugh out loud. But, by then, they would have forgotten what laughter might accomplish.
- “Tricking the Above, the Below and the Across.”
Another paragraph from Nemonymous Night: “‘The Tenacity Of Feathers’ ostensibly deals with many current matters (as they happen) and today bird sickness has fallen lower in the sky – and we can only hope that the fiction itself is helping to lower influenza’s temperature and eventually eradicate it. Fiction is that powerful. A happy ending (yes, skip to the end of the book, go on) – it’s bound to be a happy ending or the author would never have finished it.”
“Only later does the book discover that the world is quite a different world from the one for which it has been prepared.” – from the Prelude of Nemonymous Night
“Yes, a lie sickness, a plague of lies…”
“The blurb on the back cover mentioned it was an ‘alternate world’ fiction treating of the rabbit plague in Fifties England where the rabbit’s disease—myxomatosis—mutated and spread into a human-to-human disease, thus wiping out the population. Dreary stuff, she thought, slapping the book back on the table, next to Proust.”
“dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us.”
“Today, however, there are no coal-mines and therefore haulers have died out. Now, with the plagues, I reckon that butchering of meat may be within a hawler’s brief. Just a whimsical thought on my part. But I try to keep my mind busy, as there is so much to worry about otherwise.”
“A: Not a war so much, Suds, as head-on collisions of bird-sickness plague, body to body… blending…
S: I don’t understand. I don’t think I ever will.”
“Other factors lengthening the tentacles of angst included the so-called ‘nervous little people’ that seemed to plague them at every turning of the city. They were seeking identities and, if this *were* a dream after all, then identities *could* be stolen and used elsewhere.”
“Reflection: A people carrier?
O: Yes, a human being who’s infecting the birds with a virus, and not vice versa.”
“Dream viruses. They are mutating, I fear, becoming more able to fly from dream to dream without culpability. This allows the contents of each dream to swill in and out of each dreamskin, and they can even penetrate the skin of life itself and enter the mainstream.”
“necessary for the ultimate virus-buster of them all. It was like a scientific process of Parthenogenesis (coincidentally the first book in the Bible)—whereby creation’s re-ignition is possible by means of creative imagination rather than by years of empirical scientific study—“
“and that dampness tended to get down their chests causing coughs which they prayed were nothing to do with the more general sicknesses they’d heard rumoured in the city before embarking on this journey.”
“ Tho coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural,…”
“Excuse the cough. It’s my way of laughing.”
“hiding its own history of pandemic or the dream sickness had abated allowing real memories to subsist instead.”
“that dampness tended to get down their chests causing coughs which they prayed were nothing to do with the more general sicknesses they’d heard rumoured in the city before embarking on this journey.”
“The word ‘gremlins’ was a euphemism for Dream Sickness, a plague of which had only recently been taken under control by the authorities. The difficulty was to trust that the doctors weren’t under its influence themselves because different forms of the complaint would have caused them to practice equally different methods of treating it. Now the plague was effectively under control, indeed almost one hundred per cent eradicated, anyone claiming to be suffering from it was immediately branded a malingerer or simply work-shy.”
“She had a knack at the art of logical pigeon-holing and, during the Flew Plagues, she suddenly slipped through a meathole left by the careless Feemy Fitzworth…”
“Cat’s meat liquidised into doses of linctus to stave off Flew…”
“Greg and Beth were offered a chance to view more specialist operations upon Klaxonites who were suffering from a version of Bird Flew deeper than their own bodies, with diseased feather-spindles spreading their cancerous spike-ends unto the soul itself. Beth, even with her hard-nosed Essex-girl image, was reluctant to accompany Greg on this part of the tour. So Greg—putting himself in the hands of a masked surgeon—was taken on his own to not a Lethal Chamber as such, but something far worse. Lethal Chambers would at least staunch the pain eventually. Here Greg saw a patient—etherised upon a table—presenting a pink wasteland of body surface tussocked with Bird Flew. Apparently, this patient had earlier indeed managed flight as high as the highest pylon of the city, only flopping to earth with a wing-stressed bounce—because, otherwise, a mercifully heavy fall from flight would have ended his illness there and then. Illnesses tended to die with their patients. Except in the most diseased cases. The surgeon was wielding a instrument like a pen-torch that emitted a beam of siren-sound more intense than any hearing could bear if that hearing had insufficient dream protection—which, luckily, had been provided for Greg by one of the dream stewards from Klaxon itself. […] …the shrieking ‘pen-torch’ surgical instrument. The patient himself was resistant to any application of Angevin ointment to help with humane plucking. So, the surgeon (equally protected by one of Blasphemy Fitzworth’s dreams) aimed the ‘pen-torch’ beam of sound towards the most obtrusive of the rooted feathers and seared hard at its clawhold for some hours, as Greg watched the surrounding flesh sizzle and then melt away from the column of healing key-hole sound. Eventually, the surgeon could yank the feather-spindle from its tenacious grip on the patient’s bony soul-matter. Only the patient’s resultant wild screaming at the top of his voice was the final danger of sound-deafening proportions to any onlookers. But, with that withstood, the surgeon and Greg left the patient to recover for a while—before they returned to attack the next feather’s root in a long line of such feathers carpetting the patient’s flesh.”
and
“‘They’re the Healing Chambers.’
Greg and Beth were taken into one. There they found creatures that evidently had once been human like them—but now suffering from Bird Flew. Each body (including face) was currently being cream mudbathed with Angevin (this being a new discovery of its curative qualities in addition to its known dream-masking) to remove feathers at their root so they would not return. Each patient—to have been admitted to this particular chamber and its specialist healing process—had been forced to show the depth of their illness by actually proving they could fly: hence the name of their disease. One of them was in such a state of desperation that, having once flown, he or she needed to show, so as to be treated, they couldn’t fly any more: a method that necessitated the painful process of plucking. Those that were incurable and more intrinsically (indelibly) Bird Flown or still-Bird-Flying (albeit only in dreams) were forced from their beds and frog-marched next door to what was called a Lethal Chamber. One patient was jerking in his or her bed—as if pitifully trying to fly from within the heavy quilt. The nurses—who themselves were not dissimilar to human-like ostriches—continued, undeterred, the painful process of plucking that did not seem out of place amid all the wailing noises. As Greg and Beth left—after their tour as tourists—they spotted a long winding queue of hopping creatures leading to one of the notorious Lethal Chambers. Some hopped a few feet into the air and then flopped back. Greg averted his eyes. None of this would go in the book.”
If it does sell more copies because someone decides it is a useful imaginatively prophetic-in-hindsight healing or hawling device in the world’s current dire circumstances, and if there are any royalties due to me as its authorial facilitator, then they will be verifiably paid over straightaway to the NHS.
— Nemonymous Night
Flattening the Curve?
And: http://www.compulsivereader.com/2011/10/09/a-review-of-nemonymous-night-by-d-f-lewis/
And: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/nemonymous-night
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/
including much fiction that pretends to be true.
“It is an unrecorded fact that THE HAWLER (with its index-number of H5N1 now visible for the first time from the direction of any observers) stayed over…”
“It was the pub that many continually sought in dreams but forgot about seeking when they woke up.”
But Jules Verne holidays to the centre of the earth!
(There is much about the CORE in NN, and when within the Earth it’s seen as another SUN in another sky. Cf Covid as CORona.
Also see my own Core Mythos in some of my published stories in the 1990s)