The Dreamers
CBC Books | | Posted: January 15, 2019 6:11 PM | Last Updated: January 16, 2019
Karen Thompson Walker
A college girl tells her friends that she's feeling strangely tired. The next morning, when they find her in bed, she is still breathing — but she won't wake up.
Within a few days, another student, down the hallway, won't wake up.
As the sleeping sickness spreads, the town is turned upside down. We meet Ben and Annie, a young couple determined to keep their newborn baby safe; Sara and Libby, whose survivalist father has long prepared for disaster; Mei and Matthew, and other college students. A quarantine is established, the national guard is summoned. Yet, those who have fallen asleep are showing unusual patterns of brain activity. More than has ever been recorded in any brain — asleep or awake. They are dreaming — but of what? (From Bond Street Books)
From the book
At first, they blame the air.
It's an old idea, a poison in the ether, a danger carried in by the wind. A strange haze is seen drifting through town on that first night, the night the trouble begins. It arrives like weather, or like smoke, some say later, but no one can locate any fire. Some blame the drought, which has been bleeding away the lake for years, and browning the air with dust.
Whatever this is, it comes over them quickly: a sudden drowsiness, a closing of the eyes. Most of the victims are found in their beds.
But there are some who will tell you that this sickness is not entirely new, that its cousins have sometimes visited ours. In certain letters from earlier centuries, you may find the occasional reference — decades apart — to a strange kind of slumber, a mysterious, persistent sleep.
From The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker ©2019. Published by Bond Street Books.