Dreamside (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Graham Joyce |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Speculative Fiction, Fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Pan Books |
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Publication date
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1991 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 248 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 46645066 |
Dreamside is a fantasy novel by Graham Joyce first published in the United Kingdom by Pan Books in 1991. It was later reprinted in the United States by Tor Books in 2000. The novel's primary theme is the power of the subconscious and the futility of attempting to escape the past.
The novel deals with four British college students. They are drawn together by a study funded by the Psychology Department that is in need of student volunteers. The study deals with lucid dreaming. The study group dwindles over the span of the semester until there is a core group left: Lee, Ella, Brad, and Honora.
The four dreamers, led by Professor L.P. Burns, take the role of paid researchers for an experimental field of study: shared lucid dreaming. They manage to create a pocket of shared space that they call "Dreamside" and begin experimenting with different phenomena. But venturing to Dreamside has a number of unexpected side-effects: it becomes more and more difficult for the dreamers to separate the two worlds. Then one day, an act of violence shatters the students' trust in one another and they put Dreamside behind them once and for all.
The novel opens in February 1986 with Lee Peterson waking up and going about his daily routine before heading to work. But something is off. Lee takes an egg from the refrigerator and tries to break it into a frying pan. It doesn't break. He tries again; it wobbles. Lee then wakes up. He begins his routine again only to wake up again. This happens a number of times, like the peeling of one layer of onion off another. Lee calls these occurrences repeaters.
The phone rings and he wakes up again to hear a voice that he hadn't heard since his college days: Ella Innes. The first thing they say to each other is that it's happening again. 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.
Lee and Ella meet to discuss why this was happening to them now and what to do about it. 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. Lee reluctantly agrees to go find Brad while Ella searches for a reclusive Honora.
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.
The group consists of a variety of students, some pretending that they lucid dream and those that legitimately can. Over the semester, the group dwindles to a few students. At the end, Professor L.P. Burns picks Ella and Lee along with Brad and Honora. 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. Brad, an obnoxious yet skilled lucid dreamer, wishes the same scenario between him and the shy Honora. The professor is conducting a double-blind study. The lucid dreaming serves as a distraction to study group dynamics. However, Burns' interest in the dream data increases as the four began showing promising results with the exercises.
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