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Book Reviewed by:An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep.
One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep - and doesn't wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.
Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams - but of what?
Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life - in our waking days and, perhaps even more, in our dreams.
The Dreamers has an interiority that makes it rise above categorization as a simple mystery. This is a story about people, about communities; it is much less about the disease than it is about the people the disease affects. The novel moved me and made me consider the questions it posed long after I turned the last page...continued
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(Reviewed by Adrienne Pisch).
In The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker, an illness is spreading that causes everyone infected to go into a deep sleep with heightened brain activity that is suggestive of dreaming. Sleep and dreams are central to the novel, but there is a lot we don't know about both.
Different stages of sleep can be assessed through the use of an electroencephalograph (EEG) to measure different types of brainwaves. These waves are composed of electrical pulses synchronized across the brain's neurons, and they are differentiated by frequency of the pulses (measured in Hertz; cycles per second). Higher frequencies correspond to higher levels of alertness, while lower frequencies correspond to the deepest levels of sleep.
While sources vary on the ...
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Frighteningly powerful, beautiful, and uncanny, The Dreamers is a love story and also a horror story - a symphonic achievement, alternating intimate moments with a panoramic capture of a crisis in progress.
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