The Dreamers

Karen Thompson Walker creates stories where an impossible event takes place, yet she paces it out so slowly and thoughtfully, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. In The Age of Miracles, the rotation of the sun slows until a single day lasts weeks; in The Dreamers, the population of a town is affected by a virus that causes people to fall into a deep sleep. At first a student in a dorm falls asleep, then, quickly others. The dorm is placed under quarantine, and then the town is placed under cordon sanitaire, a French term I was happy to learn, dating from medieval times and referring to a physical or guarded barrier that separates an infected area. 

The doctors and scientists who study the sleeping townspeople and college students soon discover that they are dreaming: 

The true contents of the dreams go unrecorded, of course, but in some patients, the accompanying brain waves are captured with electrodes and projected on screens, like silhouettes of the hereafter. [...] There is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain - awake or asleep.

Walker's narrative voice in The Dreamers feels like an all-seeing eye that peels back the ceiling of first this house and then another, revealing the contents like a dollhouse, or a scene in a Wes Anderson movie.  For example, some patients are kept in the college library, for lack of space. 

  In the Classics section, a visitor could read about the oracles of ancient Greece and Rome , how the people of those eras believed that dreams could sometimes reveal the future.
  One floor down, in the Psychology section, one might eventually discover that Carl Jung, at a certain point in his life, became convinced that he had dreamed of his wife many years before he met her.
  On another part of that same floor, in Philosophy, one could entertain the theory that if you could truly understand the complexity of reality, you could accurately predict the future, since every moment of the future is set in motion by the events of the past - the whole system simply too complex for the human mind to model.

She taps into the sense of environmental unease that permeates our society, and, in this case, literal isolation of people who are living in what feels like a complex and dangerous time, always on the brink of natural or man-made disaster.  The Dreamers shares themes with another book I've read recently, Nick Drnaso's graphic novel, Sabrina.  In each, internet fear-mongering runs rampant, with ignorant trolls both blaming and diverting.  Conspiracy theories run rampant, claiming that what we, the reader, know to be true, never actually happened.

How people react to disaster is a common theme in Walker's books. Two sisters find fortitude in each other while their dad sleeps; a young man from the college imagines himself a savior while he endangers those closest to him.  Most people close ranks, concentrating only on themselves or their families.  The virus further isolates people who are already isolated. 

Ultimately, this book caused me to think about dreaming and consciousness in a different way.  I love any book that sends me on a search - to learn more about a word or an event.  Walker's clear love of language and desire to understand human reactions to extreme situations permeates The Dreamers with an infectious (why am I the way that I am?) curiosity.