The Dreamers

This is the second novel by the American writer Karen Thompson Walker, originally published in English as The Dreamers. The Chinese edition was brought in by Dook Culture, translated by Li Yaxin, and included in the "Dook Science Fiction Library." The story takes place in a Southern California college town called Santa Lora: not long after the fall semester begins, a college freshman goes out one night, falls asleep, and never wakes up the next day. Her roommate Mei at first thinks she is just sleeping off a hangover, until late at night she finds her still lying in exactly the same position. At the hospital, doctors can find no cause—she looks as if she is simply "sleeping normally," yet brain imaging shows her brain activity is more intense than any ever recorded. The "sleeping sickness" soon spreads through the town, first to the girls on the same dorm floor, then to the hospital, the library, the neighborhood. It spreads the way everyday intimacy does: breathing the same air, touching, being in the same room. Within three weeks, hundreds have fallen asleep, their heartbeats gradually slowing and their vital signs fading. Quarantine is imposed, schools close, the library is turned into a temporary ward, and the military moves in to seal off the town. The novel uses a third-person omniscient perspective, moving in turn into the situations of several groups of characters: the quiet, introverted Mei; a guarded single father and his two young daughters; a young professor couple who have just moved there with a newborn; a neuropsychiatrist who comes from out of town; a biology professor whose partner lies ill in a nursing home; and a girl who discovers only in sleep that she is pregnant. They must hold their daily lives together amid fear and loss, and wait for the sleepers to give them an answer. And when the first patients wake, the real confusion begins: the life lived in the dream is equally real, long, and complete, and those who wake must decide which is their reality.