Two music friends in rapidly gentrifying Portland, OR discover lucid dreaming as a way to fix their lives and take a few musical detours but HR ladies and racist inmates have other plans.
Have you ever wanted to go back in time to fix something in your life? The Dream Police rejoins the characters from Blazak's 2011 novel, The Mission of the Sacred Heart, fifteen years later. Zak and Lenny are in rapidly gentrifying Portland, Oregon, connected my their mistakes, one horribly tragic. They stumble upon lucid dreaming as a way to visit their favorite moments in rock and roll history, and maybe find alternate routes their own lives should have taken. Like Mission, The Dream Police is a rock novel. The story is built on the 1979 Cheap Trick album, using its songs to guide the musical fiction. The book tackles weighty issues, like gentrification, the commercialization of music, and the sexual politics of higher education, with humor and the energy that comes from a great song. The Dream Police is an innovative story, existing in both real time and dream time. Because it is rooted in the author's experiences as a sociology professor, the book is intended to help people heal. In this spirit, 10% of books sales are being donated to UNICEF for the benefit of refugee children.
Excerpt
Time is a bedspring that bends around itself. It pushes itself towards older coils but never actually touches them. Just close enough to feel the magnetic pull of the physical through the conceptual. We try to straighten it out for our own intentions, but as we sleep, it returns to its original form, designed by forces we will never begin to understand.
Professional Reviews
Angie Bowie says...
“Randy Blazak’s rock n’ roll novels, The Mission of the Sacred Heart, and The Dream Police, are fierce examples of art imitating life imitating art. His fancy gimmicks and riffs have all the bravado of a rock n roll aficionado and player yet tempered with academic bridge-work. Rock n’ roll novels are a part of our bizarre individual culture of challenging collectivism and, like a Heathcote Williams poem, this book rails against assimilation.”
- Angie Bowie, author of Lipstick Legends
Dream Police live inside of my head...
Randy Blazak’s beautifully destructive second novel, "The Dream Police," (a cross between "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Vanilla Sky," and "Inception") was a proverbial jab, jab, and finishing uppercut to all of your emotions. Blazak has a talent for immediately making you feel hatred, empathy, pity, or hope for each character right out of the gun. There is no pitter-pattering around with who you want to hang out with, and who you’d like to choke. And he pits these emotions, in the form of characters, against you as you float further down the stream of these people’s lives. You stop rooting for the underdog, and you find yourself cheering for the person who may represent all you hate about yourself, and he does it so craftily that you don’t even know you’re doing it, until you feel dirty. But, it’s a good dirt. It’s the kind of dirt that reminds you that you are alive, and Blazak pushes the reader through an endless web of a chess game that every time you think you have checkmate, a pawn appears out of nowhere, sending everything you thought was real into a tailspin. The real payoff here is the climax. As an author myself, I know how hard it is to end a novel with a lasting impression on the reader; an ending where the reader wont shake it off for a few days. The Dream Police does this in triplicate. One of the most disturbingly satisfying endings I have ever read. One that will linger with me for a long time. Kudos for being brave enough to release this monster of an ending into the world. It is not for the faint of heart, or the emotionally unstable.
The Dream Police is a MUST read, Randy Blazak has outdone himself!!
Blazak has done it again! The Dream Police is the most realistic and enthralling fiction you will read! This is a novel about the human conditions of love & loss, relationships, parenthood, bureaucracy, and the dreamworld. Just mix in a deep knowledge of the musical world and its culture, gentrification, and an imprisoned skinhead named Stan, and you’ve got The Dream Police! Blazak describes dreams so vividly, he takes his readers with him to an intense landscape where the brain unleashes all the strange that is our subconscious. (Not like hearing your coworker tell you their boring dream from the night before, as you try to stay awake.) As a sequel to Mission of the Sacred Heart, we get to see the characters as they’ve evolved from the trials they’ve previously faced and how it informs the decisions they make in their new predicaments. Exposed are their new emotional scars and the baggage they’ve collected along the way. The ease of being able to relate to the characters makes The Dream Police a very comfortable read that you don’t want to put down. It’s obvious he is an expert in Sociology, as Blazak writes in a way that exposes the raw humanity in a character, allowing you to understand/respect the reasons why each character came to be the way they are, even when you don’t necessarily like them. Blazak’s characters follow through with their personalities, down to the hilarious and sometimes tragic small details. The lucid dream element to this novel will turn your reality upside down, inside out, and leave you questioning if you are in a dream, or if you’ve ever existed outside of one. The way he describes the Portland, OR neighborhood (which the main character Zak resides in,) and the gentrification occurring there, is extremely sobering & very true to life. It’s also easily relatable for anybody living in a city that has become the new ‘hip’ place to live, pushing the long-time residents out. When Zak finds his way to a Portland jazz club in 1945 in one dream, Blazak creates an enchanting image of the city and musical culture for the readers, that can’t be shaken next time you are walking or driving around town. The end of The Dream Police will have you laughing, crying, cry-laughing, and pulling your hair out all at once. I like to think of it as comfortably uncomfortable, and if you are like me, you will finish at LEAST the last 2 chapters in one sitting, because you just won’t be able to put it down! Bravo Blazak, bravo!
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This is the trade paperback edition of the mythopoeic paranormal novel recounting the attempts of one Danny Blue and his friends to come to terms with a series of unusual events in his life. A Kindle eBook edition is also available.
