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Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: 2nd Edition Amazon
ISBN-10: 1930928777
Type: Fiction
Pages: 184
Copyright: March 1, 2002
ISBN-13: 9781930928770
Price: $1.99 (eBook)
The world of dreams and the world of waking collide.
The Gates of Sleep is a science fiction/fantasy novel set in a near, dark future. Below the waking world, where the US has become a fallen power slipping into seedy obsolescence, a war is raging for the zeitgeist, for the hopes and dreams of mankind. Will is an agent of industrial espionage and a lucid dreamer. He finds himself caught in the middle of that war in both worlds, fighting for self and the soul of mankind as all the systems that man has created collectively struggle to awaken.
Excerpt
Twin are the gates of sleep;
men say that one is of horn,
a ready exit for real shades;
the other is white, of flawless ivory
this way the dead send false dreams to the world.
--Virgil, The Aeneid
Prologue
You will have noticed that the world has changed.
The change came upon us like a live thing, all sound and fury, much like all the others changes to which the previous centuries introduced us. I wonder if it was the same when some grimy innovator struck that first mark into clay. Did he feel the weight of all that was to come tumbling down on him? Did he imagine the golden bounty to be reaped from the recorded thoughts of the human animal over time? Could he count the terrible cost of the same? Could he see the myriad colors of the future?
I don’t think we’re much more clear about all that now.
Change continues to baffle us, flowing in a mighty stream that lets the experts among us turn and look back along the track and say “Oh, yes. It was inevitable that all would happen thus.”
Marvelous are the ways of hindsight.
And yet, if we can raise our eyes to catch a glimpse of all that lies past the bubbling magic of the moment, to all the courses that lay open to this rushing stream of time, what terrible wonders might we see waiting for us?
I don’t know where we’re going, certainly. Whether it’s to a more beautiful or more cruel place, I can say only this: I was there in the beginning. I saw everything change. I stood across the border, with one foot in the future, and one foot in the past. I rode the crest of the wave, and listened to the voice of the waters. I stood on the edge of the instant, and looked out at the courses that lay open before us...
And the colors burned with the fires of creation.
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