Ştefan Tiron's Reviews > Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan reads almost like secret dream diary of an accidental dream-hacker. I feel I don't do any service with this review to the complexity of what's it like to visit dreams and while reading, to sleep in between and wake-up, almost surging out trough what other beings are dreaming.
Dream-hacker named Charlie is the (im)perfect heroine of this particular moment we live in. It's wonderful to read and feel the fullness of an inner floating world suddenly accessible - yet somehow so constructed & so built up. You can access this world via Charlie's dream diaries that start like reports and spread out into a city like architecture.
She's got everything staked against her somehow - she's never in charge of her physiology nor her love life, her waking time is riddled with absences & blanks. She's almost stumbled into her life's mission: staying tuned to nightly visions becose of a burdensome condition a disability of sorts - narcolepsy. Her 'normal' life has been made impossible & also incredibly exciting by this paralysis of the body. What anybody would consider a crippling incapacity - not being able to stay awake, always falling asleep anywhere and wherever: falling back to sleep mostly out of stress during difficult moments.

The very conditions of her employment, entering the sleep of others are just a side-effect of her being part of a chosen test group using nanotech for fixing various neuro - degenerative diseases. At the same time she never chose this.
She feels powerless in front of various events and forces, at the mercy of unknown agencies and people that are always ahead of her, always smarter, always anticipating or always using her abilities for unknown, even criminal purposes. It's refreshing to read about a unique heroine of dream labor - going against all those smug, secure, tech savvy and knowitall prototypes.
Like many of us, she is totally at the mercy of outside forces and technologies that surpass & overpower her. At the whim of her own affliction, her weakness actually becomes a doorway to a new almost too well constructed world - a dream city, flying inside a built dreamscape filled with various pitfalls and opportunities. At some level she's also blocked and paralyzed, but at the same time she's active and she's strong. She slides eluding into people's dreams and experiences their dreams from the inside out. She's employed to give them much sought after nightly peace & and intervene in their dreams when needed.
This almost therapeutic detective activity is out of her immediate control, it happens almost without her knowledge or acquiescence, doubled and complicated by the most devious vested dream murders, interests and corporate takeovers, strategies, battles over patents and outright dream assassination attempts. Augmented Reality meets dream hacking in this totally connected world where one can never go offline, even while sleeping. One is always liable to be mind hacked by a dream bot employed by who knows who that can literally takeover of mind/body and push you to act out the dreams in real life with deadly results.

The very social structure of trust - friends, lovers, protectors seems more dreamlike than ever, and each one by one dissolves into mirage. Even those cherished certainties have a tendency to melt down during Sweet Dreams. It's almost like an onion (mentioned even by the dream hacker herself) where every layer peeled doesn't seem to uncover the final one +there's always the risk that we'll never know for sure or at the end when we know we might be compelled to distrust or deny the outrageous answer.

As usual I feel grateful towards such thinkers/mindwalkers like Tricia Sullivan, going to the bottom end of a premise and follow implications, feeling her way across possibilities so well, doing what SF does best. Large scale yet impossible situations get explored - such an example is the larger role played by an ever expanding elderly population - kept almost as a token for their boomer value. It's good to think this trough SF via enhancements. Diseases or the therapies are just cover ups. Various age related ailments and the dependence during such a general state of mental decreptitude, opens up an aging population towards new if dark possibilities. Instead of placid asylums or babbling conspiracies, elderly populations transform into dangerous pioneers in areas that today seem to actively exclude aged persons.

There's been a new interest in dreaming, dream worlds, going in many directions starting with mapping both the so-called science of sleep at the same time that selling mattresses & curing sleeplessness. Overwork & bad sleeping gets more coverage & pervasive across cultures and countries. Various documentaries exists about dreaming under capitalism. Lucid dreaming looms larger than ever before, as well as larger role played by sleep related syndromes such as sleep paralysis and a plethora of monstrous manifestations that have sprung up in order to explain it.

I think Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan should be taken as a key text in this new dreaming curricula. Maybe it was inevitable that we've reached the gates of sleep, or that lucid dreaming has such an attraction for us today, or how 'dreamers' have taken center stage, the minute all our waking hours are being avidly quantified and skepticism about mindfulness increases. Sweet Dreams overturns the nightmares of Davos /and/or for-profit dreams by captains of industry or tech gurus by placing the experimented upon - the subjects of new technologies at the core of emergent super intelligences/archilects that seem firmly outside the bounds of waking life. These hackable dreamers are not on top of the situation, yet their weakness might be the key & offer us close & intimate insight into gaping illusions & mortal delusions filled - morphing world that is increasingly made inhababitable by a host of ëerie sentience afloat. Not sure yet how this squares out with the nightmare of being surpassed, drifting into obsolescence & palpable fears regarding an 'intelligence explosion' or the inscrutable aspects of other dreaming minds we are building and will never probably understand.