Separate quotes from ‘Nemonymous Night’, and future ones discovered will appear in the comment stream below…
THE MAIN COVID (2011) ‘DREAM SICKNESS’ PAGE IS HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/the-dream-sickness/ FROM WHICH THIS PAGE BELOW IS A CONTINUATION AND SHOULD BE READ ALONGSIDE IT.
He was also transporting fossil fuel from the depths of the earth (where the earth’s soul was most attentive) to the surface for the fires of life to be lit and smoulder on… and eventually extinguish with a dying wink… which meant more fossil fuel was needed to be fetched from Mike’s mine. It was all this… and more. Mike would only discover the ‘more’ when the time was ripe or if he became mine, if not me, himself.
Mike often reminisced about the time he worked in an office, mostly as an administrator, but also as a consultant or salesman, a business that often concerned very complex financial matters. He used to entertain clients at sporting events or orchestral concerts, lunched important representatives from other Companies, attended Board Meetings across the country, driving all manner of distances in a day. He couldn’t do this now, but, in those earlier days, he used to manage stress much better. It was almost like a dream.
the audience who, eventually, clapped as one entity: one nemonymous creature of applause with the merged thought that they remained single entities.
At the centre of the earth there exists the strongest power in the Universe. All life radiated from this centre, gradually becoming fossilier, bonier, meatier, livelier, airier in various stages of animation from dead to aethereal. At a certain stage between meat and life sat the people that revolved around and radiated from each other in a dance of fiction or friction. Only the real was excluded because nothing real could be imagined and, in turn, that was because imagination could only possibly imagine things that were unreal. Only hawlers knew of the various layers through which anything or anyone could travel.
The covered market had open sides but did have a robust roof, so it was not strictly open-air or covered.
the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty. Air-liner? Hmmm. He laughed.
“It’s like that TV programme, Suse, isn’t it—you know the one. Where they evict people from the house gradually. But this is the other way round, where people are voted into a scheme of reality which fits the reality as we see it…”
This dream, then, was simply knowing—within the dreamer’s mind—that it was a horror film and that all the people in the dream were really actors, but they were unaware, apparently, of this fact. So when the dreamer him- or herself saw the birth of a baby ape, it was simply known—without equivocation—that this would grow into a giant monster. Indeed, looking through to the hall (to where the “baby ape” had fled), there were seen various people treating a gigantic human figure with some respect and unsurprise, not knowing it was a monstrous creature quickly grown from the “baby ape” and that it was pretending to perform on the stage in the hall as part of some talent competition. It towered above all the normal people. The dreamer fled from the hall—where these things had been seen—to warn the rest of the town of what was happening under their noses. Was waking, however, before or after being caught by the monster relevant?
chivvying Susan and Mike into really believing that their children were missing and it was simply not good enough at all merely to reply: “What children?” “Arthur and Amy, those kids you brought up…” Beth shouted, trying to get through to her sister somehow. The dream sickness was a factor that remained unsaid—unsayable. That such a sickness should have actually caused the children’s disappearance and their parents’ subsequent dead-eyed reaction to such a major event represented a complexity that such simple city folk could never envisage, let alone explain or even admit.
More quotes will appear in the comments stream below…
Nemonymous Night 
CL: Dream sickness, yes, but nobody admits to it existing. Nobody actually says those words in public.
O: I know. I think it’s better called dream spam than dream sickness!
CL: Hmmm. Junk dreams? Maybe your fixing idea’s got legs, after all.
O: Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of the new holidays run by a firm that’s organising trips based on Jules Verne?
(Jules Verne holidays to the Centre of the Earth which fit in as a potential way to avoid current ‘lockdown on holidays?!)
One part of the dream wasn’t so clear—it was a pub that was a caravan-type thing that seemed high up on the side of a cliff, embedded into its rock. And you had to climb up to it—and it was much bigger inside than you could ever imagine from looking at its outside.
(A lockdown-busting pub?!)
: except this underlay was a surface—but surfaces were meant to be ‘on top’ as that was where they always tended to go. An under-surface was a logical impossibility. He wanted one of his special carpets to be beige-coloured to match some future required necessity of appearance, one that fitted in with a retrospective destiny. There were mounds of these vexed textures of surface: each a fire-wall—or, rather, fire-floor—as if he were readying them to serve as an insulation device that even time couldn’t penetrate.
The western airport area—now overgrown like a long-forgotten golf course—reminded him of another derelict airport he had seen on the web as part of his dream research.
(There are derelict airports throughout the rest of NN, I recall.)
But what is a liar? If you tell lies without knowing they are lies, without any intention of lying, are you still a liar? Answer that question with care because it may land you in a lot of trouble when accounts are settled at the end of the day. […] “A liar?” I answer, after a long Pinteresque moment. Answering with a question is a knack I had learned as a useful ploy in the subtle manoeuvres of life. There is a darkness before life. There is a darkness after life. So one has to make the best of the light of life between those twin darknesses—and using questions as answers, I’d realised, was the easiest way to progress matters whilst avoiding responsibility for the progression.
This belief in such stolen identities opportunely gave an indication of how truly extraordinary the times actually now were, making it difficult to describe these events with any degree of seriousness. However, if they’re not treated seriously at face value, then times have a tendency of coming back with a vengeance and biting the people who disowned them.
If he thought the destiny of the whole world depended on the outcome of his thoughts, he would have been more careful with those very thoughts or just tried to be less thoughtful altogether.
The headlines of the newspaper in his hands spoke of the mysteries of Angevin which had taken away most of his customers—and even those who remained in the city stayed in their houses these days dreaming of drinking Angel Wine… or even drinking it for real.
….some under no illusions, others quite aware of the exact task in hand, others under a number of different illusions, some in deliberate subterfuge, others in helpless or clandestine denial… some in communication with each other (whether telling the truth in part or telling lies in part), others conspiring to collaborate, others overtly competing…
….to face out the creeping dangers that the world supplied in the form of night plagues, dream terrorists or simple lunatics.
D (walking over to the curtains on silent runners making as if to open them): Out there are many situations that need fixing.
R: I know.
D: Such as that tower block—as you’ve just suggested—being attacked from the sky by itself! A very good example, that one is.
R: I believe you.
These airports were always benighted even in their respective hey-days. One theory was that they only served each other, i.e. short-haul flights between them taking place for their own sake, because it was easier to travel across the city by other means, even if one wanted to travel across the city at all. These airflights were later assumed to be merely acting as cover for their real flights—beneath the ground, with the main runways leading steeply down tunnels into the earth from each airport.
…brainstorming has indeed eventually become the norm—with even written documents (where one should normally have inferred a responsible writer of such documents or, at least, an editorial chief/steering-committee) being considered just as bad as pub talk. Equally, the inverse may be true, i.e. when something is written down it lends credence even to pub talk. It depends on one’s point of view.
The optimum, the fail-safe assumption, is to believe nobody is in control.
As a tangent, however, whilst these subjects are in the forefront of our minds, many documents since discovered have touched on ash clouds, dreams, lies, fictions (fixions), all of which seem to have become a form of sickness or disease, approximately in the same general time-zone as the bird plagues that killed off so many of us.
Which brings us straight back to the question of why there were two airports in the city, where even just one airport would have been redundant.
…craft skimming across the city from airport to airport, complete with scary droning just upon the hearing threshold. Simply to call them ‘scary’, however, doesn’t necessarily *make* them scary. You had to experience them to know how really scary they were.
It is difficult to imagine the world being better or worse than it actually is. However, without humanity to stain its pages, who knows what will then become imaginable or even real? There is a theory—to which I subscribe—that humanity “strobes” in and out of existence, selective collective-memory then forcing the ‘alight’ stage to forget the previous ‘switched-off’ one… time and time again. Mass consciousness flickering in and out of existence like a faulty lighthouse… or, indeed, a fully working lighthouse.
”…in the Core’s scatter-orange light…”
(There is much about the CORE in NN, and when within the Earth it’s seen as another SUN in another sky. Cf Covid as CORona.
Also see my own Core Mythos in some of my published stories in the 1990s)
….any mechanical aircraft whatsoever now grounded (perhaps meaninglessly grounded—and do keep listening to the news on the radio and all may be explained).
TO BE CONTINUED BELOW, AS I REREAD THIS WHOLE BOOK!
A cruise liner was halfway up the steep side of a cliff, dry-berthed if not literally shipwrecked. This was a concoction of several dreams, if she had but realised or known she was effectively (at some unconscious level) sharing in a vast communal vision just below the threshold of knowledge or even belief.
Why had nobody thought of daylight fireworks before, so potentially au fait with the way the world was now going, with street riots meaning there was always a strict curfew during any dark hours.
anyone sleeping next to me would have been infected by the same dreams that had just beset me… or were still besetting me.
As history once battled with different history to become real history, so one novel battles with another novel for domination in the right to fix fiction forever as the ultimate truth.
When life is tough, most things take the backseat, everything except survival of oneself.
“Yup yup. But a human body, like my own body, is something you can’t get off. I’m trapped inside it and there is nothing I can do to escape it.
“To escape it is certain death. I wonder how we ended up like this in such a nightmare. Knowing it’s all going to end with a blank while incapable of waking up from the nightmare. I remember many dreams I thought were real at the time I was dreaming them, terrifying situations I thought I could never escape—until, with great relief, I wake up and leave it all behind in a quickly forgotten dream. Life’s problems, by comparison, are as nothing compared to those one sometimes meets in dreams. But this waking nightmare of the bodytrap, all our bodytraps, is not a dream you can wake up from. It’s relentlessly and terrifyingly inescapable. Who the devil landed me in this body? They have a lot to answer for. And I can’t really imagine the devastating effect of complete and utter non-existence when this consciousness within my body finally vanishes. A paradox—that I hate being trapped in my body but I’d give anything to stay trapped there forever, because I can’t face the outright blankness…”
By contrast, I myself was keen on everything turning out happily, with the world having learnt the lessons that my own novel created and then, having created them, constructively destroyed for the good of all of us.
You can’t destroy evils without having set them up in the first place. Or so I believed. And still do. True paradoxes are sometimes very difficult to deliver.
*
Tears came to my eyes as I looked back at the various paths I could have picked on… chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so I could make the turning towards the goal I had once set myself.
If there is such a thing as global warming, then it’s not inside outwards, it’s outside inward, as the ‘atmosphere’ became colder and colder—until, just for a nonce, we were slightly warmed by a clearing of the darkness and a sudden thrilling vista of the Core: it was like a sun in the roof, a roof that was, in hindsight, below us as a floor. But then the spherical light vanished just as quickly, with the re-onset of darkness. I knew we would catch glimpses of this from time to time on the journey, the disc-light growing bigger each time, but equally less warm.
It simply proves that whatever we did, we did successfully, because I am here now to tell you about the important matters: the journey and its eventual repercussions for us and the rest of the world.
Dreams are often too late to throw any light on more important matters that have already arisen.
It was almost midday by Corelight, a lightsource that the inhabitants seemed to call the Sunne…
They had indeed intended to view Sunne-Stead from the marigold-window. The moment came and went. The Sunne, rising from West to East, shuddered to a halt, poised in the white hell of the ‘sky’ for what seemed almost a minute and, then, returned East to West.
Two Sunnes in balance, a monster between their rims – like a merged Corona? –
….like my Gestalt Real-Time Reviewing site that for a while I called Parhelion.
Otherwise, there would be some danger of his novel becoming the victorious prevailing reality: a fact which would be a vast disappointment to us all, as my own novel was the only novel that contained a happy ending. Hawling, after all, is dragging positive from negative and crystallising it. A novel is shorthand for a novelty trying to find its permanent fixture or berth as a well-established truth. And my scatter-brained extrapolations from all manner of different truths and fictions were—and still are—trying desperately to fit their novel jigsaws of shard into the ultimate picture of probability and, from probability, learning to summon the sinews of certainty… carving the perfect dimensions (inner and outer) of the sphere where we can live forever happy and content, having defeated those who wanted to smash it to smithereens even before it was formed.
THESE QUOTES WILL NOW CONTINUE HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/733-2/