Nemonymous Night by D. F. Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

her bed. She had just been dreaming of the hawler—the first real image anyone had gained of such an entity, in dream or otherwise. It was as if each dream—each of everyone’s dreams in the city and of the city—had been straining at the leash, forcing itself to depict—gradually and painfully—the hawler himself. A wide-faced creature masquerading as a man that lurked at the coalface of some underground powerhouse, whose only duty was to gather up all the material chipped away each night by several miners (Mine! Mine! Not yours!) and transported to the surface for processing. The full description—other than wide-faced—was still unclear. Additional dreams—not necessarily Amy’s own—would be required before a fuller picture was obtained.
    One irrelevant dream intervened, however, or it seemed irrelevant at the time—although the dream sickness as it developed and as it was better understood by dreamers and non-dreamers alike (and I think this was the first time it was pinpointed as a ‘sickness’ as such) did specialise, it seemed, in mock irrelevancy. 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?
    *
    In a part of the city, there was a zoo. And it was known by the Authorities that any dream sickness affecting the rest of the city did not affect the zoo. There seemed to be individuals in charge of the city that the ordinary citizens failed to recognise—or ever to know they existed at all. These Authorisers, so-called, had some mandate to keep parts of the city as reservations of clear sense—where dream was clearly recognised as dream and real life as real life, and never the twain should overlap. Strangely, perhaps, the zoo grounds were one such reservation and those citizens suffering from the dream sickness often resorted there—on their holidays—just to be certain about themselves and about reality and, indeed, about the dreams that they still dreamed when at the zoo but they actually knew they were dreams, knew them for what they were. How they knew this fact was similar to going abroad to sunny climes for one’s holiday—away from the cold, dank, often dark city—and believing it was for the sake of enjoyment and recreation, not the chore a holiday surely always was.
    Here, at the zoo, the citizens knew similarly that they were free of deceiving dreams and what they saw—as they toured from cage to cage, enclosure to enclosure—were real animals and creatures. Only when the citizens were asleep, at the zoo hotel, did they know they would be in danger of dreaming—unlike in the surrounding city itself, where waking was no safeguard against surreptitious dreams taking over the minds: not day-dreams, but full-blooded dreams which one thought were real life when experiencing them. In the zoo grounds, however, such dreams were dreams, whilst waking was waking.
    The entrance to the zoo was not at all imposing and it could have served as the gates of a small factory, where people came and went after spending the rest of their time in terraced back-to-back two-up-two-downs in the less desirable parts of