Wednesday Wisdom from The Dreamers

Posted May 5, 2021 by elzaread in Wednesday Wisdom / 10 Comments

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you need to read a certain book at a certain time? If you read it at any other time, the impact is just not the same.

My Mommy is busy sorting out the Book Club’s books that need to be returned to the D.E.A.R. ladies end of May and as you can guess, she now realizes how many books she still needs to read. We’ll tell you more about the Book Club in a later post.

Anyhows, one of the books  my Mommy is/was frantically trying to finish before they need to be returned to their rightful owners, is The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. This book has been in the Book Club since early 2019 and it wa published in January 2019.

 

In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned.

Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

I’m quite certain if my Mommy picked up this book in 2019, or even in early 2020, she might not have felt the same way about this. I’m sure she still would have enjoyed it as the dreamlike writing style of The Dreamers would have appealed to her no matter the story. She’s crazy like that, I know. 
 
However, like I’ve said, this book was published in 2019 when Covid 19, Isolation, Deadly Infectious Disease, Lock Down and I can’t even think of more vocabulary – wasn’t much used in general conversation. If at all. Reading this book, created the same type of sensation as we’ve experienced over the passed year. Same situations, same behavioral patterns. Yes, it was a different type of disease and the cause of the illness remains unknown, but it was still a disease that had a massive impact.
There were numerous quotes and passages from this book, that stopped us right in our tracks. This one is by far our favorite:

 

How true is that? And this one:
“Isolation: That’s what the doctors call it. The separation of the sick from the well. But isn’t every sleep a kind of isolation? When else are we so alone?”
I think many, if not most of the Covid 19 patients and especially the victims across the Globe, might have preferred to just go to sleep and not suffer as much as they had to endure.
“They sleep through the lesson made so instantly clear to the others: how disease sometimes exposes what is otherwise hidden. How carelessly it reveals a person’s private self.”

“The human brain is subject to all kinds of misperceptions, and the waking mind not always more attuned to reality than the dreaming one.”

The Covid vaccine is being rolled out all over the world at the moment and life is slowly returning to normal for a large number of countries. But for some, life will never be the same again. So many people have been affected by this dreadful disease in numerous ways. Loss of loved ones, loss of income, loss of security and routine and for all of us the loss of the sense of “normal”. We sometimes forget how important emotional, psychological and social well-being is to humankind. Not to mention how we felines feel if your race goes a bit wacko.

That is something very important to remember. It’s not always about what happened, but also about what didn’t happen or even, what could have happened. All of these have a huge impact on you mere mortals. Strive to be a cat. Life really is a bit less complicated being a cat. Or at the very least, do get yourself a cat. We tend to make life a bit more bearable.
Have you read The Dreamers? Did we miss any important quotes you could think of?
Lots of Love,
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10 responses to “Wednesday Wisdom from The Dreamers

    • Hi Yvonne! It's not actually the original cover, it's just the cover that was available in SA and I liked it most.

      It's a heavy read, but still a good one.

    • Hi Diane! For once I'm going to say I'm glad that you haven't read it yet. The timing is perfect to read it right now.