Codex of Dreams
Everything is a dream
Nothing is forbidden— Author unknown, Liber Somniorum
This nightmare began quietly on a sunny day while I was enjoying lunch with my friend Danielle. Over cold sandwiches and a shared bag of stale chips, she asked which novel was my favorite guilty pleasure. I immediately knew my answer and quickly summarized the story. An up-and-coming journalist accepts an assignment to write a book about an explosion at a refinery, the kind of serious technological disaster that would be at home in a Crichton novel. As the journalist digs into the material, he discovers that the actual story is dull and overly contingent on subtle nuances of safety reports and bumbling officials. To keep himself amused, he inserts invented details into the story. Small at first, little background hints and allusions, and then later whole subplots involving mysterious conspiracies and beautiful women. One night, after a bottle of wine, he throws all caution to the wind and adds a ruggedly handsome journalist as a major character. Pleased with his own cleverness, he smugly continues on until he eventually notices that he’s being followed, that people around him are disappearing, and that the details he invented are in fact real. The kind of the thing you might expect in a novel by Eco. He soon realizes that the book he is writing is his own autobiography, and it ends with his murder.
I was surprised when my friend, a well-read aficionado of thrillers, said she had never heard of this book, and so I promised I would loan her my copy. However, once at home I found no trace of the book on my shelves. Puzzled, I went to order a new copy and discovered that no bookseller or database had any record of the book. Over the next few weeks I asked others at the publishing house where I worked, and no one else seemed to know of the book either—though several said that it sounded interesting and to let them know if I tracked it down. As far as I could tell, the book I remembered so clearly had never existed.
Troubled by this discrepancy, I turned my efforts to finding the author. After peeling back multiple layers of pseudonyms and misdirections, and aided by my contacts in the publishing industry, I eventually found myself outside of an old Victorian mansion isolated in the countryside a few hours from the city. A man in a black suit ushered me into a nicely furnished salon decorated with shelves of old books and a painting of a woman with her arms upraised and shadowy winged shapes flying through gates of horn and ivory. Miss Browyn, the suited man said, will be with you momentarily. I sat in a comfortable overstuffed chair and waited only a few minutes before a woman of exquisite beauty entered the room and greeted me by name. What she said next upended my world.
Now I hide in the catacombs below the house and listen to the quiet footsteps of the assassins as they search the dark passages and alcoves. I am thoroughly lost, unsure of the way back to the hidden iron staircase that I had inadvertently found while fleeing through the house. To those pursuing me, I am the prophesied harbinger, a threat to the Imperium Somni, an ancient cabal that secretly controls the world through dreams. As it is written in their sacred book, the Liber Somniorum, all of reality is nothing but a dream, and they are like Morpheus, the master of all dreams. The novel I had remembered weeks ago had been an imaginarium, a dream object they inserted into the world as a lure to expose the harbinger. With my death fast approaching, the last of the illusions fall from my eyes and I realize the truth. Miss Browyn, the woman in the salon upstairs who had ordered my execution, is my friend Danielle.