Customer Reviews

Dreamer

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Who amoung us wouldn't relish the chance to revisit our past and repair a broken relationship or make a different choice at a critical point in life? Author Richard Miller gives the reader such a chance in his new novel, Dreamer. The reader travels with the main character back to his past through a clever set-up made realistic and believable by the author's careful use of technical terms and concepts -- not too techie for the average reader yet enough to make the story work well. Traveling into a time most readers will relate to, Miller carries a music element throughout, weaving in meaningful song lyrics and titles that let the reader revisit their own experiences back when those songs were popular. The book held my interest so well that I read this book in two sittings, losing a good amount of sleep in the process! After finishing the book, I found myself musing about my own life and what people and events I would revisit if given the chance to go back in time as the author gives the main character of Dreamer. I consider a book that leaves me thinking deeply as a worthy read as this book did, and recommend Dreamer to anyone as a thoroughly enjoyable read and a nice way to loosen some cobwebs in the reader's past.

Many people are interested in doing past life regression in order to get a better handle on the events of this lifetime. This book, however, deals with a group of people who pay big money for high tech induction sessions that take them back in great detail to times in their own youth and childhood.

Mike, the protagonist, begins these sessions with the aim of mining old memories for monetary gain. We join him in his journey to the past, and also in his present-time encounters with the mixed-up characters who run the facility and the lost souls who are fellow clients delving into their memories.

Not an easy book to put down before the last page, Dreamer will take you through a range of emotions. It will make you think about your own past: your favorite possessions, long-lost friends, and best of all, the times when love took hold of your life and changed you forever.

Dreamer took me back to the small midwest town where I grew up in
the 1960's. References to the popular music on radio stations we all listened to and that 64 Ford reminded me of my own teenage years and the boyfriends that I loved and lost. For everyone who has ever wanted to go back and change their past, this is an excellent read.
I like Richard Miller's style and hope he writes another book soon!

I have been strongly impressed by Dreamer and wish to recommend it to everyone.
Funded by some government agency, a clinic recruits volunteers for a "total recall" memory retrieval project. With the help of hypnosis and suitable technology patients are able to travel within their own memories and re-experience their past in all detail. The main character Mike is in advertising and participates in the project hoping to retrieve useful memories of the sixties' look-and-feel. Of course, he becomes more and more involved with his own past friends and love stories. Miller's accounts of Mike's trips to the past are very good visual descriptions of America in the sixties. Of course Mike and his fellow patients start by experiencing the past as passive observers (like watching a movie), but at some point things become more complex, with questions on the deep structure of reality and hints at "many-worlds"-like (Everett) interpretations of quantum physics.
Surprisingly for a book with a lot of challenging intellectual content, Dreamer is very well written and has believable characters in the past and in the present.
Besides foundational work in quantum physics Miller acknowledges a debt to Ernest R. Hilgard's psychology book "Divided Consciousness". Read his review on the book's Amazon site:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0471396028/qid=1089194396/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-6648234-8828067?v=glance&s=books

Dreamer is one of those books that while I was reading it I could visualize it in my mind as if it were happening in front of me like a movie. When the radio blared out music I could hear it, too. Of course, it helps that I lived through the 50s. I recommend this book to all those people who would like to experience what childhood was like back then ~ and to all others who, like me, want to revisit that era with all it's charm and atmosphere...

. . .remember what it was like to drive down a country road while the greenish hue of the old dashboard reflected back on my face... the unique sound that those AM dial radios created with just the slightest background of static... sigh. Richard L. Miller does a fantastic job of bringing back the "good old days..." Granted I was a wee child while the character was a teenager, but I felt that time vividly because many of my memories are collected from one perspective of a curious baby sister tagging along, and watching closely, my vivacious and active teenage sister.

The other part of me that liked this book is the teenager who loved.... no, lived and breathed... science fiction... My reading of fiction has become limited ~ mostly it's history and political view books that I keep on my bedside table and, ahem... the back of my toilet tank... For my reading pleasure I occasionally pick up a novel, so, Miller should feel that he's done something many fiction authors can't do... tempt me to read his book and then keep me interested enough to finish it...

Time Travel... a physically impossible feat, at least for now. However, as a person who loves biographies and reads history, I find that it's possible to imagine Miller's richly described scenes which seem to play out right before my eyes. This only happens for me when I'm reading a well-written piece. Miller gave me that sensation again and again. Those of you who read about the brain and how it works will be delighted to find the word "entrainment" used in such a fashion. Several other very real scientific studies find their way comfortably inside the story.

I learned a lot from his book, "Dreamer" as I dived into the past with his main character, an advertising executive. . . a man with emotional baggage still in denial. The story unfolds delicately with the usual mystery of daily life. . . His past opens up through the mental experiment in which he has agreed to be a subject. He believes he is searching for the music in the past to help him in his business. His discoveries overwhelm his senses.

Occasionally the man feels a jolt of recognition and finds the "hidden observer" which must exist in all of us; usually called our conscience or perhaps our muse... Miller makes one recognize that we don't always listen well to what our inner voice tells us; and, that the consequences of our actions are often far more important than we can ever predict. My own epiphany was that perhaps we can co-exist in parallel universes created by our destiny of record and our destiny of choice.