Could it be there’s no such thing as the paranormal ... only infinite varieties of normal we’ve yet to understand?

Date:   5/13/2014 2:21:42 PM ( 10 y ago)

Could it be there’s no such thing as the paranormal ... only infinite varieties of normal we’ve yet to understand?

Bestselling author Sol Luckman’s new novel, SNOOZE: A STORY OF AWAKENING, sets out to answer this question strongly in the affirmative through the eyes of the psychically gifted Max Diver, aka “Snooze,” as he undertakes to rescue his father, astronaut Thomas Diver, from a fate stranger than death in the exotic, perilous Otherworld of sleep. You can read early reviews of SNOOZE here.

For those unfamiliar with the author’s writing, or who only know about his bestselling nonfiction, this isn’t his first time around the novelistic bend—or, for that matter, off the fictional deep end.

Eric Hoffer Award-winning author Sean M. Poole described Luckman’s debut novel, BEGINNER’S LUKE, for which the author was offered a contract by a respected New York publisher, as “a transformational novel, a manic manual of self-discovery, self-invention and renewal.” Reader Views called BEGINNER’S LUKE “a modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND,” while Apex Reviews referred to it as “a mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast.”

BEGINNER’S LUKE was a zany, dithyrambic hymn to the transformational power of the imagination. SNOOZE, by contrast, is a razor-sharp exploration and celebration of the supernatural in the form of an epic, coming-of-age tale of one extraordinary boy’s awakening to the world-changing reality of his dreams.

Decidedly sci-fi in its emphasis on the unexplained, from Bigfoot to levitation to telepathy and beyond, SNOOZE is also unmistakably literary—featuring a host of memorable characters, engaging drama, an offbeat sense of humor, and page-turning pacing reminiscent of THE DA VINCI CODE that will stir you wide awake!

Starting below and continuing on the author’s website, you will find the first five chapters of SNOOZE for the perusal of anyone interested—but especially those who might want to receive a FREE advance reading e-copy (in PDF, Kindle or epub formats, valued at $12.99) of the whole novel in exchange for posting a timely (and hopefully generously starred) review on at least five of the following websites—listed in order of priority—that will be featuring SNOOZE:

Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Goodreads
Smashwords
Barnes & Noble
Lulu.com

If you’re genuinely serious about reading and reviewing SNOOZE, simply contact the author with your name and email address here. Please be sure to put “Review Copy” in the Subject line.

Sweet dreams!

For more information on SNOOZE or to preorder your paperback or electronic copy for mailing by May 31, 2014, click here.

“I, Chuang Chou, dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, for all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware I was Chou. Soon I awakened, and there I was, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly—or whether I am a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” Zhuangzi

As a kid, Max often dreamed of flying. Not that he always remembered his dreams. But the ones he managed to wrest, often in fragments, like bits of sand dollars washed ashore from the aquatic world of deep sleep, invariably involved flight.

Sometimes he was a passenger aboard some kind of craft, such as a fighter jet or the Space Shuttle. Fittingly, his father had been borne aloft high above the earth’s surface both ways.

Virtually everything Max could remember about his father, Captain Thomas Diver, Navy pilot and celebrated NASA astronaut, had to do with flying—starting with the occasional spin in the Captain’s private Cessna out over the Everglades or down around the Keys.

There were the model airplanes gifted for birthdays and Christmases the two of them, so alike in their attention to detail, painstakingly pieced together and painted.

There were the elaborate paper planes and jets, like flying origami, often featuring complex designs in ink, left by the “Tooth Fairy” or “Easter Bunny.”

And of course, Max would never forget the kites they designed, assembled and flew together for hours on end, like condors riding endless thermal currents, out over the breezy Gulf beyond Cape Carnival.

With the squish of sand underfoot and the salty wind in his hair, squinting in the sunlight, chest thumping with excitement, Max would work the string to his father’s exhortations—“Higher! Faster!”—while feeling absolutely in the right place at the right time.

Years later, even after graduating Salutatorian and enrolling at an Ivy League university, kite flying remained Max’s signature memory of his father, preserving a feeling of fleeting bliss—one that, like an imperfect but beautiful crystal, was created only to be shattered.

Naturally, there were dreams that didn’t include his father. Most of them, actually. Alone, Max had parasailed high above turquoise waves, hang glided over tropical forests, sailed over rugged canyonlands in hot air balloons.

Such dreams were indeed captivating. Still, the dreams Max loved best involved no special equipment, no technological support, no hitching an aerial ride, no “crutch.”

These were the dreams where he himself flew. Actually flew. No sails needed. No wings necessary. No engine required. No wheel, no stick, no throttle to interfere with the purity of the experience.

In defiance of gravity, or maybe somehow working with gravity, he would simply lift off. There was hardly any effort required. Or if there was effort, it wasn’t of a physical kind—it was entirely mental.

It was like … meditation. Though he didn’t know a lot about meditation in those days. Later, as a young man beginning to grasp intellectually what he had started doing naturally, he would jokingly refer to the process as “beditation.”

Flying in his dreams was an exhilarating, breathtaking experience, sometimes literally, that tended to leave reality wanting, like riding a roller coaster compared to mowing the lawn.

His dreaming heart fluttered like a sparrow as his body rose up out of bed and hovered in mid-air, head almost touching the ceiling, for a few seconds or minutes.

Sometimes it took a while to recall how to direct his flight. The steps involved first intending to go somewhere, then allowing himself to go, then actually moving—mentally—in the opposite direction.

As he came to understand the weird, counterintuitive mechanics of dreams, Max discovered that down was up, up was down, right was left, and left was right.

When he was a pre-med student studying anything but medicine, he would also learn that, in the world of dreams, outside was inside—and inside was outside.

Not only that, but in the world it was possible to access through dreams, time was no arrow shooting forward (as it seems to be here) but a traversable landscape.

In such dreams taking place in a parallel reality mirroring our own, to simplify things somewhat, your current location is the present, the past lies behind you, and the terrain ahead is the future.

But as a kid dreaming of his own world, Max knew none of such finer navigational points that applied to the dream world beyond.

There was no pressing need—and in any case, grasping that in inverse-reality dreams, feeling and intuition are physical senses, while sight, hearing, touch and the like are more like hunches, would have been like studying calculus before mastering arithmetic.

As a kid just dreaming, all that really mattered to Max was knowing how to move about, which required only the rule of opposites.

To be a flyer, he soon realized he had to be a diver—a joke that wasn’t lost on Maxwell Andrew Diver, an uncommon boy not only in his abilities but also in his intelligence, even at a tender age.

At which point, diving, he would zoom out the window (physical barriers usually posed no obstacle in dreams) and dart up and off like Superman in pajamas in the direction of his desire.

Read more here.

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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