Description
An experimental work about a young woman coming to terms with what it means to have consciousness. Published by Second Story Books and applauded by literati, this work will change the way you think about the intersections of science and mysticism, and the spiritual and material.
What Readers Say About Mastering the Dream
“Nothing less than essential, existential questions haunt the heart and mind of Kelly
Lydick’s ambitious first book: What is the real? How did I get here? Only when “The entire world looks different and I will never be able to see the old world again” can the speaker of Mastering the Dream maneuver through epistle, poetry, Jewish thought, late-night TV, Plath, tattoo parlors and a fear of death to begin to answer herself. Reminding us that “Information is not knowledge,” and questioning the boundaries between everything, between fiction and nonfiction, dream and reality, past and future, science and metaphor, she sets a third term between each – poetry, ecstatic vision, present, theology—in order to suggest some preliminary answers: there’s no such thing as either/or: there’s only and & and & and. This exhilarating wisdom is demonstrated so brilliantly by the book’s own structure that in the end, when she proclaims “i see for the first time. everything is clear,” we not only believe her: we seem to say it too.”
– Brian Teare, author of
The Room Where I Was Born
“Kelly Lydick meditates on the value of single letters while probing deep into the meaning of memory and those passages of light and shadow that weave consciousness. The great themes of life and death, of loss and acceptance, are bound here in the journey of a young woman with a growing mastery of language and the magic it can create.“
– Neeli Cherkovski, recipient, PEN Josephine Miles Award for
Excellence in Literature
