Edward L. Alban
Maria Diaz, originally from Ecuador, teaches math in a Miami high school. She is intellectual, loves poetry and likes music-from classical to Andean, to tangos-and suffers from insomnia. Sleep intrigues her. She does the math and figures that over a sixty-year span we sleep the staggering sum of twenty years. Where does all that time go? Is it a waste? Or does it have a hidden redeeming value? Finding answers to these questions becomes her quest. She reads extensively about the brain’s activity during sleep, she keeps a log of the few brief dreams that she remembers and manages to intertwine her conscious hours with her subconscious hours into a helix-like braid of her life, which she presents in the form of a novel. Her sleeping mind opens its doors and reveals her sleeping world. She meets her inner self: her id, libido, ego, alter egos, muses, and oracles. They all come alive as colorful human characters, vying for control of her life and her destiny. Maria’s Libido is a sexy look-alike who thinks it’s high time for Maria to lose her virginity. Her sassy Literary Muse advocates career change from teaching and mathematics. Her oracles are alter egos personified as older gentlemen who guide her in matters of philosophy. Every night, Maria is at the center of this seemingly schizophrenic reality filled with laughter, tears, adulation, and scorn. It is a wonderful world that she comes to love, but, as with all humans, Maria can’t remember her dream world when she is awake. Day after day, Maria’s parallel world is wiped away upon awakening. The only exceptions are wisps of dreams and little snippets that are still fresh when she awakens. But the bulk of her sleeping hours is off limits. This is where her treasures, her 'forbidden dreams' are held by oblivion. And she intends to get them, if she has to steal them. It took her ten years to do it. The result is this work. Maria comes of age in many ways, she matures philosophically, she becomes sure of her convictions, and she lives her life by her own precepts. She shares with us how the mind at night interphases with the conscious world. We do relive our daytime life by night, and our night hours in turn do influence the decisions we make in the real world. But it happens so subtly, it is almost imperceptible. This is what we learn from her experiences.
