Dreamer
By: Paul L. Bates.
Edition: 1st ed.
Series: Imprint Cycle # 2
Publisher: Five Star
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Waterville, Me
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781594146428
Subjects: Heroes -- Fiction.; City and town life -- Fiction.
Genres: Fiction.
First sentence: The smell in the supply tunnel is fetid--a sickly blend of chemical, dank, stale, rot, long dead.  The overhead lights are grime covered, few, far between, with over half of them cracked, shattered or simply burned out.  The low lighting, about knee high above the tunnel floor, is better maintained, but the acrylic housings are all soot smeared and yellowed with age.  These lie at fifteen foot intervals on opposite sides of the tracks.  The bulbs are ten watts at best.  They give off enough light to animate the shadows, find a broken wheel, reveal a frightened drossie cowering in the perpetual night.  They make the rats’ eyes gleam.  No one not long accustomed to working below grade could possibly see much more than vague movement, occasional churning shadows, black phantoms rising and falling across an even blacker landscape.
Description: Dreamer, the sequel to Imprint, is the story of two people within the last city on a dying planet:  Jennie Height, the visionary for whom there is no distinction between her waking and dreaming lives; and Walter Velum, the owner of the Sector Twelve Grille and revolutionary, whose dreams are ideals of a more humane and enjoyable world for the common man.
	Jennie's life has been shaped by the brutal sexual abuse of her early childhood, from which she seeks constant escape.  She uses her dreams to direct her actions, which lead her from situation to situation, lover to lover, in a seemingly endless cycle.  While with Walter, she saves his ragtag band of resistance fighters again and again until her dreams lead her uptown and into the arms of Wyatt Weston, the protagonist of Imprint.  In Wyatt she finds a kindred soul, another true anomaly, and during her brief stay with him her gift of dreaming begins evolving.  
	But Jennie becomes illegally pregnant, leading her to a forced decision she barely understands, and to a new life within the protective walls of The Archives, the source of all knowledge within the City.  There, under the tutelage of Carpathia Coyle, an empathic adept, her powers begin to develop exponentially.
	Walter, meanwhile, embittered by Jennie's unexplained desertion, begins to question everything, including his own involvement in the resistance.  After a lethal confrontation with his resistance superiors, he shortly finds himself in the embrace of Carpathia Coyle, who shows him how much more there is to life than simply running a bar and shooting up symbols of authority.  But as every change seems to improve the quality of his life, each comes at a cost to Walter as he sheds his dreams, his ideals, one by one in order to learn the real impetus behind the resistance.
	Events set in motion by both the mysterious leader of the resistance as well as Victor Crist, Wyatt's patron, force Chairman Adolph Void from the safety of his power base in The Heartland--the seat of authority within the dying world--to the Sector Twelve Grille to confront Walter on the very day the Chairman is to become immortal.  Jennie witnesses it all within her dreaming, even the holocaust unleashed upon Sector Twelve by Victor Crist which catches Chairman Void and his private army unaware.
	Soon after Jennie is called upon to aid with the transplantation of Adolph's mind into the synthetic body from which he plans to rule the world forever lest The Archives be raised, while Walter is given a taste of immortality of another sort.  In the end, it is Jennie, Walter and Carpathia who must decide whether the world will live or die and whether or not the human race will survive, and if so, in what form.
Notes: "Psychic powers and political intrigue meet in this ever-shifting “companion/sequel” to 2005's Imprint. Simple minded barmaid Jennie Height's journey to understand herself and her strange precognitive dreams dominates the narrative, wrapping around a core of dissent and power struggles...." Publishers Weekly

"In a large, unnamed city ruled by the dictatorial Chairman Void, Jennie Height's sometimes prophetic dreams mesh seamlessly with her waking hours [until] Jennie's growing powers take on a life of their own....Read alone or in conjunction with Imprint, the author's companion story set in the same universe, this tale of a dystopian future where hope still lives and dreams mix with reality to create the future..."  Jackie Cassada, Library Journal

"...Well written and exciting, readers initially will root for the rebels, but soon realize they offer more of the same ruthless oligopoly control as the government does. Fans of psychic thrillers in a futuristic dystopian world in which the adversaries are two sides of the same coin will appreciate Paul Bates’ fine thriller DREAMER."  Harriet Klausner