Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet

by Elizabeth Knox

  mounter Any DREAMHUNTER who can OVERDREAM another and erase the dream he or she is carrying is a mounter.

  Novelist Any DREAMHUNTER who can catch a SPLIT DREAM is a Novelist. The people who share a Novelist’s dream will sometimes pick up one point of view and sometimes another, or switch back and forth all night between the two. Split dreams are richer and more complex than other dreams. Grace Tiebold is the most celebrated Novelist dreamhunter.

  overdream When a powerful and fully loaded DREAMHUNTER, especially one having a MASTER DREAM, erases another dreamhunter’s performance, this is known as over-dreaming.

  penumbra A DREAMHUNTER’s projection zone is known as his or her penumbra, a term borrowed from astronomy, where it describes the partial shadow the moon casts on the face of the earth during a total eclipse. (The “umbra,” or totality, is the dreamhunter himself or herself, asleep and haloed by the shade of a dream.) An average public performance-sized penumbra is around eighty yards. Some dreamhunters, such as Maze Plasir, have small penumbras and still have good careers because they have other specialties, and their projection zones deliver hypnotically intense dream experiences. Grace Tiebold has a three-hundred-yard penumbra. Tziga Hame’s, at four hundred, is the largest on record. Grace Tiebold and Tziga Hame cannot sleep just anywhere when LOADED with a dream.

  the Place The territory where the dreams come from is called the Place. It is infinitely more vast than the hundred or so square miles of the mountain range it encompasses. Only a very few people can enter the Place. Of these, some become RANGERS and some DREAMHUNTERs who can make their fortunes from dreams caught, carried out, and shared with others.

  No one has established how long the Place was there before being discovered. Protected by its own remoteness, and the sparse population of the Rifleman Mountains, the Place had its first verifiable appearance on a day in November 1886 when a young violinist named Tziga Hame disappeared from a coach traveling between the village of Doorhandle and Sisters Beach.

  rangers Employees of the DREAM REGULATORY BODY, rangers patrol THE PLACE, maintain its trails, and perform search and rescue when necessary. Rangers are those who find that, although they can enter the Place, they can’t catch dreams.

  Soporif Anyone who is close to a Soporif DREAMHUNTER when he falls asleep will fall asleep with him. Soporifs often work in hospitals, enhancing the effects of anesthetics. For example, Soporifs can be helpful by entering the operating room before the surgeons and their assistants and lying down near the prepared patient. George Mason is Southland’s best Soporif.

  split dream A dream that has two points of view is a split dream. Only a NOVELIST will be able to catch both points of view at the same time and deliver them to the audience. Examples of split dreams are Homecoming, the Second Sentence / Sunken, and Grace Tiebold’s famous first split dream, Pursuit.

  Think Again dream A dream classified by the Department of Corrections as a DREAM FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD and used for educating and rehabilitating prisoners is a Think Again dream.

  Try Twice a year, in the fall and spring, the DREAM REGULATORY BODY holds Tries, at which people, the majority of them teenagers, attempt to enter THE PLACE. Only one person in three hundred will cross over into the Place.

  Wakeful A purple-red fibrous paste, Wakeful is a powerful stimulant with a pleasant perfume. It is dangerous if used for too long or in large doses. DREAMHUNTERS often chew Wakeful to stay awake when they have walked days into THE PLACE to catch a dream they don’t want to waste before they have an audience.