"Dreamfall"

Amy Plum is the author of Die For Me, a YA series set in Paris. The first three books—Die For Me, Until I Die, and If I Should Die—are international bestsellers, and have been translated into thirteen languages. The fourth and fifth books are digital novellas, entitled Die For Her and Die Once More, and they are followed by a sixth digital compendium Inside the World of Die For Me. Plum’s newest series is a duology: After the End and Until the Beginning.

Plum applied the Page 69 Test to the newly released first book of her YA horror duology, Dreamfall, and reported the following:

From page 69:

CHAPTER 10

JAIME

Trial subject two is named Fergus Willson. He’s eighteen. Freshman at a local community college. His file looks a lot more medical than Catalina’s, stuffed with charts and readouts and prescriptions dating back years. He’s diagnosed as having narcolepsy with cataplexy, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, excessive daytime sleepiness, and night terrors.

I’ve heard of narcolepsy, of course, but don’t know a couple of the other terms. I open up the search engine on the fancy computer and type in cataplexy. Three hundred eighty-four thousand results. Scanning a few, I see that it is a condition that about seventy percent of narcoleptics suffer where they experience sudden muscle weakness triggered by emotions. I’ve seen something about this before on a documentary—if they guy laughed, cried, or was frightened, he just collapsed wherever he was, sometimes injuring himself pretty badly.

For the Page 69 test, I dipped back into Dreamfall to find out what actually takes place in that section of the book. And, although it is somewhat representative of the set-up of the book, it’s not where the action takes place.

Page 69 is from Jaime’s point of view. Jaime is a medical student who is witnessing the experiment that is at the base of Dreamfall: a cutting-edge technique that is supposed to shock the brain of the seven teenage insomniac subjects into regular REM/NREM sleep cycles. Jaime is there when the experiment goes wrong, throwing the subjects into a coma. And this makes Jaime want to know more about the subjects…as people, not just as bodies lying in a laboratory. Interspersed between the nightmare actions scenes, Jaime helps us get to know the subjects one-by-one by reading their folders in the test file.
So although page 69 helps the reader know more about one of the test subjects, I wouldn’t say it’s representative of the book. (It won’t give you nightmares!) Enjoy!

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--Marshal Zeringue