Could it be there’s no such thing as the paranormal … only infinite varieties of normal we’ve yet to understand?

This is an important and timely question explored in the highly acclaimed spiritual novel, SNOOZE: A STORY OF AWAKENING, winner of the 2015 National Indie Excellence Award for New Age Fiction.

Written with young adult and young-at-heart readers in mind, SNOOZE further proved its literary merit by being selected as a 2016 Readers’ Favorite International Book Award Finalist in the Young Adult-Coming of Age category and receiving an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Beach Book Festival Prize competition in the General Fiction category.

Now for the first time ever, this epic visionary tale is being officially serialized—in both readable and audible formats.

You’re invited to join—either with eyes or ears—Max Diver, a.k.a. “Snooze,” along the razor’s edge of a quest to rescue his astronaut father from a fate stranger than death in the exotic, perilous Otherworld of sleep.

This inspiring tale interweaves a plethora of paranormal and metaphysical subjects, from Bigfoot and enlightenment to the Loch Ness Monster and time travel via the Bermuda Triangle.

In her review of SNOOZE published in INDIE SHAMAN Magazine, June Kent had this to say about what she described as “superlative fiction”: “Engrossing, entertaining and occasionally humorous, SNOOZE also takes a look at a wide range of subjects including levitation, telepathy, lucid dreaming, spirit animals, parallel universes and shamanic-like journeying, giving a wide range of information effortlessly absorbed as you enjoy the story as well as much food for thought.”

If you’d like your own downloadable review copy to share your thoughts via Amazon, Goodreads and elsewhere, read details and contact the author with your request.

Naturally, your generous review would be greatly appreciated even if you simply enjoy the full text now being presented on this blog and numerous podcast platforms. Keep in mind that paperback and ebook versions are for sale. A complimentary online version is also available for your reading pleasure.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to follow Snooze 2 Awaken and/or Sol Luckman Uncensored for alerts as new chapters of the 84 in total that make up Max’s extraordinary story become available.

Sweet dreams!

SNOOZE: A STORY OF AWAKENING

By Sol Luckman

DEDICATION

For my beloved Peeps, who inspired and encouraged this tale

EPIGRAPH

“I, Chuang Chou, dreamed I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, for all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware I was Chou. Soon I awakened, and there I was, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly—or whether I am a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” Zhuangzi

PART ONE: DREAMS

CHAPTER ONE

As a kid, Max often dreamed of flying. Not that he always remembered his dreams. But the ones he managed to wrest, often in fragments, like bits of sand dollars washed ashore from the aquatic world of deep sleep, invariably involved flight.

Sometimes he was a passenger aboard some kind of craft, such as a fighter jet or the Space Shuttle. Fittingly, his father had been borne aloft high above the earth’s surface both ways.

Virtually everything Max could remember about his father, Captain Thomas Diver, Navy pilot and celebrated NASA astronaut, had to do with flying—starting with the occasional spin in the Captain’s private Cessna out over the Everglades or down around the Keys.

There were the model airplanes gifted for birthdays and Christmases the two of them, so alike in their attention to detail, painstakingly pieced together and painted.

There were the elaborate paper planes and jets, like flying origami, often featuring complex designs in ink, left by the “Tooth Fairy” or “Easter Bunny.”

And of course, Max would never forget the kites they designed, assembled and flew together for hours on end, like condors riding endless thermal currents, out over the breezy Gulf beyond Cape Carnival.

With the squish of sand underfoot and the salty wind in his hair, squinting in the sunlight, chest thumping with excitement, Max would work the string to his father’s exhortations—“Higher! Faster!”—while feeling absolutely in the right place at the right time.

Years later, even after graduating Salutatorian and enrolling at an Ivy League university, kite flying remained Max’s signature memory of his father, preserving a feeling of fleeting bliss—one that, like an imperfect but beautiful crystal, was created only to be shattered.

Naturally, there were dreams that didn’t include his father. Most of them, actually. Alone, Max had parasailed high above turquoise waves, hang glided over tropical forests, sailed over rugged canyonlands in hot air balloons.

Such dreams were indeed captivating. Still, the dreams Max loved best involved no special equipment, no technological support, no hitching an aerial ride, no “crutch.”

These were the dreams where he himself flew. Actually flew. No sails needed. No wings necessary. No engine required. No wheel, no stick, no throttle to interfere with the purity of the experience.

In defiance of gravity, or maybe somehow working with gravity, he would simply lift off. There was hardly any effort required. Or if there was effort, it wasn’t of a physical kind—it was entirely mental.

It was like … meditation. Though he didn’t know a lot about meditation in those days. Later, as a young man beginning to grasp intellectually what he had started doing naturally, he would jokingly refer to the process as “beditation.”

Flying in his dreams was an exhilarating, breathtaking experience, sometimes literally, that tended to leave reality wanting, like riding a roller coaster compared to mowing the lawn.

His dreaming heart fluttered like a sparrow as his body rose up out of bed and hovered in mid-air, head almost touching the ceiling, for a few seconds or minutes.

Sometimes it took a while to recall how to direct his flight. The steps involved first intending to go somewhere, then allowing himself to go, then actually moving—mentally—in the opposite direction.

As he came to understand the weird, counterintuitive mechanics of dreams, Max discovered that down was up, up was down, right was left, and left was right.

When he was a pre-med student studying anything but medicine, he would also learn that, in the world of dreams, outside was inside—and inside was outside.

Not only that, but in the world it was possible to access through dreams, time was no arrow shooting forward (as it seems to be here) but a traversable landscape.

In such dreams taking place in a parallel reality mirroring our own, to simplify things somewhat, your current location is the present, the past lies behind you, and the terrain ahead is the future.

But as a kid dreaming of his own world, Max knew none of such finer navigational points that applied to the dream world beyond.

There was no pressing need—and in any case, grasping that in inverse-reality dreams, feeling and intuition are physical senses, while sight, hearing, touch and the like are more like hunches, would have been like studying calculus before mastering arithmetic.

As a kid just dreaming, all that really mattered to Max was knowing how to move about, which required only the rule of opposites.

To be a flyer, he soon realized he had to be a diver—a joke that wasn’t lost on Maxwell Andrew Diver, an uncommon boy not only in his abilities but also in his intelligence, even at a tender age.

At which point, diving, he would zoom out the window (physical barriers usually posed no obstacle in dreams) and dart up and off like Superman in pajamas in the direction of his desire.

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

Introducing Sol Luckman’s new visionary novel, CALI THE DESTROYER. Learn about the single most censored story in the history of the human race—and why it matters today.