The Dreamers is a 2019 science fiction book created by Karen Thompson Walker. In it, the small California town of Santa Lora is ambushed by a mysterious disease that causes people to fall asleep. The book follows a variety of narrators as the story progresses: Mei, a student at the local college at the source of the outbreak; Sara, a girl who lives with her sister and survivalist father; Catherine, a psychologist who comes to study the disease; Ben, a new father who has recently moved to the area; and Nathaniel, a biology teacher who watches over his gay lover.
No relation to Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 film of the same name.
This show provides examples of:
- Asleep for Days: Rebecca ends up asleep for a whole year.
- Contamination Situation: The main characters are almost always exposed to the disease, and side characters fall like flies in this novel.
- Deep Sleep: What the disease causes in people. Turns into Big Sleep very quickly if the person doesn't get medical attention
- Dreaming of Things to Come: The dreams that people have while sick seem to be from the future, but nobody knows if they actually are.
- Rebecca dreams about raising a child before she even sees her child in real life.
- One person dreams that a fire will happen, and it does, but several details are inconsistent
- Just Before the End: The story takes place before the disease spreads to the major population centers of California. Averted. The disease runs out of people to infect before it manages to spread any further.
- The Plague: The town of Santa Clara is slowly destroyed by the sleep disease.
