In Melanesian mythology, the Abaia is a great eel that dwells at the bottom of freshwater lakes and drowns those foolish enough to fish in its domain. Author Gene Wolfe co-opts the myth in his Book of the New Sun, transforming Abaia into a monstrous aquatic demigod who rules vast swathes of humanity through their dreams. The motif of the Abaia as a benthic entity associated with transitive states like drowning, dreaming and unconsciousness in general (states symbolized by the being's aquatic nature) is one found often in perusal of mythology. Nymphs, merfolk, leviathans and a whole host of mythic creatures dwell in the Abaia's interstitial realm. Nothing conflates so well with the idea of the mind divided by sleep and waking as the barrier between air and water.
Science fiction and fantasy, genres long dependent on such tropes as prophetic dreams, visions and oracular foretellings, draw heavily on the concepts of meta-reality and subconscious veracity. In the tradition of Hunter S. Thompson's and William S. Burroughs' psychedelic dream sequences, speculative fiction dives in and out of an unconscious world where semiotics runs rampant. Free-floating symbols anchor themselves loosely to the skins of stories, describing (to the astute reader) what has been or will be within the framework of the mytharc. In Orson Scott Card's renowned Ender's Game, Ender comes to understand the true rules of the battle school (a training ground for genius-level tactical intellects) through a fantastical computer simulation in which a vindictive giant proctors an impossible test. The simulation is later revealed to draw heavily on the subconscious of the user, playing neatly into the idea that Truth is held within the vault of the sleeping mind.
The dreaming world is, in speculative fiction as in modern thought, a place of potent symbolic importance. It functions as a kind of Plane of Truth, a meta-world where the sometimes overwhelming jargon and convolutions of fiction can be dissected and resolved unconsciously. Meaning escapes the obfuscation of plot and becomes apparent in the constructs of dreaming, expressed in bold colors and broad strokes. Through dreams speculative fiction escapes its most persistent parasite: information overload. The reader is drawn down not into the world of the characters but into the characters themselves where comprehension and its absence play equally to reader and __tagonist both.
Dreams are the atlas for speculative fiction's liminal landscape. Like the Abaia, they wait beneath the membrane of textual reality, strange and monstrous in character.
Word of the Day: Nostrum.
Book of the Day: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.
Author of the Day: Jack Vance, author of The Dying Earth and other seminal works of fantasy and science fiction.
Author vs Author of the Day: Herman Melville vs Thomas Aquinas.
Result: Melville harpoons Aquinas, writes symbolically dense novel about experience.
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