One night, Lucie screams and, thanks to the radio that they listen to constantly, Eva and Serge learn that she is not isolated: the same night, the children residing on the same meridian had similar behavior. So much so that in 24 hours, as the meridian moved, this cry came from the mouths of all the children in the world. Other nightmare dreams will follow, equally global and without their authors being able to tell them. Each time they announce a catastrophe testifying to the disruption of the world, our rupture with nature and animals. Each of the ten collective dreams is, in the novel, attributed to a child living in a country located on the famous meridian – a little girl lives in Waterloo.
“During the first confinement, remembers Carole Martinez, we were experiencing a feeling of the end of the world. In Normandy, with my husband and my daughter, we found ourselves isolated, while being connected to the outside world thanks to the radio and TV. Since I only slept an hour and twenty minutes a night, I found out about sleep. I realized that I was avoiding REM sleep, and therefore dreams, and I discovered that, in certain civilizations, there is another world that communicates with ours through them. From there came the idea of an epidemic in sleep that only affects children, of something that would pass through their dreams to try to modify the world.“
The dreams that electrify the planet are all different. One leads children to immerse themselves in water. However, as it is emphasized, “In most religions, the practices of immersion, sprinkling and ablution hold a crucial place. It regenerates the body and mind“. Following another, Eva is surprised by the pestilential odor emanating from her daughter, to the point where she can no longer control her nerves. Other mornings, mosquitoes swarm, the children refuse to drink water. milk or are affected by an unknown illness, etc. In her fifth novel, Carole Martinez thus approaches the question of the endangerment of our humanity from a new and surprising angle, even if it sometimes means dispersing.
Carole Martinez, “Sleep your brute sleep”, Gallimard, 395 p.
