“La Sonnambula and the City of Sleep: A Fragment of a Dream”

“La Sonnambula and the City of Sleep: A Fragment of a Dream” is one of many texts collected in an anthology of P. Craig Russell’s work, titled Isolation and Illusion: Collected Short Stories 1977-1997. In this wordless tale, Russell employs colorless, romantic and surreal illustrations to evoke the strange opulence of a dream world. The plot begins with a frame story in which the protagonist sleepwalks. While sleepwalking, she dreams of being an angel who joins others to journey to the City of Sleep where they gather at a tower and peer through the window at a Rude Goldbergesque machine that generates the world of dreams. Upon entering this world, the angels soar through the air, narrowly escape the predators of the sea, and revel in their own splendor. Eventually, the protagonist leaves the group and returns alone to the city where she re-enters the tower and exits the dream world that it creates. “La Sonnambula” pairs well with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” which was composed one night after an opium influenced dream. Coleridge was interrupted while writing the lines of poetry that came to him from his dream, causing him to forget the remainder. Like Russell’s tale, Coleridge’s poem is “a fragment of a dream.”

“La Sonnambula and the City of Sleep: A Fragment of a Dream” by P. Craig Russell
High School
Dark Horse Comics
10pp.
Published 1985
1-56971-838-5
$14.95

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