Saturday, November 9, 2013

Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "Dream's End" (short story, recursive dreaming, free)

Illustration accompanying the original publication in Startling Stories magazine of short story Dreams End by Henry Kuttner and C L Moore. Image shows the doctor hallucinating or dreaming.It has at least one episode of recursive dreaming - dream within a dream. I'm not sure of the other episodes - they're either independent hallucinations, or even deeper dream in a dream in a dream...

I'll put it among the less interesting stories of authors.

Story summary.

A doctor in a sanatorium has found what he thinks is a cure for most forms of insanity - what he call "empathy surrogate therapy". It involves a device whose electrodes are put on the head of the sane doctor & of insane patient. And something happens involving empathy. Only the first experiment seems to have gone seriously wrong - for the doctor, at least...

See also.

  1. Henry Kuttner's "All is Illusion" (read online): A much better story about dreaming.

Fact sheet.

First published: Startling Stories, March 1947.
Read online at UNZ.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Henry Kuttner, C L Moore.

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