"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

Beat.

тАЬWrong,тАЭ she said in quite another voice, sinking down into the rattan peacock chair set out for her and
folding her arms across her chest with a little smile. тАЬI'm talking about a path we all find ourselves on
every night, the door we all walk through on the way to it, the path through the dreamtime, and the door
to sleep."

Click, grin, sigh, whoosh, she had them; the opening theatrics were over, and she could just open up and
be with them, relax and just be Amanda.

тАЬAfter all, we never remember the moment we fall asleep, do we?тАЭ she said, as if talking to a couple of
friends in her living room. тАЬWe can never remember precisely what was going through our minds at the
moment we passed through that doorway. And when we've got insomnia, it's the agony of Tantalus itself
trying to summon it up by act of conscious will, now isn't it?тАЭ

Amanda had a repertoire of a half dozen of these seminars, which she preferred to call тАЬexperiences,тАЭ
not just because it was a clever marketing tool which played well on the New Age Circuit, but because
experiences were what she truly sought both to convey and obtain.

тАЬAnd then there we are in the Dreamtime without quite knowing when or how we got there, without
even knowing weare there, more often than not. The magic land of our dreams, of beauty and of terror,
of spirit messages and satori, of dire punishments and inexplicable powers, stranger than truth and wiser
than fiction....тАЭ
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Places like Xanadu had existed up and down the coastal mountains of California long before
fourteen-year-old Amanda Dunston had run away from Marin Country for her three-week magical
mystery tour in the Haight-Ashbury's Summer of Love, long before she was born, to hear her parents tell
it.

тАЬThe boys in the lab coats think they can tell you all about sleep and dreams. They can tell you all about
the structure and biochemistry of the brain, and how Rapid Eye Movements are the physical signature of
the dream state...."

Wooded mountains tumbled to the rocky coast of California from not too far north of Los Angeles to
the Oregon border and beyond, and the further north you went, the grander the scale of the landscape,
the deeper and mightier the forests, and the emptier the wilderness of the works of twentieth century
man.

This was the California primeval, loamy brown and forest green, fog-girt and silently whispering, a long
jumble of seacliff mountains and misty canyons like no other coast on the planet; the secret spiritual spine
of the land magically hidden in plain sight.

Small wonder that Zen monasteries and nudist communes, solitary hermits and beatnik poets, ascetics in
hair-shirts and blue jeans and free love libertines (and who knew what Indian shamans and secret
medicine lodges before the white man came) had slip-slided away into these hidden mystic vastnesses.