Showing results for "The Science of Sleep" in Anthologies & Short Stories

The relationship between sleep and storytelling is an ancient one. For centuries sleep has provided writers with a magical ingredient, a passage of time during which great changes miraculously occur, an Orpheus-like voyage through the subconscious daubed with the fantastic. But over the last 10 years, our scientific understanding of sleep has been revolutionised. No longer is sleep viewed as a time of simple rest and recuperation. Instead it is proving to be an intensely dynamic period of brain activity.

Following on from Literary Remains, R.B. Russell's previous collection for PS_Publishing, the twelve stories of Leave Your Sleep concern sex and death, love and loss. Russell allows his characters to disappear, slip into alternate realities, or re-write their own histories. They find they are able to do the most extraordinary things, even though they may not immediately realise it. And who is in control of their actions, or those around them?

Have you ever wanted something so badly that you'd do anything to get it, even something bad? This is the story of Once Upon a Time, based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Wicked Prince. This story is a translation of a classic tale by Hans Christian Andersen. While this is considered by some to be one of Andersen's darker stories, there is still hope throughout. In this story, a wicked, arrogant prince plunders and conquers first his own land, and then the neighboring nations, enslaving the vanquished kings. When he tries to conquer God, he meets his match.

Lovecraftian themes abound in the tales of an intern at a madhouse and an illiterate madman. Slater, the madman whose unspeakable crimes led him to the madhouse, is continuously awakened in this story by surprisingly literate hallucinations of a glowing entity seeking revenge. Inspired by Slater’s uneducated background and the telepathic machine that he had made in his yesteryear, the intern delves deep into Joe Slater - who is receiving telepathic messages from a being of light.