Träumen Roman

It was a fat Gollancz hardback with a yellow cover, so I must have written it in the late 1980s, presumably between Four Hundred Billion Stars and Secret Harmonies. Or perhaps, in the dream, it was my first novel. I was pleased to find it in the secondhand bookshop, so I must have lost or given away all my copies. A one-word title I can't remember, now, on waking. Did it begin with an 'R'? A 'P'? Somehow I knew, in the dream, that it was set in one of those cities on the edge of time, or a city in a virtual reality realer than what we like to call reality. A kind of dream within a dream. And I also knew that the narrative was shared by three protagonists, each speaking in the first person. Something about visions or abilities they were trying to make sense of, and something about finding a secret location in the city that would explain everything, once they all realised they contained or represented different parts of the key. There was a long quote in the acknowledgments about the blues singer John Lee Hooker. From Charles Shaar Murray's biography, perhaps, although that was published after Gollancz discontinued their signature yellow jackets. Still, dreams have their own logic and chronology. I remember thinking, as I thumbed through that unborn dream book, that it wasn't especially well-written - that it was just as well that the only copy could be found in the bookshop which dissolved when I woke up.