A Theory of Dreaming

The second installment in a duology that began with A Study in Drowning, the novel is set in a fictional world where the nation of Llyr and its neighbor Argant have been at war for twelve years. The country's cultural identity is bound up in the legend of the Seven Sleepers, revered historical figures whose preserved bodies are displayed in a national museum and whose writings form the literary canon.

The story opens with a newspaper article reporting that two undergraduate students have produced documents proving that the celebrated novel Angharad was written by the author Emrys Myrddin's wife, Angharad Myrddin, not by Myrddin himself. The students are named as Euphemia "Effy" Sayre, the first woman admitted to the university's literature college, and Preston Héloury, an Argantian national. As the war grinds on, the government views Myrddin's legacy as essential to morale, and the students' claims are treated as borderline seditious.

Effy begins her first day in the literature college, having transferred from architecture after exposing Myrddin's fraud and confronting the Fairy King, a supernatural entity who haunted her since childhood. She is humiliated when class begins with exercises she cannot follow and reflects that the Fairy King is gone, along with the dream world that once served as her refuge. That evening, she is startled by a deep voice in her mind reciting a line from the poem they are studying: "I found my deathless death in dreams" (34). She takes a sleeping pill and falls into an unnervingly easy slumber.

Preston meets with his adviser, Master Gosse, the head of the literature college, who presses him on whether the supernatural elements in Angharad's diary might be real. Preston deflects, but he is privately unsettled: At the Myrddin estate, he heard mysterious bells that Effy never heard. Gosse names Preston legate, a ceremonial student leadership role, and gives him a golden dragon pin. That night, Preston dreams of an underwater palace: a grand hall of gray-white marble with statues in niches, windows onto the ocean floor, and the unmistakable sound of bells. In a chamber lit by torches of green flame, he discovers a towering statue of Effy. A crack appears across her marble face, and he wakes in a cold sweat.

Effy researches Laurence Ardor, the sixth Sleeper, whose poem "The Garden in Stone" is the subject of her class. She learns Ardor lost his vision to illness before composing the poem, and notices certain words are bolded in an unexplained pattern she later hypothesizes are secret marks left by Ardor's daughter Antonia, who served as his amanuensis, or scribe. Meanwhile, a gossip reporter corners Effy about her involvement with Master Corbenic, the former architecture dean dismissed for misconduct. Posters appear around campus labeling Effy a liar. When she discovers that a wealthy baron is pressuring Dean Fogg to implement a university-wide loyalty pledge, she leaks the information to the press, and a resulting story exposes the scheme.

Preston tracks Gosse to the Sleeper Museum, where Gosse has taken pages of Angharad's diary. In the Sleepers' chamber, Gosse instructs Preston to remember the last time he believed in magic. Preston recalls his father reading him fairy tales, and both men enter the underwater palace. In subsequent visits, a crowned figure tells Preston, "This world has been built for you. Now you may mold it to your desires" (99), and summons a vision of Preston's deceased father, Riwan, as he was before the accident that left him cognitively impaired. Preston embraces him and realizes he never wants to leave.

Effy discovers Letters & Annals by Antonia Ardor in the library, a slim volume untouched for nineteen years. Antonia's diary entries reveal that after her mother's death, her blind, bedridden father became possessive and controlling, refusing to let her leave the manor and visiting her room at night. Antonia describes rendering his dictated ramblings into verse, making her own contributions to the poem. Effy recognizes a parallel to Angharad Myrddin: Both women were imprisoned by men who exploited their creative labor while denying them recognition.

As the war intensifies, the government restricts cultural activities and shutters a third of university classes. Preston reads an Argantian fairy tale that mirrors the Llyrian Neiriad, a foundational national epic attributed to Aneurin the Bard, but with opposing moral frameworks: In the Argantian version, the king is a tyrant rather than a hero, exposing the nationalist framing imposed on the shared myth. Effy's condition deteriorates. She stops attending class, deceives Preston about her whereabouts, and takes increasing doses of sleeping pills far beyond her prescription. Preston, consumed by Gosse's demands and his own dreams, fails to recognize the severity of her decline.

At the Midwinter Ball, a student named Domenic Byron Southey II makes sexually threatening remarks about Effy. Preston attacks him and is suspended. He and his roommate, Lancelot "Lotto" Grey, break into the Sleeper Museum and discover that the original Neiriad manuscript contains no nationalist framing: no reference to Llyr, no mention of "demon Ankou's tongue," no identification of the enemy as Argantian. Preston shatters Aneurin the Bard's coffin and finds no body beneath the death mask. The first Sleeper never existed as an individual.

Effy runs out of sleeping pills and breaks down. Preston calls her mother for help, and Effy overhears the conversation. He returns to find her unconscious on the bathroom floor with an empty pill bottle. At the hospital, Dr. Quinbern reports that Effy is in a semicomatose state. Angharad Myrddin travels to sit vigil at her bedside. At Preston's suspension hearing, Gosse intervenes by declaring Preston essential to his research, and the Earl of Clare, Lotto's father, offers a donation on the condition that charges are dropped.

Preston enters the underwater palace one final time, carrying Effy. The palace is crumbling. When he weeps over a glass coffin that has appeared, the glass shatters and Effy opens her eyes within the dream. Gosse, who has entered the dream on his own, urges Preston to stay, but Preston refuses, declaring that dreams cannot sustain real life. His father appears one last time, and Preston says goodbye in Argantian before willing the dream to end. The palace collapses, and the Sleeper Museum crumbles simultaneously into Lake Bala. Preston realizes that "every dream is a living death" (349). He wakes at Effy's bedside, needing glasses again, unable to hear the bells. Effy opens her eyes and whispers his name. She remembers nothing of the dream, only darkness. During her recovery, she reads Antonia's final letter, which describes the same underwater palace, revealing that Antonia found in imagination the solace denied her in life.

The museum's destruction coincides with Llyr's crushing military defeat, and a peace treaty ends the twelve-year war. Angharad announces that the Llyrian Times will publish Effy and Preston's thesis and donates her late father Colin Blackmar's estate to establish the Antonia Ardor Memorial Endowment, a program dedicated to studying writings by female authors, with Effy's paper as its first publication. After receiving a package from his mother containing his father's book of fairy tales and her sapphire engagement ring, Preston proposes to Effy on the pier overlooking Lake Bala. He threads the ring on a silver chain so she can wear it around her neck despite her missing ring finger, a childhood injury inflicted by the Fairy King. Effy accepts. In the epilogue, set the following spring, they visit Preston's father's grave in Argant, the border now open. Preston envisions one final statue in the palace: his father in a shaft of light, holding a book, wearing a crown. A king in a world that never was, and so would always be. When Effy asks if he is ready, Preston turns from the grave and says, "Let's go home" (399).