The Experiment of Dreams

REVIEW:  THE EXPERIMENT ON DREAMS by Brandon Zenner

An exciting and sensorily vivid and vibrant novel, THE EXPERIMENT ON DREAMS is an adventurous international thriller, as well as deep exploration into the mind and subconscious of one individual. Ben Walker has been an experimental subject for decades, and has become extraordinarily gifted at Lucid Dreaming. He is sought out to be tested in private-sector experimentation with an avant garde device nicknamed "Lucy," which receives and records data of dreams. Ben leaps at both the opportunity, and the payment, only to discover what seems too good to be true, may indeed be true, but not good.

I need to confess I did something I hadn't done since way back when I first discovered the addictiveness of reading. I gorged on this book. Meaning that when I saw I had little time and no guarantee that I would have another reading break for an undetermined period and was unwilling to leave these characters and story to rest, at the 7% mark I started skimming over the book, reading bits and pieces of it until I got a partial picture and was somewhat appeased.

Don't judge, I know I shouldn't have done it. I wasn't even going to start this book for few days because I needed a break from reading. But once I picked this up I couldn't put it down.

Now that I have fully read this book, I feel free to say I loved it and I have a lot of things to say about it. Let’s see if I don’t mess up my original pre-review.

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading this book. It was sweet, provocatively steamy, and absolutely swoony. It gave me some sad tears but mostly huge smiles. It was truly a celebration of the best emotions overcoming the sad, painful and ugly ones.

An enjoyable read I was intrigued by the blurb about this book and found it was a very interesting read.
The idea that Ben could control and remember his dreams was fascinating to me, even know that it was a work of fiction.
I felt compassion and empathy for Ben whose life had been full of loss and that he was constantly battling personal demons.
I really enjoyed the twists and turns as his dreams and the Lucy experiment turned his life into something so different and then dangerous that he didn't know fact from reality at times, it kept me reading and guessing and not knowing who were the good guys and who were not.
It's an interesting idea that one day we could use our dreams to create things from them and in the end it's Bens dream creations that set out to destroy him.
I enjoyed the ending, I wont' spoil it but it was satisfying and complete, for me at least.

I really liked this book, I gave it 4 out of 5*****. Benjamin Walker was a very interesting character that's for sure. I felt bad for him the way he would have those really awful and I mean Awful headaches. As will as Benjamin's wife dying the way she did, it was such a senseless death. I thought that the idea of being able to go into people's dreams like the machine could do was a very interesting but dangerous idea. Benjamin his just the type of gut that a lot of women would want in their lives. It seems like to me at least that once he feel in love that individual would be all he wanted and that's it. You could tell by the way he didn't date after his wife died. I'M really glad that he was able to finally let his dead wife go at the end. And allow himself a chance at life again. I didn't give it 5***** just because, it just didn't seem like a 5***** book, their was just something missing that I just couldn't point my finger at but it just felt that way to me.

What a ride! The Experiment of Dreams was a fast paced exciting read. This is EXACTLY why I say authors are the true rock stars of the world . The imagination and detail that went into creating this thriller truly blew my mind.

We are introduced to Ben. A depressed man who had lost his wife and has never recovered from her loss. To make ends meet he participated in studies at the hospital. When the Dr. he has worked for and with for years retired he was offered an opportunity to participate in a privately funded study that would allow his dreams to be recorded. From there the twists and turns are masterfully conducted. I read every line of this book with rapt attention and couldn't put it down one I was halfway through. 

I'd never heard of Brandon Zenner but his is name I'll be looking for as I'm scanning books to read, hopefully for years to come. Smart, intense, and suspenseful. Highly recommend.

I really enjoyed this novel.  The writing was great, with a lot of details throughout that are only explained and tied in at the end – which I love, as if seeds were subtly planted here and there in a greater orchestration of the story.  The plot was fast pace, and I didn’t see some of the twists coming. 

I haven’t read much about the actual science of lucid dreaming, but I can imagine how the lines between dreams and reality can begin to blur and meld together, as they did for Ben.  I especially loved the scene in which he enters Emily’s painting of the cabin in the woods, and cannot seem to differentiate from then on whether or not he is dreaming or awake, if what is going on is real or not.  

I really loved how it ended, the epilogue in particular.  It gave me a very eerie feeling, as we are not so far from these kinds of scientific experiments and devices.  It really makes you think about the ethics of some of the scientific advancements and how rapidly they’re coming about today, and how they’ll impact our society.  

A fantastic, sci-fi/speculative fiction, action-packed read that really makes you think!

I really enjoyed this book but it didn't fit as well within the type of books that I typically review as I thought it would.  For that reason, I will not be posting a review.   It was a very good book however, and I thank you for letting me read it.

I really enjoyed this author's writing style and have always been interested in dreams and the science behind them. Highly recommended. (Amazon reviewed).