I had a blast Sunday re-reading one of my favorite stories from when I was 12 years old: “Dreams are Sacred,” by a writer named Peter Phillips. It was easy to track down — a quick Google search on the title (which fortunately I remembered) led me to the Internet Archive and a complete scan of the magazine where it was first published: Astounding Science Fiction, September, 1948
The story holds up — it’s exciting, fast-paced and funny.
The hero is Pete Parnell, a fast-talking wisecracking New York sportswriter who is recruited by his friend Steve Blakiston, a psychiatrist, to help with an experimental technique that could cure the madness of a science fiction and fantasy writer named Marsham Craswell. The writer has fallen into an unconscious fugue state and is trapped in an endless dream scenario from his own stories, which resemble Conan the Barbarian or Barsoom.
Fortunately, Blakiston has invented a machine which allows one person to enter another’s dream. Parnell is tapped for the job of curing Blakiston because Parnell is the fastest-thinking and hardest-headed person Blakiston knows.
Supporting characters include a friendly cop with an Irish accent straight out of cartoons, a surly cab driver and a sexy lounge singer.
I found the story every bit as enjoyable as I did when I was 12 years old. Old-fashioned? Sure! That’s part of the fun.
Phillips, the author, was no New Yorker — he was English. He was a newspaperman who wrote about two dozen science fiction stories. He died in 2012, age 92. In addition to “Dreams are Sacred,” he also wrote another story I loved when I was a boy, “Manna,” about a stack of canned super-food that gets transported accidentally back in time to a medieval monastery. Hilarity ensues.
More on Phillips here, including some wonderful old magazine and book covers.
Astounding Science Fiction, the magazine “Dreams are Sacred” appeared in, was founded in 1930, with the delicious title, “Astounding Stories of Super-Science.” Beginning in 1939, under editor John Campbell, Astounding published groundbreaking writers including Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. The magazine changed its name to Analog Science Fact & Fiction in 1960 and still publishes today, under the name Analog Science Fiction & Fact.
Also last weekend, I re-read another favorite from the same period, “The Push of a Finger," by Alfred Bester. And I downloaded one more, “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, which was the basis for the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”
I read all three stories when I was a boy, in the fat, two-volume anthology, “The Astounding-Analog Reader," which I checked out of the East Northport Public Library about a dozen times, every time I was in the mood to re-read it.
All three stories have newspapermen as heroes. I guess those stories made an impression — I have made my career in journalism of one form or another for my entire life. (In addition to those stories, I also devoured Superman, Spider-Man, and especially the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Lou Grant. I wanted to be Lou Grant when I grew up. I still do.)
