Life is but a Dream
Community Rating
Description
Sometimes, when you close your eyes to sleep, you find yourself in a dream. You may not remember the dream, but for those precious moments, or perhaps seemingly years, that is your life. Yuclaus finds himself rocked to sleep while returning home on a public bus. As he falls into a deep slumber, his heart slowing down, he jerks awake. Where he finds himself is a world full of various creatures, races, mysteries, laws of physics, and creations so fantastical, it could only be a dream. Yet with every person he meets, with every encounter, he realizes how lifelike this world is. He starts subconsciously accepting this as his reality, but is that really wise? No matter how you look at it, this world could be nothing but a dream.
Disclaimer: There is a profanity warning. If you are worried about swearing in every dialogue, fear not. In order to capture a character's reaction properly, I felt I needed them to swear. As of now there are three uses of profanity. There are also multiple times a swear word is started, but not finished. For example: "bi—".
Information
- Status
- Hiatus
- Year
- 2021
- Author
- Silent Haitch
Tags
Royal Road Stats
- Rating
- 4.8/ 5.0
- Views
- 202
Chapters(45 total)
Reviews
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Community Reviews(2)
- ActusRoyal Road★★★★★ 5.0This is quite a unique novel.
The author does a few somewhat interesting things that differentiate this novel from the general books you can find on RoyalRoad. The first is that we appear to have an unreliable narrator. He inserts comments and clearly has his own opinions of the main character, who he nicknames 'Cause'. I don't know if the author plants to lean harder into this, feeding the reader misinformation through the narrator, or if he just plans to use him as comic relief.
The second is that the main character is...honestly, kind of a prick. Not by being rude or disrespectful to people, but he speaks (and even thinks) in what is essentially modern shakesperian english, which I will refer to as douchebaggerian. Yuclaus is said to be a scientist of some sort. Specifically, the narrator calls him a 'mad scientist'. However, it's almost as if Yuclaus is desperately trying to convince people he's smart through his word choice, rather than demonstrating it through his actions.
I feel like this is intentional. The other characters speak normally (with what little time they've had to speak, it's quite early in the book), and at one point Yuclaus forgets to speak douchebaggerian within his own thoughts, and the narrator points this out.
Some part of me hopes that Yuclaus grows out of speaking douchebaggerian and takes on a more normal voice so everything he thinks and says isn't pseudointellectual. The other part hopes he never changes, because it's kinda growing on me. I haven't had enough exposure to this novel to really say much more, so onto the required categories.
Style: Pretty solid. As mentioned, the douchebaggerian is slightly annoying as the main character comes off as pretentious, but it grows on you and does succeed at giving the MC a lot of personality. And hey, people can't all be perfect.
Grammar: No errors that I saw, or nothing significant enough to be of worth. This novel appears to be edited before publicaiton, and the english is solid. There are n - LioraLaneRoyal Road★★★★ 4.0This story is a play on what happens when we dream. It's an interesting premise and has some great characterizations. Our MC has a very distinct voice and is interesting. He's not necessarily likable, but he is different and intriguing. The author enjoys breaking the fourth wall in a style mimicking Douglas Adams, so if you're not in on the style beware. If you are, then you're going to love it.
Style score is a 4.5: This story has a whimsical style to it. Very fantastical things are happening in it and characters are very mysterious as to who and what they are. The narrator fancies himself a comedian and is not always trustworthy.
Grammar score is a 3: Throughout the story, the MC's name has been autocorrected to a mundane word, which can cause a few re-reads of sentences. There are also some hard-to-read sentences and I can't quite tell if they were done that way on purpose to be mysterious. A good proofreading of this story would go a long way.
Story score is a 3.5: This story is going somewhere. I have no idea where. There are characters being introduced, but I have no clue who they are or what they're doing here. All that being said, I'm interested in them. I'm interested in what the heck is actually happening. I feel that at 5 chapters, I should have a bit more stable of a foundation on that.
Character score is a 5: This is the strongest point of the story. All the characters have a distinct feel and voice to them and are interesting. If you are a reader who is big on character then this is a story for you.
Overall I'm giving this story a 4. There were a lot of things going well for this story. It's intriguing, there's mystery, there's fantastical implications and great characters. A few things that could take this to a 5 would be a solid proofreader. Some of the problems that took me out of the story could be fixed easily with an editor. The second thing that could take this up a notch would be to introduce characters slower. Almost every chapter had a new ch