Asleep in Green

Asleep in Green is a reference to the green meme in spiral dynamics. The twelve short stories are accompanied with twelve songs to be listened to while reading, creating an aural experience with the reading. The book opens by posing the question of human existence, our main character grappling with the struggle of the human organism trying to find a higher mind, or higher purpose. In the second story, we are shifted back through history to Botswana where we find an old folk story mirrored into a modern era of AIDS and the environmental problems of Africa. The strings of time play on the idea of evolution, leading us into the third story, expanding time even further into the past and future, tying in the universe and alien civilizations to our own. In the fourth story we change course, the emphasis now being on human struggles for power and justice ending in bloodshed. This leads to the fifth story, a shakespearean sonnet about running with bulls, (bulls being both the religious symbol of hinduism and a cultural sport in Spain). The sixth story is part of a play debating the roles of art. The seventh story is a juxtaposition of heaven and hell set in the disappearing frontier and home of Native Americans in the 1800's. The eighth story finds us in Japan amongst a young hikikumori who in her isolation is unknowingly referencing Anne Frank. The ninth story finds our character as an older man, recently losing his wife to cancer and reflecting on her life, falling asleep whilst listening to a stream and falling into a dream leading us to our tenth story, following him swimming through an underwater city. The city comes alive and he realizes he's imagining the whole thing. Our eleventh story finds him crawling out of the water as a Phoenician sailor on the rock of Gibraltar, the symbol for human power and conquest throughout history. It is in the eleventh story that our book hits its crescendo. At last, the book peaks and slams down into our twelfth and final story, in a quiet house with the ghosts of all the characters throughout the previous stories. He reflects on the journey, lets it go, and leaves this place for another dream. All in all, this book requires the reader to let the stories wash over them without expecting to come to concrete conclusions. By the same token, this is what makes this book so rewarding because it requires the reader to use his or her own imagination in congruence with the author's lead.