In Dream Your Animal Dreams, Carole Martinez crafts a haunting, visionary novel that entwines the personal with the global in a tale of dreams, survival, and transformation.
With her eight-year-old daughter Lucie in her arms, Eva—a neurologist specializing in sleep—retreats to the isolated marshlands of the Camargue to protect them both from a violent man and a world that appears to be unraveling.
At first their retreat appears idyllic. Then, one night, Lucie wakes in tears after a disturbing dream. It soon emerges that children all over the world are emitting a powerful, universal cry in their sleep—a phenomenon that quickly ripples into waking life, heralding inexplicable calamities that recall ancient plagues. There in the Camargue, between the whispering reeds and the ever-watchful horizon, Eva faces the narrow frontier between waking and dreaming, love and loss, humanity and the natural world.
Martinez’s prose is at once lyrical and visceral, blending myth and psychological insight to explore how collective dreams might be messages from a beleaguered planet. Structurally bold and emotionally potent, the novel addresses themes of motherhood, violence, ecological collapse, and the universal search for meaning in chaos. Rich in atmosphere and moral urgency, Dream Your Animal Dreams is an unforgettable novel by one of France’s most beloved novelists.
