Mystical bridge over troubled lifetimes

‘Or maybe life itself is one big illusion.’

Why did I choose to read this book when I so rarely review fiction? It’s Bridge of Dreams: a Speculative Tryptych, what I would call a tragi-comic fantasy, by the American writer Kevin P Keating (Iff Books, May, 2025).

Well, the answer to the question is that, first, Kevin sent me an email to tell me about his book, being aware of articles I’ve written about the work of the philosopher-scientist Bernardo Kastrup, a proponent of metaphysical, or analytic, idealism, who gets a mention in the final pages of Kevin’s book.

So, on that basis, Kevin, whose interests include classical literature, mythology and Gnosticism, must have thought I’d be receptive. Quite evidently, he’s also interested in investigations of the nature of consciousness, revealed not least by allusions, in a psychedelic postscript, also to Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna, Rupert Spira and Donald Hoffman.

Kevin signs off a somewhat surreal and possibly fictional Bridge of Dreams introduction as ‘a visiting lecturer at the Center for Advanced Consciousness Studies, Aspern College’. A websearch failed to find such an institution.

Significantly, perhaps, a list of Kevin’s favourite books shown on his blogpage includes Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers in which a…