They say that there is a state known as lucid dream­ing, whereby one realises one is dream­ing with­out wak­ing up. With this real­i­sa­tion comes power — the power to fly, to go any­where in an instant, to have revenge on your ene­mies or to become a great hero. And all this within your dream, where mere thought directs your expe­ri­ence. Any­thing you believe you can do, you can do.

We’d use that state for per­sonal grat­i­fi­ca­tion, wouldn’t we? After all, dreams aren’t real, and your dreams are pri­vate things that only you expe­ri­ence, so why not? What’s the harm?

But what if they’re not just your dreams? What if they’re everyone’s dreams — bil­lions of dream-worlds, com­bined into one?

And what if those dream-people, when they went to sleep, dreamed of us?

Of course, you’re the real per­son, right? You know the dif­fer­ence between dream­ing and being awake. Do they?

Is the real you, the prod­uct of nature and nur­ture, of society’s expec­ta­tions and the lim­its of your species, truly the real you? Is the dream-you, your self-image, uncon­strained by the cage of soci­ety and biol­ogy, per­haps more true, more real?

What would be the result if, rather than mere idle spec­u­la­tion, this debate became a mat­ter of life and death for two par­al­lel sets of human beings? Two worlds, so dif­fer­ent and yet so depen­dent on each other, are on a col­li­sion course.

Why? And how is that even possible?

Who are we, what are we? What do we want, and what do we fear? And what is truly real?

This is Dream­ing Awake. It is in equal parts epic fan­tasy, psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror and philo­soph­i­cal trea­tise. And it might even get writ­ten some­time in the next few decades.