The Dream Hacker

Book excerpt: Your dreams belong to you. Theyre private, and no one needs to know what happens in them. But what if someone could invade your dreams? And once in, what if that someone could control what happens while you lie there, powerless to affect the outcome? Dylan Ward can do that. Struggling to make partner in a law firm and finding it hard to hold on to a romantic relationship, his nightly dreams become his escape into a world that seems far happier than his real one. When he learns about the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, where the sleeping person is actually conscious of the events in the dream, he immerses himself in an attempt to master it. Soon his nights are filled with fun and adventure, where he has the power to control events and find temporary relief from his mundane life. That relief soon pales when he reads an old legend about dream sharing that leads him to the idea of entering and controlling the dreams of others. What starts out as an interesting experiment soon turns into an obsession of hacking into the dreams of the people in his life. He begins a strange quest for vengeance, power, love, and all the things that are missing from his real world. But its when he devises a way to teach other people how to invade dreams that the dangers of his obsession become frighteningly clear. The Dream Hacker moves between imagination and reality, along the hazy sleeping path that everyone travels but cant really navigate. Mixing equal parts of dark humor and the angst of modern culture, the story challenges our notions of understanding what is real and asks just how far a person will go to change the course of his life.