Brian Sfinas

The characters hold the idea that the mind is where a person is safe. Shutting out all external distractions they are willing to sleep endlessly if need be to stay in a perfect place that they believe they can control. Their true connections with society are in their dreams. When Sfinas writes on page 54 that families don't stay together and "The internet is our family now," the stark truth of the comment took my breath away. In so many ways it's not only our family but our inner circle and our companion. It allows us to stay within ourselves.

Michael is a good storyteller and comes off in his narrative as kind of a too cool for school kind of guy. He really gets how nonsensical life can be but in his first lucid dreams he's clinging to a golden past in which he's an adult so that the reader gets the sense that he always felt distant from his childhood experiences. He's a generally a bit of a slacker. He tells the audience that he's complacent. While his fellow adventurers in dream world are somewhat like him, he sees lucid dreaming as a safe place. He controls what he sees so dreaming isn't going to hurt him the way that substance abuse might. Sfinas builds through his character a subtext of tension. Michael doesn't trust the drug dealer. Terrible things will happen. The narrative provides the reader with spine chilling warnings that propel us further into the novel. The humor will make the reader like Michael but the tension will keep them reading.… (mehr)