Synopsis

He could be dead, dreaming, or painfully alive. Does he really want to find out which?

Timothy Smit is sick. He’s stuck in middle management at a second-rate news aggregator when an intense coughing fit causes him to pass out at his desk. Tim wakes up in the ICU to a diagnosis of a rare and aggressive form of lung cancer and the news that he likely has no more than a few months left to live.

Confined to a hospital bed with his health deteriorating, Tim finds himself immersed in a series of vivid dreams. As he becomes increasingly captivated by this enigmatic fantasy world, he realizes his dreams just might be keeping him alive.

But can Tim discover a real life worth living before it’s too late?

To Build a Dream is a mesmerizing psychological sci-fi novel that blurs the line between dreams and reality. If you like lone heroes fighting to survive, visionary quests, and a race against time, then you’ll love Greg Hickey’s enthralling dream world.

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Review

What if your dreams were helping you move on in your life or even keeping you alive? That is what seems to be happening with Tim. After being diagnosed with a normally fatal type of cancer, he seemingly starts to beat the odds. Were his dreams an escape? A way for his body to heal itself? Or something more? It is up to each reader to decide for themselves what is really happening in Tim’s dreams.

This book can be hard to read because of everything Tim is enduring while undergoing treatment for cancer. The effects are real and might hit too close to home for some people. The descriptions were what I would expect for someone battling terminal cancer, from the treatments to the sores, losing weight, and so forth. None of it is a pretty situation, and the fact that Tim’s dreams seem to be curative is beyond amazing.

Let’s talk about these dreams. In these dreams, Tim is in a tunnel being led around by a coworker, or at least someone who comes across as a coworker. The dreams are fairly repetitive as they stumble around these caves, not knowing where they are going or where they will end up. There were times I wanted to skip ahead because I didn’t feel like this wandering led to anything and felt like some filler. However, it is the dialogue when he exits the dreams with the doctors, nurses, and his sister that is intriguing. Were these dreams restoring his life? Is that even possible? The mind is an amazing thing, and I wouldn’t discount this entirely.

While we have an idea of how the book ends, I would have liked to have seen more information about where Tim went from there. Was he cured? Were there relapses? What did he do with his life? There were many unanswered questions.

This book was an interesting read, but do not expect to sail through it in one sitting. At least, that was not my experience.

We give the book 4 paws up.

About the Author

Greg Hickey started writing his first novel the summer after he finished seventh grade. He didn’t get very far because he quickly realized he preferred playing outside with his friends.

Eight years later, he began to find a better balance between writing and life. He wrote the early drafts of his first screenplay, Vita, during his last two years of college. Vita went on to win an Honorable Mention award in the 2010 Los Angeles Movie Awards script competition and was named a finalist in the 2011 Sacramento International Film Festival.

After college, he spent a year in Sundsvall, Sweden, and Cape Town, South Africa, playing and coaching for local baseball teams and penning his first novel, Our Dried Voices. That novel was published in 2014 and was a finalist for Foreword Reviews‘ INDIES Science Fiction Book of the Year Award.

Today, he still loves sharing stories while staying busy with the other facets of his life. He is a forensic scientist by day and an endurance athlete and author by nights, lunches, weekends, and any other spare moments. After his post-college travels, he once again lives in his hometown of Chicago with his wife, Lindsay.

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