Thank you so much for reading Dream Born! As with all of my books, I like to use these author’s notes to talk about what I was thinking when I wrote the novel. So if you want to a glimpse into what inspired this story, keep reading.
My Life Changed with a Dream
I was so fascinated by my own dreams as a kid that I kept a journal, and I wrote down every single dream for almost four years.
My parents gave me an allowance every week, and I would walk to my local Walgreens and blow it on Sweet Tarts and pocket notebooks. You know, the little ones that you can write on in a moment’s notice.
This was before smartphones existed.
In fact, my biggest fear in life during middle school and high school was losing my pocket notebooks. If I did that, I would have lost all of my dream research. Quite a few of those pocket books accidentally ended up in the washing machine.
But seriously, I wrote all of my dreams down. And those dreams inspired short stories that I wrote when I was young.
I Studied Dreams Like Crazy
I was not a scientist (and definitely am not one now), but I tried to be scientific about how I studied my dreams.
I paid attention to dreams that I had in my own bed, and I compared those to dreams I had in other places, like hotels, campgrounds, high school lock-ins, etc. I compared the interactions that I had with people in real-life versus the interactions with those same people in my dreams. And most importantly, I paid attention to the emotions and the lighting.
There’s something about the emotion of dreams.
You feel them in a way that you don’t feel them in real life.
And the light just seems to be magical. The light itself is an emotion.
What were my major revelations?
Hell if I remember. But I remember learning so much about myself through my dreams.
In fact, there was one dream that literally changed my life.
If it hadn’t been for that dream, I don’t know where I would have ended up in life.
Seventh grade.
Imagine me: scrawny little black kid who carries around notebooks in his pocket, scribbling ideas in them every ten minutes. I read books like they were going out of style. I had read all the classics before most kids in my class even knew they existed.
Naturally, I was bullied.
Around this time, the middle school I went to was mostly black. And I can’t tell you how awful black kids were to me when I grew up.
I was never black enough. I spoke too proper. I was “weird”. I was an easy target. If you want to know more about this, read some of my other books—I talk about this in other author’s notes, so I won’t spend too much time on it here.
I had to put up with a lot of crap. Fights after school. People throwing things at me in class.
My grades suffered. Big time. I went from a straight A student to almost flunking.
I fell in with the wrong crowd of kids. Kids who dabbled in drugs (I never did any), and hung out with the WRONG people.
A guidance counselor pulled me into her office at one point and told me that my life was going to go nowhere if I didn’t do something about it. I blew her off.
It was such an awkward year for me, being bullied, hanging out with the wrong crowd, hating school (very unnatural for me) …
I remember coming home from seventh grade on the final day of school and never wanting to go back again. Nothing seemed to be going right in my life. Okay, okay, I was thirteen, and I definitely had some angst going on, but those emotions were real.
And the day before eighth grade started, something weird happened.
A Dream Changed My Life
I had a dream.
I was sitting in class.
All of the other kids were teasing me and making fun of me. They were throwing things at me.
And I ignored them.
I kept my head down, and I just studied.
I imagined myself as the best possible version of myself, at the top of the class, with amazing grades, amazing friends, and…best of all, happy.
I woke up in a cold sweat that morning.
That dream gave me a revelation: that no one else mattered except me. That I had to take my life into my own hands.
And I ROCKED eighth grade. Straight As, won all kinds of contests.
That was just the beginning of what became a very, very successful academic run that has ended most recently with me going to law school.
In that dream, I saw what I could be—I saw the best possible version of myself. Even though I was young, I’ve strived to replicate the strength I felt inside myself in that dream. When I visualize myself, I still see myself as that awkward eighth grader, keeping his head down and working hard even when the rest of the world didn’t understand him and teased him for being who he was.
A dream changed my life.
Maybe a dream can change yours, too.