The Dream That Became A Book Series

The dream started like most nightmares. Darkness. Fear. Chaos.

Then I saw him. A black man fighting a mob.

Then I saw her. A young white woman running in terror.

Then I saw them. A Hispanic family huddled in their home, explosions all around them, the kids crying.

Then I saw them. Asian-Americans fleeing in the night, heading south to a border that used to be a one-way road in.

Then I saw him. A drug lord turned dictator who worked with our nation’s enemies to bring the USA down to its knees and onto its face.

Defeated. Darkness descends over the land. And walls go up in the cities that remain.

I woke up in a cold sweat. What in the world?

Praying and trying to calm my beating heart, I wrote it all down and eventually fell back to sleep.

Then I met him in the dream that never stopped.

Marcos. An angry, young Hispanic man growing up in an area called Havana, never interacting with anyone who didn’t look like him. Asking questions that earned him beatings at home from a controlling, abusive father.

Then I met her.

Rose. An insecure, suspicious young Asian woman growing up in the area next to Marcos’, but called Almond. Raised in a towering building of apartments that overlooked the city’s walls, Rose spent her days listening to the other areas from her high rooftop retreat. Surrounded by cement walls and barbed wire, she dared to dream.

Then they met each other in this place called the Underground. Where they could not only become friends, but could work together to bring down the cement walls and the barbed wire and the dictator who made slaves of his enemies.

And then Divided was born.

While my writing inspiration was a dream, our reality doesn't need to become a nightmare. Let this series serve as a warning for what might happen if we only see each other and don’t meet each other, if we don’t learn to work together for a common good.