As an offering and further introduction, I’ll share insights I have learned and blended with my study of writing over the years, all illustrated by an amusing dream I had on the very night my novel “Dream Knights” released. Fair warning: you won’t get the complete references unless you are familiar with the game Cyberpunk 2077, which prominently features a Latino friend, Jackie Welles. But even if you don’t get the reference, note the vibrant detail I pulled into the waking world and my efforts to share those, even for such a short and silly dream.


We are hanging out at a food stall in a popular merchant’s plaza, my friend and I, chilling and getting in some amusing people-watching, soaking in the warming sun. A commotion, a brief moment of scuffle, and then I hear the slap slap of a punk’s tennis shoes on the pavement as he races away with whatever he had stolen.

“Hey,” my friend says with a nudge to my arm and a pointed finger. “Don’ let him get away with that.”

Knowing I have the right implant for the job, I focus on the fleeing guy, seeing that amazing moment as my optics zoom in and capture his information: name, affiliation, and bounty. I pass the info along to my friend and grin as he also registers the name of the perp: Pengato Daio.

With an arched eyebrow, I comment, “Isn’t that like a Spanish cuss word? Meaning ‘F’in cat’ or something?”

He smirks at me as if to say, “You dork.” But instead replies with casual amusement in his Latino style, “Yeah…it’s a versatile word.” And with that, we go back to eating our noodles.


So, the dream was clearly taken from my immersion in the game I’m playing, using that as a backdrop to run a fun little sequence, and yet the feeling was a layer no game can currently match, the personalized being there—inside the moment in a self-aware way. Furthermore, in general I am terrible at remembering names; yet, I clearly remembered the thief’s name as if it were still printed out on my augmented reality display! And when I woke up enough to realize the silly pun I had made of that name, I cracked myself up (for those who don’t know, gato means cat, and pengato is similar to a cuss word in Spanish). When you can crack yourself up both in and out of dreams, you know you are doing something right. It has been my personal experience that the more I train myself to not only remember details but to find ways of clearly communicating them, the more complex/fancy dreams I have (or recall having). It’s as if my training has unlocked entirely new layers of adventure, so I encourage each of you to keep pushing yourselves to pay attention to the finer details and be able to share those. At the very least, we can gain more value from the dreams you already have.