Before Waking

What if every time you fell asleep, you woke up inside another life?

In 2001, Ethan Hale is a San Francisco novelist trapped in a cycle of chronic insomnia and mysterious episodes he calls “big sleeps.” Each time he wakes, something feels wrong. His dreams are no longer fragments. They have continuity. Memory. People who remember him.

And another life waiting on the other side.

In one world, Ethan is a novelist who writes about the subconscious and loves Maya Laurent, a violet-eyed fortune-teller who reads playing cards. In the other, he is a psychiatrist married to Claire Dawson, drawn dangerously close to his patient Rachel Quinn, while treating Silas Ward, a mysterious writer who insists that he is God.

At first, Ethan is certain one life must be real and the other a dream.

Then both begin producing evidence.

People remember conversations he remembers. Relationships carry consequences from one awakening to the next. Time continues while he is gone. As the outside world grows increasingly unstable—with SARS alerts, the Iraq War, hospital precautions, apocalyptic fears, and violence filling the news—the boundary between dream and reality begins to collapse inside Ethan as well.

Soon, waking up is no longer proof of anything.

Desperate to discover which life is real, Ethan makes an irreversible choice. He believes that if death can exist inside a dream, then waking afterward will finally give him the answer.

It does not.

Instead, the other world keeps going.

Memory becomes evidence. Guilt survives awakening. Years can pass in one life while only days disappear in another. And Ethan is forced to confront a possibility more terrifying than madness:

What if neither life is only a dream?

How long can a dream last?

Can a few minutes contain decades?

If you love someone in a dream, is that love unreal?

If you kill someone in a dream, does the guilt disappear when you wake?

And if you open your eyes after death, were you saved—or did you simply wake into another layer?

Before Waking is a psychological suspense novel about insomnia, memory, love, betrayal, mental illness, war, death, and the terrifying instability of consciousness.

Because the most dangerous question may not be whether you are dreaming.

It may be this:

When you open your eyes, how do you know you are really awake?