The Déjà Rêve

Overview

Maya Santos is a forensic accountant in her mid-thirties who has kept detailed dream journals since childhood. Every night for twenty-three years, she has written in them—sometimes a few lines, sometimes pages of description. It is her one private excess in a life otherwise constructed with meticulous care. The journals are locked, dated, catalogued. They are hers alone.

Then, in her most recent entry, she describes a crime scene with impossible specificity. A particular address. A particular arrangement of furniture and objects. The position of a body. The color of the walls. The exact sound of silence in an unfamiliar room. Three days later, the crime occurs. Not hypothetically. Not similar. Identical. And the question becomes: did Maya predict this, or did she cause it? And if she did cause it, how, and why, and what does it mean that she cannot remember doing so?

Maya

Maya is detail-oriented to the point of obsession—a trait that made her excellent at forensic accounting and makes her terrible at living without control. Everything in her life is accounted for, organized, filed away in its proper place. She is meticulous with her appearance as a kind of armor, dressing in neutral colors that demand no attention, wearing her dark hair in the same style it has been for six years. She is in her mid-thirties but could pass for older; there is something in her bearing that suggests she has already lived several lives and found each one insufficient.

The dream journals are her one deviation from this pattern—the one place where her mind is permitted to wander without documentation or justification. She needs them the way she needs sleep. They are essential. But increasingly, since the first coincidence, they are also terrifying. Because she does not write them consciously. She does not remember the act of writing. She simply wakes, and the words are already there, already dated, already bound and locked away in a leather journal that lives in a safe beneath her floorboards.

Her relationship with sleep has become fraught. She is afraid of what will appear in the journals when she wakes. She is afraid of the absence of evidence—of the possibility that the journals have always been telling stories and she has simply never noticed. She is afraid, most of all, of the growing suspicion that she is not in control of her own hands.

The Dream Journals

The journals are not random. They are specific, detailed, visceral. They contain sensory information that could only come from being in a place, from observing something directly. But Maya has not been to the places described. She has not seen the people. Yet the details persist: the exact shade of paint, the particular smell of a room, the way light falls through a specific window at a specific time of day. As the novel progresses, the reader comes to suspect that the journals are not dreams at all, but something else—prophecy, perhaps, or evidence, or confession.

What makes them evidence in the eyes of the law is what makes them terrifying in Maya's hands. They have become the primary documentation of crimes she cannot remember committing. The police find them. They read them. They recognize the details of crimes that have already occurred. And suddenly Maya is not someone haunted by her own mind but someone hunted by an investigation that suggests her consciousness itself is a crime scene.

Setting

The Déjà Rêve takes place in contemporary time, in an unnamed mid-sized American city—the kind of place that exists in the background of most people's awareness, distinctive enough to have character but generic enough to belong everywhere. The novel is constrained to six weeks of narrative time, though the dream journals reach back two decades. The city itself becomes increasingly claustrophobic as the investigation narrows and Maya's options contract. By the final chapters, the entire world has collapsed to the space between her apartment and the police station and the places the journals send her.

MORE PAGES COMING AS THE STORY DEVELOPS