Blog Tour: A Dream Within a Dream

The world within the Dreamworld Duology, or should I say, the worlds within the Dreamworld Duology, were both challenging and fun to create. They are a product of my protagonist Reeve and the story itself. Specifically, the first bit of this story that I knew was that it’s about a girl who falls in love with a boy she meets in her dreams. That in itself prompted many world-based questions. What was this dreamworld like? How did it contrast to Reeve’s real world? What did each world bring out in Reeve?

I knew I wanted the dreamworld to be a dark, nightmarish place, which is why I named it Tenebris, which means “dark” in Latin. I wanted it to be a place that makes Reeve dread going to sleep, until the boy she’s to fall in love with arrives, that is. The monstrous, six-foot-tall falcons were built to add to the terror of the world, the way they patrol the streets and kill anyone caught outside.

In contrast, Reeve’s waking world is called Acarsaid, which means “safe harbor” in Gaelic. It’s an idyllic world, bright and airy and everything Tenebris is not. But I wanted it to feel confining to Reeve, to really make her yearn for freedom, which is why I decided to set the whole story in an era that models Victorian England. For all that Acarsaid is the opposite of Tenebris, it suffocates her. To that end, I also made Acarsaid a small island nation, to further the isolation she feels.

The worlds play such a large role in each character’s development, not just Reeve’s, that they feel like characters themselves. Bran would not be who he is if he had been raised in Acarsaid, and nor would Arden be if he’d been raised in Tenebris. They are such a product of their circumstances, and so each world, and each man within each world, tugs Reeve in different directions.

I’m sure you could build a thousand stories based around the idea of a girl falling in love with a boy she meets in her dreams, but I’m really proud of the one I built.