FLYING DREAMS

A Nigerian author explores the convergence of dreams and reality in this nonfiction work.

“If I could bring all the beautiful things I see in the dream world to the real world,” Udejiji opens in this debut book, he would “replace everyone’s nightmare with flying dreams…to help humanity ultimately conquer the universe.” The author recounts in detail some of his more fantastical dreams, from an account of escaping a pursuing mob by flying away into the sky to stories of monsters and of scientists who created a “system” involving “an implant attached to the DNA of every person.” A spiritual thinker who often blends biblical references with a distinctly West African cosmology, Udejiji emphasizes the “intersection between the dream world and the real world,” providing instructions to readers on how to decipher his “encrypted” dreams. However, he also provides sociopolitical notions of a better world. Much of the book’s analysis offers specific commentary on a vision of a more just and prosperous Nigeria; one part, for instance, envisions a new city in the author’s home region—an economic and cultural hub that “will give us a second chance to make Africa great again.” Another chapter (“If I were the President of Nigeria”) details potential solutions to the country’s social and religious strife and offers concrete plans for infrastructure and civil service development. This is an often surreal read that includes vivid descriptions of such things as mushroom houses with “elevators stretching from the bottom six hundred feet to the sky.” This colorful imagery, however, often detracts from the author’s more grounded political commentary on topics that range from African ethnic divisions to the wealth of the Catholic Church. It’s a relatively brief work at fewer than 125 pages in length, but its prose style is occasionally stilted and repetitive, and it might have been improved by tighter editing; at one point early in its narrative, for instance, the author tells readers, “I do not remember if I talked about this earlier in the book.”

An examination of dreamtime visions that’s absorbing and frustrating, by turns.