"Dream state" synopsis
Just a taste of my novel:
The leading lady of my story is Shelli Wengart. Woven through all of the personal stories of each of her family members are the recurring events of Shelli's dream life, starting at the age of 10. She discovered her passion for writing early on. She would be constantly writing about things she saw, heard, and especially about events in her family’s history told by her parents and grandparents. Here is an excerpt from the beginning pages that will shed some light on her dilemma:
"Twelve year old Shelli sat up abruptly in bed, breathing fast and feeling confused. She tumbled out of bed and went straight for her 3 cedar chests. Memory, Fantasy, and Hope. Each of these represented her past, present and future respectively, where she collected things special to her. She kept a secret from her family because she thought they would think her crazy or just plain weird. She thought that maybe Mom might have suspected something was wrong, because apparently, she must have made some sounds during a dream one night and her mom would be outside the door knocking and asking if she was all right.
Truth be told, she had been plagued by disturbing dreams at least once a week for the last two years. Starting on her 10th birthday on August 21, she confided in her sister and best friend, Josie, who suggested that she keep a dream journal to get the disturbing images out of her head and down on paper. Shelli's mom, Margana, was a published Montana historian and could tell you any facts about Montana you could dream up. But Shelli's dreams were not about Montana, but another girl in another state of long ago. And so Shelli began writing in her first journal:
Why was tonight so different? When the dreams began, they were short and kind of jumbled, hazy, you know, kind of unclear. I kept wishing that I could see more and make sense of them. Sometimes they would be about a three-year-old girl jumping off her dad's car bumper at her birthday party and breaking her nose. Another dream was a little clearer and I could see a big green leafy tree across the street from her house. The weather was clear and sunny, and it looked like some kid was up in the tree hammering boards and probably making a treehouse of some sort. Then I could see this little girl shouting up in the tree to throw down the rope and let her come up. I guess it was her brother in the tree yelling at her to go away. Then she saw a rope attached to the branch where he was and started to pull hard at the rope to bug her brother. Suddenly he screamed at her, “Lally!” and she crumpled to the ground, crying and shrieking, “Mommy, Mommy!” I think something fell out of the tree and hit her on the head. It scared me. I wanted to go help her, but I couldn't move. I don't think they knew I was watching them. A week later I had the same dream, but it was right after Lally's accident (I think her name was Darla). She got up and was screaming and running down the long driveway to her house, blood gushing everywhere from the gash on her forehead made by the claw hammer
falling from the tree. Her brother tumbled down the tree rope and was running like mad after her, and you could see on his face that he was in BIG trouble.
You know, Josie was right. I feel a lot better when I write what I saw. It's like a story that I would read at school or here at home. Enough for now dear Dream Journal!"
As Shelli got older, the dreams got darker and more complicated. They always seemed to happen after a major occasion, like Thanksgiving dinner, or Christmas morning, or someone's birthday, or after 4th of July fireworks.
The dreams parallelled her own life, but in opposite directions. Where her life was joyful, satisfying, loving, with no financial worries at all, Darla’s life was just the opposite. Living from paycheck to paycheck, her dad taking on extra shifts just to put away money for Christmas, impending divorces, knock-down drag-out fights between father and son, poor choices that led to extreme complications, and the inability to provide for higher education, was a recipe for disaster. And a very hard life. Having to pack up and move every time her dad heard about a better job opportunity in another state caused Lally to find it difficult to form any kind of lasting friendships at her many schools.
The juxtaposition of their two lives was enough to change Shelli from a carefree, happy, playful girl to a moody, withdrawn, sad, and helpless child if it weren’t for her dream journals, and the love of her big sister.
Well, I think you have the idea. Every day with her family, her parents, brothers and her sister brought joy to Shelli’s heart, making it possible for her to separate reality from fantasy. Waking up from a dream and being able to put it down in her journal filled shelves of journals throughout her lifetime.
"Home" page features a section showing each character, complete with their portrait. Click on each picture to take you to their bio. I feel that it's important to have a backstory for each one to guide you through the novel without confusing you. I am asking you, my readers, to give me feedback to make it a better story, one that you would stay up all night reading because you just couldn't put it down!
Dream State Synopsis - Part 2
Shelli Wengart is a purposeful girl who knows exactly how she wants her life to go — active in school, gifted in music and art, endlessly curious, the kind of child who asks why until she gets a real answer. She was named after her father, Herschel, and there was always warmth and mischief in the house he and Margana built: Josie, the oldest, with a poet's heart and a dream of becoming a writer; Ryan, the athlete, self-assured and kind; Marcus, who loved every animal on his grandparents' farm; and Dillan, the youngest, who saw houses everywhere he looked before he ever picked up a pencil to design one.
It was a life worth living, full of holidays and Sunday dinners and a faith the whole family shared without needing to explain it to each other. And it was against exactly that backdrop that Shelli's dreams began, just after her tenth birthday — dreams of another girl, in another place, living a life that mirrored Shelli's own in every way except the ones that mattered most. Where Shelli's family had abundance, Darla's had scarcity. Where Shelli had a home that never once felt uncertain, Darla had moves, and men, and mistakes that cost her more than she ever meant to pay.
For nearly thirty years, Shelli watched Darla's life unfold in pieces — a marriage, a divorce, a slow unraveling neither of them understood — and wrote every dream down, the way her sister once told her to, never quite sure whether she was witnessing a stranger's life or something closer to a memory that wasn't hers to have.
What Shelli doesn't know — what she spends the whole novel getting closer to finding out — is exactly whose story she's really been living inside of, and what it will cost both women when she finally does.
Dream State Dynasty follows three generations of the Wengart family through weddings and wars, secrets kept and secrets broken, all the way to the night everything Shelli thought she understood about her own life gets tested at once. It's a novel about the distance between the life we're given and the life we build for ourselves — and about how far love is willing to travel to close that distance.
A note from the author
I wrote this novel over thirteen years, and while it's a work of fiction, it grew out of a life I know something about — the gap between the family we picture for ourselves and the one we actually build, and the long, imperfect work of making peace with both. I'll leave it to you to decide, once you've read the whole book, how much of me is standing behind which of these two women. That's part of the story too.
