Queen of Bad Dreams Vol. 1 by Danny Lore

You deserve to be more than a pawn in someone else’s.” Queen of Bad Dreams is my way of telling fellow dreamers: you deserve to step into the waking world as vibrant and as powerful as you are in your dreams. Ava, who steps out of the dreams of a spoiled rich man, and Daher, who breaks protocol to help her, are at the center of the story, but they’re not the only ones in these pages who are discovering what happens next. Queen is the story of a small group of women, both dreamers and dreams, who break the pattern-who fight to win. That’s what happens in a world where your own dreams are the stuff of nightmares for those in charge. It’s about the moment you become aware of the pattern…and the first time you break the routine. That’s what Queen of Bad Dreams is about. The feeling might not necessarily be happy, but damn if it isn’t freeing. Maybe the dream started out happy, but instead of just going for a ride, you explored. Maybe it started out as a nightmare, but for the first time in the dozens of times you’ve had it, you broke the pattern. The ones where you wake up, heart racing, and maybe your cheeks are streaked with tears, but you feel triumphant. Festers.īut more than the happy or bad or sad dreams…you’ve got those angry dreams. It creeps up into your brain and lodges itself. You can’t help those when there’s so much fear in the world. You have nightmares where you wake up in a cold sweat because a certain striped-sweater-wearing villain with a fedora chases you through your housing projects (I HAVE had that dream, many, many times feel free to take it from me). Maybe you ride on a soft, fluffy cloud while wearing a crown of cotton candy (I haven’t had this one, but I’m trying to put it into the universe so that I can). You’re safe and sound, untouched by the pattern, the strictures. You have your happy dreams, of course, where nothing bad ever happens. When you’re stuck in that rut, what do you do? You dream anyway. You have to follow the pattern, again and again, so someone higher up on the food chain can achieve their “perfect” dream life.

We’re told how to be black, how to be queer, how to maybe be a woman-but if you’re not a woman, here’s a prescribed way of being non-binary too.

“People like me are told constantly how to dream-not too big, not too broad, not too often.

Queen of Bad Dreams Vol. 1 by Danny Lore