Fans pick 75 books like The Dream Peddler

False Pregnancy, a mysterious and fascinating condition, is a topic of The End of Miracles, written by a psychiatrist who has witnessed the condition up close.

The novel examines how unfulfilled desire can meet with mental illness (or perhaps lead to mental illness) and alter our perceptions in ways that can have outsized effects on our behavior. The tale is told with great sympathy and respect for its protagonist and has no shortage of surprising twists.

On her 29th birthday, Kelly Holter walks through a door and into a life that barely resembles her own. And yet it is her own.

Is her reality wrong? Or are her memories wrong? Or are they both somehow correct? Part sci-fi, part thriller, all-consuming, The Other Me explores how the decisions we make influence the person we become, or don’t. The novel raises many fascinating questions and provides plenty of unexpected answers.

A routine tale told in a familiar way can be comforting and satisfying.

Embers on the Wind is a different kind of thrill altogether. The story is fresh, the characters are multifaceted, and the storytelling is original. When I picked up this novel, I knew only that it was about a purportedly haunted home that had once been part of the Underground Railroad. I had no idea what I was in for or the wild ride the author would take me on.

Each character perceives reality a bit differently, and those differences make big waves. It's best to be surprised by a novel like this, so I won't say any more than that it's thought-provoking and entertaining at once.

Would you like to live forever—or barring that, for a really long time? If the answer is yes, then who are you? Is the person you were last month you? If your consciousness from last month could be transferred to a clone of your body, would that clone be you?

Matthew FitzSimmons explores the reality of who we are and more in his fast-paced mystery sci-fi novel Constance.

If you’re like me, and you feel a hole in your reading life when you finish this book, the good news is that the sequel is just a click away. Enjoy!

Elizabeth Knox is a world-class writer with an exceptional imagination and her fantasy novel, Dreamhunter, is a great introduction to her work. Set in an alternative past, dreamhunters harvest dreams which are transmitted to the public for entertainment and therapy – or worse. Fifteen-year-old Laura Hame must enter The Place of Dreams to uncover what happened to her missing dreamhunter father and in the process reveals how the government has used dreams to control an ever-growing population of convicts and political dissenters. Those who love Philip Pullman or Garth Nix won’t be disappointed.

The Dream Master was originally published in Amazing (Jan/Feb 1965) titled, He Who Shapes. The novella won Roger Zelazny a Nebula Award in 1966. I have re-read this novel several times over the years, and subconsciously I think it influenced the premise for Dream Phaze. Some of the tech is a little outdated by today’s terms, but the overall idea is still fresh.

Season of Mists is my favorite of Gaiman’s graphic novels from his stellar Sandman run. Death, Dream’s older sister, appears at the end of the first arc and proved to be a fan favorite from that first on-page appearance. She’s a lovely, sweet, and utterly kind incarnation of the boundary that severs this life from whatever comes after. Gaiman creating a comforting presence out of an idea that terrifies most people. She’s charming in this installment, forcing her brother to face his misdeeds with compassion and honesty. It’s no wonder she is one of the only people in his family that Dream listens to!

James Hillman is the kind of writer you sometimes have to stop, think and re-read, to work your way into what he is trying to say, but it repays the effort because what he says is always interesting. This book, about fantasy and imagination, explores the idea that we are more than our personal story, more than ego and self. For me as a writer, it changed the way I see the creative process, with imagination not being something we need to spark and drive, but a space we already inhabit. Imagination is our essence; we are the dream.

The book tells the story of a man who believes that his dreams influence reality. I loved it because it was strange and intriguing, mind-bending and surreal. Nothing was permanent, and even reality itself was questionable.

Ursula Le Guin explores the issues of climate change and overpopulation, pollution and the destruction of the environment though the characters’ personal experiences. She tackles racism and shows how one's life experiences shape their personality. The question of whether the end justifies the means keeps recurring in the narrative.

I picked Dream Work because it is “one-stop shopping” meaning it is a comprehensive and thorough review of many different approaches to dream interpretation. I particularly like the quick tips he offers if you don’t want to delve into theory. For example, he recommends you create a title for a dream which is effective in increasing your insight quickly. He also has guidance for working with fragments of dreams and offers a powerful case study of how one small dream fragment of remembering “pastel” colors opened up a new career direction for a dreamer. While many dreamers find dream fragments to be frustrating he shows how these can be condensed and edited “telegrams.” Other quick tips he offers are asking questions about a dream such as “What might happen if I did this in the real world?”