Oft Perchance to Dream

'Oft Perchance to Dream' is a science fiction novel referencing various cosmologies of physics - Newtonian, Einsteinian Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and String Theory - to further a storyline couched within a fantasy world set within lucid dreams. The novel recounts the adventures and conflicts of Malcolm MacPherson, a professor and researcher of Dream Studies who is an adept at lucid dreaming. Unpredictably during one of his nightly lucid dreams a 3500 year old Olmec shamanic sorcerer unexpectedly attacks the professor - an adept persisting in the dream-space, outside Newtonian Time, able to employ shapeshifting and sorcery to achieve his nefarious end of killing Malcolm. Then not long after, the professor learns that a shapeshifting shaman has also attacked two of his dream studies students while dream-walking: one of whom remains locked in the dream, while the other manages to escape back to waking reality. So the professor must find a way to rescue the comatose student from the dream world and the shamanic sorcerer holding her enthralled.As the bizarre mystery gradually unfolds within his lucid dreams, the Malcolm MacPherson begins to understand the overwhelming mystical forces arrayed against him. Assisted by his graduate students, also proficient at waking consciously in the dream-space; the academic fellowship must utilize lucid dreaming and dream-walking to locate Malcolm's dead dream teacher; lost on the astral plane 25 years past after the silver-thread connecting her astral body to her corporeal body was severed by her death due to an overdose of sleeping pills. It soon becomes imperative for the professor and his graduate students to delve ever deeper into lucid dreams and dream-walking, so that Malcolm can come to terms with his 'true nature' and survive by employing an array of sortileges and thaumaturgies to defeat his aboriginal adversaries. And in the end, he must learn to use the power of his 'true nature' to defeat the shamanic sorcerers hunting him and his students, so that he might free his deceased dream teacher from the astral plane.