Dreamslinger by Graci Kim

Author, Graci Kim, writes a fascinating blog for us today about the power of dreams and her book, Dreamslinger!

When I was a kid, I had this recurring dream where a ghost would fly through the glass wall of our house and take something from my gut. It didn’t hurt, but in the dream, my nana would sit in her rocking chair next to me, sobbing. As you can imagine, it was terrifying, and I had it regularly for months. The day the nightmare vanished was the day my nana was diagnosed with colon cancer and had to have part of her gut removed.

Then when I was about ten years old, my nana was visiting family in South Korea when she called me in a panic. “Don’t go near water!” she demanded. “I had a dream where you died near water.” Naturally, the next day, our family went on a day trip to a nearby island. After a great day, we were rushing to the ferry when I slipped on a bed of oyster shells and gashed my leg open. I bled so much I almost lost my leg that day. “Tsk tsk, you should have listened,” my nana scolded. “Don’t you know Koreans are superstitious about dreams.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been so fascinated by dreams. Why do we have them? What do they mean? And where do they come from? It made me wonder: what if our dreams actually come from a real place? And what if a minority of the world’s population were born with a genetic mutation that allowed them to access this place, and be able to harness its strange and magical powers?

That was my starting seed. But then I started to wonder how the rest of the world would react to the exceptional abilities of these “dreamslingers”. Would they be celebrated, or would their powers make them a target? What if society saw them as threats and persecuted them for the “crime” of being born with the gene?

Ultimately, I wanted Dreamslinger to be a fun and magical adventure inspired by the dream world. But I also wanted to explore the way we as a society treat people we deem to be different from us. We may not all have dangerous dream magic sparking from our fingertips, but we can be born with something that makes us a minority—whether that be skin colour, culture, neurodiversity, or take your pick, really. And when people treat you as an outsider, it can make you feel “less-than”. Or like you’re unworthy.

I remember feeling like this a lot growing up as a Korean kid in New Zealand, where kids would spit in my lunchbox because seaweed wasn’t real food, or would tell me to go home to my “own country” when New Zealand was the only home I’d ever known. To me, it was apparent then as it is now, that despite our differences, we all covet the same things. We want to belong. We want to be loved. We want to matter. After all, we’re all human.

But it’s easy to feel stuck between contrasting versions of reality. And I think it takes real courage to embrace complexity in a world of absolutes. I hope if readers take anything away from Dreamslinger (apart from having a good time!), it’s to recognise that despite being born as an undesirable exception, what makes the main character Aria truly exceptional is her determination to seek out the truth, and to forge her own path, all without losing her compassion. We could all be a bit more like Aria, I think.