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NightBorn is available at Amazon US and Amazon UK
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Guest Post
Some Dreams Refuse to Stay Silent: How NightBorn Found Its Way Into the World by Theresa Cheung
www.theresacheung.com • @thetheresacheung
For more than twenty years, dreams have been the centre of my professional universe. I’ve spent my life studying them, interpreting them, writing about them, and when I’m very lucky helping people understand the extraordinary intelligence hidden in their sleeping minds. My readers know me for my dream dictionaries (including The Dream Dictionary A–Z, originally The Element Encyclopaedia of 20,000 Dreams), my research into the afterlife, spirituality, intuition, and all the places where science meets mystery. I’m also the resident dream expert on ITV’s This Morning, where callers regularly share the inner landscapes that puzzle or inspire them.
So yes, I’ve been called the British grande dame of dreams and, on some days, I happily accept the title. But NightBorn, my debut novel, is something different. It’s the book that came not from analysis or academic study, but from a creative impulse I simply couldn’t contain. In many ways, it feels like the dream I’d been waiting for my whole life.
Dreams in My DNA
My fascination with dreaming didn’t begin in a library. It began at home. I grew up surrounded by family members who spoke openly about intuition, symbolism, and spiritual experiences. Dream interpretation was woven into everyday conversation. By the time I went to King’s College, Cambridge to study Theology and English, I already saw dreams as both deeply personal and universally significant. They aren’t just psychological events—they’re stories, messages, mirrors, warnings, and sometimes gifts.
For years, my mission has been to normalise dreamwork, to show that dreams hold profound insights into emotional, spiritual, and creative life. But as much as my nonfiction books reached countless readers, I knew that many younger audiences, like my own daughter, arely pick up spiritual or psychological nonfiction.
I couldn’t shake the question: How could I speak to readers who love stories but would never open a dream dictionary?
The Spark Came From My Daughter’s Bookshelf
My daughter devours gothic fantasy and dark psychological fiction. She reads with a passion I envy but she has never been even mildly tempted to read my reference books.
One afternoon, watching her tucked into a corner with some atmospheric, shadowy novel, a thought struck me with startling clarity: What if I slipped dream interpretation into a story she couldn’t resist?
That moment planted the seed. I began imagining a novel where everything I’ve discovered about dreams, archetypes, and the subconscious could hide beneath a narrative full of tension, mystery, and emotional punch. A book that felt like a dream, beautiful, unsettling, layered, while quietly teaching readers how to understand their own inner worlds.
That idea became the heartbeat of NightBorn. Every major character carries some connection to dreams, psychology, or the unseen workings of the mind. Their conflicts and revelations echo the symbolism I’ve studied for decades. And the core message - Some dreams must be set free, Nightmares, after all, are dreams too - became both the theme and the spine of the story.
A Leap Into the Unknown
Despite my enthusiasm, writing fiction was far outside my established world. I knew how to structure a dream dictionary, how to analyse symbols, how to explain spiritual concepts clearly but writing a novel requires a wholly different set of muscles.
I had to learn those muscles from scratch.
I consulted trusted author friends, took workshops, and accepted critique I knew would sting. Slowly, the manuscript grew more layered, emotional, unpredictable, just like the dreams that inspired it.
Finishing it was a victory. What came next was the challenge.
When I sent NightBorn to my longstanding nonfiction publishers, the response was warm but firm. They didn’t want me wandering outside the spiritual/dream niche they had built around me. Fiction simply didn’t fit their expectation of what a “Theresa Cheung book” should be.
The polite rejection hurt but it also crystallised how deeply I believed in this story. So I took a risk. I partnered with an indie press, knowing I would receive no advance and little of the traditional publishing safety net I had once relied on.
It felt like jumping without seeing the ground. But sometimes the only way to honour a dream is to leap.
Five Years of Detours and Determination
From the first notes in my journal to the finished copy landing in my hands, NightBorn took nearly five years to come to life. I rewrote it countless times between my nonfiction deadlines. I questioned myself. I doubted whether anyone would ever read it.
But the story wouldn’t let me go. And I’ve learned over decades of dreamwork that when something refuses to be silenced - whether it’s a dream or an idea - you must pay attention.
One of the most delightfully unexpected turns in this journey involved the cover. We had no budget for a designer, so my son-in-law offered to try creating something. The result is striking, eerie, and unmistakably NightBorn. Readers tell me it gives them chills. Some say it triggers dream recall. I couldn’t imagine a better response.
A Story With a Purpose Hidden in Its Pages
Many readers on Goodreads have given me reactions that surprised and moved me. People talk about the plot and the characters, of course but many also say the book made them remember their dreams again, or think differently about their subconscious, or reflect on aspects of themselves they had ignored.
That reaction means everything to me because it reflects the book’s true intent.
NightBorn is, on the surface, a psychological thriller. Beneath that, it’s a secret guidebook - a way of showing readers how powerful their inner worlds really are.
Dreams are natural healers. They are storytellers. And they are teachers. I believe dreamwork should be as essential as reading and writing in early education. Imagine if every teenager knew how to listen to the messages their psyche sends each night. Imagine how empowered they would feel.
My Fictional Love Letter to the Dreaming Mind
NightBorn is the book that unites both halves of myself: the researcher and the dream evangelist, the scholar and the storyteller. It represents my belief that fiction can sometimes carry truth more powerfully than facts alone.
My hope is simple: That NightBorn encourages readers - especially those who might never pick up a nonfiction guide - to honour their dreams again. Because some of the most transformative journeys begin quietly, in darkness, with a dream that refuses to be ignored.
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Excerpt
Florida, USA—Sometime soon
Alice saw the wave. It was a beast.
It rose slowly at first, the way a predator prepares to strike—silent, inevitable. It quickly gained speed, swelling into a towering monster, a force of nature, as if the ocean itself had decided to swallow her whole. The wave surged, easily 30 feet high, dark and roaring with a ferocity she could feel in her bones. It moved toward her with the relentlessness of fate.
She turned, panic seizing her as she raced up the beach, her bare feet slipping in the wet sand. The ocean was closing in—the world was closing in on her. Her breath came in jagged gasps, but the wave, too quick, slammed into her, yanking her under.
Her body twisted through the water, eyes stinging, lungs burning, desperate for air, clawing at the debris swirling around her—plastic, broken wood, seaweed, dead fish—but there was no solid ground to cling to. The current pulled her deeper, its grip tightening like cold fingers around her throat.
She gasped for air, choking on the water, the world a dark, crushing void. She couldn’t see. Every nerve in her body screamed for release, but the ocean kept pulling, tumbling her in every direction, turning her body like a puppet with broken strings. She was drowning. No—she was going to die.
Something in her snapped.
Her feet hit something solid. Hard. Stone? She couldn’t tell.
All she knew was that she had to rise. She shoved upward, throwing her weight toward the surface with every ounce of strength she had left. Her body screamed, but she pushed harder, until her head broke through to air. For one split second, she inhaled—but the water dragged her down again, relentless, hungry for her life. She fought the instinct to panic.
She couldn’t let it win. Not today.
Just breathe. Just breathe, Alice. Instinctively she let herself float, stilling her body, letting the sea carry her, accepting the weight of the water around her. She couldn’t fight it anymore—but maybe she didn’t have to.
Her feet found solid ground again. She shoved upward, defiant, gasping as she broke through. Sunlight blinded her.
Alice jerked awake, the sharp taste of salt lingering on her tongue, her body tangled in the sheets. The echo of the wave still thundered in her ears. The sunlight slanted through the bedroom window, blinding. Her pulse thrummed in her neck as if the sea still had its grip on her.
“You’re okay. You’re okay. It was a dream. Just a nightmare.”
What if it wasn’t just a nightmare?
Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, Alice’s feet hit the cold floor. Had Swiss psychiatrist and dream analysis pioneer, Carl Jung ever felt this unsettled after one of his dreams? Had his own night visions ever made him question his grasp on reality?
Her eyes flickered to the bedside table and her Red Book: the dream journal she’d named after Jung’s own. Ever since she was young, she’d written down her dreams. But this one felt radically different from the rest.
It was too real, though it clearly wasn’t literal. She lived more than an hour from the nearest beach and had never been to it. Was the dream a symbolic glimpse into her own future? A warning? Or something darker, deeper?
It was just a dream. Maybe it was just all the energy she’d poured into teaching Jungian dream analysis spilling out cathartically in a nightmare.
The feeling of drowning clung to her.
She grabbed her journal and scribbled out every detail of the dream. The ocean. The wave. The suffocating terror. Jung had called the act of recording dreams an act of self-analysis—so why did this one feel more like a clear and present danger than an analysis? Was it the forbidden mystery Jung had hinted at in his Red Book—that thin line between genius and insanity where revelation could be found?
Was her obsession with dreams driving her mad?
It was her calling, her passion. Perhaps, as director of the new program in Jungian Studies at the University of Central Florida, she could teach her students what she had dreamt and encourage them to analyze it; maybe it would be cathartic for them and for her.
What if her students were the key to unlocking the deeper meanings of her own dream? She could see herself standing before the class, scrawling on the blackboard, her voice filled with energy as she taught them about using their dreams to peer into possible futures, even to shape reality. Inception—she would reference that for sure, the perfect movie fix to illustrate how the subconscious could manipulate perception and even reality.
What better way to introduce her students to the power of their own dreaming minds?
Alice pushed herself out of bed as the sinking feeling of the dream still clung tight. Blinking rapidly in front of her bedroom mirror, she forced herself to take deep breaths. Her long dark hair framing the mismatched eyes staring right back at her: one blue, one brown. She had always hated this difference. Always hidden it behind a pair of blue lenses.
A perfect illusion of normalcy, her blue lenses. They always worked—ever since she was 14, when her mother had taken her to the ophthalmologist to prevent the cruel teasing at school.
Alice slipped them on, as though the simple act could shield her from her nightmare.
The rhythm of her repeated blinking to help the lenses settle helped bring a semblance of calm.
Something was coming, though; she could feel it. Something was drawing her, pulling her into the unknown. Could she rise above and survive it?
Alice dressed the part for her day ahead and stepped out into the bright light of the day.
Was the drowning nightmare a message? A warning? And if so, a warning about what?
– Excerpted from NightBorn by Theresa Cheung, Collective Ink, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
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