Dreamrider

Dreamrider is a young adult novel by the Australian writer Barry Jonsberg, published in 2008. Its narrator is a boy who can control his own dreams, and the book takes that ability seriously enough to ask what it is for.

Michael Terny is starting his seventh school in four years and expects the same treatment he has had at the others. He is overweight, he is a target, and he has learned to keep his head down. In his sleep he can do something else: he recognises when he is dreaming and decides what will happen next, which gives him a private place that nobody else can reach.

At his new school he makes an unexpected friend, and the two of them plan what to do with a power that only one of them has. Michael's idea is to use it to reward people who deserve it and to take revenge on the ones who do not, and the novel follows what that plan produces. As the dream world and the waking one begin to overlap, a passage opens between them that offers more power than he has imagined and rather less control than he assumes.