By design, Astra Woods leads a simple life. She lives in San Francisco where she spends her days working as a photographer at a studio. At nights, she trains and teaches at a karate school, before heading home to eat and feed her fish Sam. She has good friends and a comfortable innocuous life. She worked hard to achieve the security, to feel safe. She had kept to herself after losing her parents when she was in college. She’d had no one when she was attacked right after she graduated, and it had been hard work to come back from that period in her life.
But her safety and friendships change one night while walking alone through the city. Astra hears a woman’s scream echo through a dark alley. Flashbacks of the previous attack on her own life drive her to enter the darkness and help the stranger. But when one of the perpetrators throws Astra against the alley wall, the following brain trauma instantly alters her mind and her life.
Astra wakes up in the hospital and knows something is different, that she has changed, and is somehow not quite the same person. When she closes her eyes, unusual and extraordinary dreams invade her rest. The dreams seem very real. After each adventurous dream, Astra notices physical differences and begins to wonder if there is something more to these imagined explorations.
Along with the physical changes, there are personality changes. Astra is no longer the calm forgiving friend. Certain aspects of the odd and abrupt aggressiveness scare Astra. But within the personality deviations, Astra finds a new fierceness and strength that she embraces and relishes. When her friends, her only family, make it clear that they want the old Astra back, the new Astra turns to Dr. Elara Fox, the strange woman she saved. Needing answers, Astra accepts Dr. Fox’s offer to study her mind and dreams at a specialized brain trauma facility. At the facility, Astra realizes that she is not alone. There are others who have similar dreams. Dreams that feel like traveling. She meets Leo Belmonte and together they are determined to understand the extent of these dream travels and the possibility of a strange and incredible ability fashioned by terrible accident and mishap.
She begins to understand the complex damage to her brain triggered something never seen before. Her curiosity and fortitude to learn the truth, creates a rift with Leo, the facility, and with an outside force determined to end Astra’s unique ability. She is forced to make decisions that could change the lives of those she loves and all of humanity. Astra must quickly determine who she can trust, or take a leap of faith, to avoid being lost in another world forever.