Have you ever woken up from a dream so vivid, you felt like you were there? A dream that gave you a longing for a life that never was. Emotions for people that never existed. Something that didn’t leave your head for days on end?
I have dreams like this sometimes. They come unannounced and uninvited, and they refuse to leave. They linger in the back of my mind like a melody you can’t stop humming, except it’s not a melody — it’s a world. Complete with people I’ve never met but somehow know. Places I’ve never been but could draw from memory. Stories that unfolded while I slept, with beginnings and middles and endings that felt more real than my morning coffee.
Usually they don’t let go until I do something with them. Usually, I write them down. Not in a diary. I write down their stories.
That’s how Within Range came to be. And before that, Xenoforming. Actually, all of my favorite stories came to me in a dream. Dreams I obsessed about so much that I wrote them into my books. The ones that haunt me are always the ones that turn out best — as if the story was already complete somewhere, and I just needed to find the right words for it.
A Theory From the Pages of Comic Books
Now, I am not a religious person. For all intents and purposes, I consider myself an apatheist — someone who finds the question of God’s existence genuinely uninteresting. Most of my beliefs are grounded in science and rationality. I like evidence. I like things that make sense.
But if there is one metaphysical theory with absolutely no proper scientific basis that I would wholeheartedly subscribe to, it’s a theory that was created by a comic book writer in 1961. Not a physicist. Not a philosopher. A man who wrote stories about people in colorful costumes punching each other at superspeed.
His name was Gardner Fox.
Fox was the kind of person they don’t really make anymore. A trained lawyer who abandoned his practice during the Great Depression to write comic books. A self-described polymath who once said, “Knowledge is kind of a hobby with me.” He published stories in pulp science fiction magazines like Weird Tales, Planet Stories, and Amazing Stories. He read Edgar Rice Burroughs at age eleven and said the books “opened up a complete new world for me.” He filled his comics with references to Hungarian revolutions, Norse mythology, numismatics, and whatever else he happened to learn that week. Over his career, he wrote more than four thousand comic book stories.
Among those thousands of stories was one that changed everything. In September 1961, DC Comics published The Flash #123 — a story called “Flash of Two Worlds,” in which the modern Flash, Barry Allen, accidentally vibrates so fast that he tears through the barrier between dimensions and ends up in a parallel universe. There, he meets Jay Garrick, the original Flash from the 1940s — a character Barry had always known as fictional, a hero from comic books he read as a kid.
And here’s where it gets interesting. Barry needs to explain how comic books on his Earth could contain the real adventures of a real person on another Earth. His explanation, written by Fox, goes like this:
“A writer named Gardner Fox wrote about your adventures — which he claimed came to him in dreams. Obviously, when Fox was asleep, his mind was ‘tuned in’ to your vibratory earth. That explains how he ‘dreamed up’ The Flash.”
Read that again. Fox didn’t just introduce the concept of parallel universes to superhero comics — which he did, and which would define DC’s storytelling for decades. He proposed something far stranger: that fiction writers don’t invent their stories. They receive them. During sleep, a writer’s mind tunes into the vibrational frequency of a parallel world, picks up real events happening to real people, and upon waking, writes them down — believing the whole time that they simply have a vivid imagination.
And in a move of breathtaking audacity, Fox wrote himself into the theory. It’s not some fictional writer receiving these transmissions. It’s Gardner Fox, sitting at his desk in New York, who supposedly dreamed the real adventures of Jay Garrick and published them as comic books. The pun on “dreamed up” is clearly intentional — what we dismiss as creativity is actually perception.
More Than Just a Comic Book Gag
It would be easy to dismiss this as a clever plot device — a fun way to explain a continuity problem in a children’s comic. And on one level, that’s exactly what it was. Fox needed a reason why Barry Allen had read about Jay Garrick in comic books, and this was his elegant solution.
But Fox wasn’t an ordinary comic book writer. He was a man who read physics for fun, who published science fiction alongside his superhero work, and who was almost certainly aware of Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, published just four years earlier in 1957. Everett proposed that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements actually occur — each in its own branching universe. The theory was obscure in mainstream physics at the time, but it was exactly the kind of thing a science-fiction-literate polymath would pick up on.
Fox also published in the same pulp magazines as H.P. Lovecraft, whose Dream Cycle stories — written between 1918 and 1932 — had already established the idea that dreams could be portals to real alternate dimensions. The Dreamlands in Lovecraft’s fiction weren’t metaphors. They were a vast parallel world that dreamers could physically visit during sleep.
So Fox had all the ingredients: Everett’s physics saying parallel worlds are real, Lovecraft’s fiction saying dreams can reach them, and his own experience as a writer who knew what it felt like when a story arrived seemingly from nowhere. He synthesized all of it into a single, elegant idea: writers are dreamers who tune into other worlds and write down what they see.
Where I Come In
I first heard this theory in the Justice League animated series — the two-part episode “Legends,” which aired in 2002 and was dedicated to the memory of Gardner F. Fox. The show never aired where I grew up, so I didn’t catch it as a kid. I discovered it years later as an adult, binging through animated shows I’d missed — and I’m glad I did, because I don’t think the younger me would have understood why it mattered. In that episode, the Justice League gets transported to a parallel world populated by heroes that Green Lantern had read about in comic books as a child. When the team tries to understand how comic book characters can be real, J’onn J’onzz — the Martian Manhunter — theorizes that the comic book writers on their Earth must have had a subconscious psychic link to this parallel world. What they thought was imagination was actually memory. What they believed they were creating, they were actually witnessing.
I remember watching that episode and feeling something click. Not because it was a new idea to me, but because someone had finally put words to something I had always felt.
Ever since I started writing, my best work has come from the same place — from dreams that felt less like dreams and more like visits. The stories I’m most proud of aren’t the ones I carefully plotted and outlined. They’re the ones that arrived fully formed while I was asleep, demanding to be written. The ones where I woke up and thought, that wasn’t mine. That belonged to someone else, and I just happened to see it.
So yeah — I don’t just like Fox’s theory. I subscribe to it. I believed in it before I even knew someone had put it into words.
The worlds I make are the worlds that are real. They are real to me, and I write them down.
Is it probably just the fantasy of a writer who wants to believe in something more? Sure. Almost certainly. But hey — if you can worship your spaghetti monster, I can believe my worlds are true.
Clara and Sonia
And so this brings me to Within Range.
This is how the story of Clara and Sonia came to be. I didn’t just make it up. For a short moment in my life, I lived their story with them. I felt their emotions — not as a writer crafting a scene, but as someone who was there. Their world left a mark on me strong enough that I had to write it down for anyone to read.
I can’t tell you what I saw without ruining the book for you. What I can tell you is what it felt like. It felt like watching two people reach a moment that changes everything — and then watching them say goodbye. The kind of goodbye that breaks something inside you that doesn’t heal right.
That’s what I woke up with. Not a plot. Not characters. A wound. And the only way to close it was to write the whole story that led to it — to give that moment the weight it deserved, so that when you reach it, you feel what I felt.
That’s what Within Range is. Not a story I invented. A story I owe to two people who may or may not exist somewhere across the vibrational divide.
Gardner Fox would have said my mind was tuned in to their vibratory earth. Lovecraft would have said I crossed the wall of sleep. A physicist might say it was random neural firing during REM sleep.
I know which explanation I prefer.
And if you’ve ever woken from a dream with tears in your eyes for people who don’t exist, with a longing for a place you’ve never been — maybe you’ve been tuning in, too. Maybe you just haven’t written it down yet.
Within Range is available now on Amazon and on my library page.
