Dreamer

by Brandon Sanderson
31 pgs

Dreamer is a short story Brandon Sanderson wrote, which was included in the Games Creatures Play anthology. As he’s done with some of his other short stories, he pairs two of them together and releases them as a small hard cover double book, where you read one story, then flip the book around and read the second. He paired Dreamer with Snapshot and brought them with him to this year’s Salt Lake Comic Con, where I picked up a copy.

Dreamer is the shortest thing Sanderson has ever published and it shows he doesn’t need hundreds (and sometimes many hundreds) of pages to tell a good story.

It’s a story about a group of friends who have the ability to jump from one person’s body to another, suppressing that person’s soul while they possess it themselves for a short time. The group likes to play games, like ‘capture the flag’ and ‘cops and robbers.’ The rules vary from game to game, but the group plays them without regard to the safety of those whose bodies they use. If the body they’re in becomes injured or dies during the game, they simply jump to the next body and continue their game.

Dreamer is a dark fantasy story and much different from what I’ve come to expect from Sanderson. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. It was well worth the 20 minutes it took to read.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆