Preview of Dreamer Summary:

In this novel as in its predecessors, Butler's themes include the nature and function of religion, the concept of love as an elemental, essential force in the universe, and the nature of reality and human intelligence.

Dreamer supplies the origin of the religion known as Buderianism in Nightshade.

In the earlier novel (but set a couple of centuries into the future, on Mars), the founder of the religion and author of its scripture The Works was unknown, and the religion took its name from the twentieth-century poet (Jack Butler) who wrote its "Preface." In Dreamer we learn that the founder was the mathematician Loren Wingo, who had a life-changing amnesiac experience and fled from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to New Mexico.

There, he became a hermit and devoted his life to creating his Theoretical Model of Heaven, evidently the volume that would later be known as The Works.

In Chapter...