This book is based on something we all do often, but know very little about: dreams. An ancient, secret society of dreamers thought that their dreams were just vivid reflections of the past, reflections that allowed them to better understand and learn from events that had occurred long ago. Together, they realized that their dreams had a more far-reaching dimension. This story is from the Dreamers depicting the trials and triumphs of a young African-American boy in the mid-19th century, but it's presented as truthful account of a parallel universe. Sharing and interpreting dreams, revealing alternate worlds, pasts and futures, they've chosen to emerge from chosen obscurity to tell Shakuru's story, among others, in order to "alter the destructive course" of the world and demonstrate the power of dreams. Shakuru begins the story as George Lincoln, 10, an honorable, courageous and shrewd slave in Tennessee. He has a special gift with horses and prevents his family from starving by hunting and fishing. Although George, his brother, sister and parents experience a nearly unbelievably superlative, benign form of slavery, the South is portrayed as dangerous and barren, and the residents of the plantation-whites and newly freed blacks-decide to join a wagon train and move west, to California. George and his brother Wilson end up alone on the treacherous wagon journey, and after a brutal attack, they're taken prisoner by a warrior tribe called the Chokobi. George-now renamed Shakuru-must learn to accept as his own the people who murdered his companions. He does, and grows into a preternaturally skilled, savvy warrior leader, protecting Indian tribes from the U.S. forces seeking to displace them.