Dustin "Dusty" Cann, 37-year old, inventive art professor, has achieved his lifetime goal. For Dusty, newly tenured as professor of printmaking, life is good. His admiring students, loyal wife and a promising business making art printing presses of original design assures him. Money and awards are flowing in. Ambitious and feeling invincible (and goaded by his Muse) he becomes obsessed with the rumored of a secret society of holders of a high award for "Great World Teachers." Striving to be noticed, he allows an unqualified, challenging and unsavory student to take his class. He is Greg Potter, Jr., 27, a rich, spoiled, unscrupulous medical student (and scion of the University Godfather) who takes Dusty for a tool in his own ambitions. When a furious controversy arises over Dusty's radical teaching simultaneously with an accident involving his art press, Dusty is pressured by lawsuits, academic furor and campus politics. His mind crumbles, made worse by a head-injury. Hospitalized and judged unfit to teach, he is dismissed from teaching. In a forced sale, his press business is lost to Greg Potter's father, a renowned brain surgeon. The doctor sends Dusty-who's in and out of comas-to an island recovery village. His stressed-out wife, feeling helpless, leaves to care for her ailing hotelier sister in Brazil. An ambulance delivers a comatose Dusty to Two Dog Island, north of Seattle, landing at the Puntaville ferry dock. Dusty's speech is impeded with purpose tremors. He takes up writing as therapy, adapting to an Apple computer at the Puntaville library. Nights, in fantastic, vivid dreams he re-encounters his muse, a woman who interprets his dreams-her fall to Earth, fateful kidnappings and a mystery ship-reviving Dusty's wishes for the creative life. He mines his muse's treasury of stories seeking ways to get redemption. He thinks again about a great prize for teaching art. Gradually, the enigma fades, but fragments of the woman's stories persist in teaching dreams and fantasy swings. Accepting a job as town librarian, which includes a rundown house to live in, he finds Richard Dana's long lost seaman's chest. Besides new facts about Dana's stay, it also contains an ivory and wood model of an etching press similar to Dusty's design, and, in scrimshaw, one of the woman's yarns. Dusty's circle of friends form a society of archeology amateurs who find artifacts in the locale suggesting a mystery ship lay nearby. Dusty's nemesis, the infamous Greg Potter, Jr., comes to the island with an offer and asking his help. Potter knows about the valuable trunk and he wants it. Dusty and Potter have a confrontation, and-enraged that Dusty has sent the trunk to the Smithsonian as a national treasure, Potter assaults him and intercepts the trunk and steals it. Dusty's had enough and leaves for Brazil. Potter disappears and is a person of interest, suspicious of having stolen a national treasure. When a construction crew unearths a skeleton on the Potter family property, parts of Dusty's stories are confirmed. Dusty is gone, but the archeology club works on, aggregating their discoveries. Gregg's nefarious past and his hijacking of the trunk is exposed, which will result in his ruin and shame the Potter name. Far away in Florianopolis, Brazil, Dusty is reunited with his wife, helping her run a hotel. Their family is joined by a precocious, artistic street kid. Dusty's life is good again, except for his speech problem. They get news that the great prize he wanted is won by the club back in Puntaville. One morning, he catches a glimpse of a woman passing who resembles the woman of his fantasies, waving invitingly. He takes up pursuit and the little girl follows. The woman leads them to an antique shop, and then vanishes. In the shop an amazing discovery tells truth of the legends and Dusty is redeemed, his great hopes actualized.