9 h 38 minAudiobook4 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if your whole life were a troubling dream in a world that has learned to live better?
In H. G. Wells’s The Dream, Sarnac lives in a calm future, where people are healthy, educated, and free from fear of war and want. Then he dreams an entire life as Harry Mortimer Smith, an ordinary Englishman caught in the crowded, quarrelsome world of the early twentieth century.
Through Harry’s life, Wells explores what a society throws away: human strength, chances to learn, and the hope of living without constant conflict. Nations pull against one another. Schools teach little that matters. Set beside Sarnac’s ordered world, this muddle raises a question: must people always live this way?
What you’ll discover
- Two worlds in contrast Move between a peaceful future and a past crowded with waste and quarrels.
- An ordinary life reconsidered Follow Harry Mortimer Smith through a world whose habits look different from Sarnac’s distance.
- The cost of waste Consider how poor schooling and divided nations drain the strength of everyday lives.
- Wells the social thinker Explore his concern for education, shared knowledge, and a world no longer pulling apart.
- Space to reflect Let one man’s recollection lead you toward questions about humanity’s choices and future.
Is it for you?
This is for readers who like ideas as much as plot, and who enjoy Wells the social thinker as well as Wells the inventor of scientific romance. If you want fast action and tight suspense, the book's long reflective stretches may feel slow.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A dreamer wakes in a better world
- Sarnac lives as Harry Mortimer Smith
- The old world is shown as waste
- A novel built as a lesson
Who’s who
- SarnacA man of a future, well-ordered world who dreams a long life from the distant past and looks back on it.
- Harry Mortimer SmithThe ordinary Englishman of the early twentieth century whose life Sarnac dreams, caught in the waste and muddle of his age.
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- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
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- Large print hardcover
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 4
A dreamer wakes in a better world
The story begins in the future, where Sarnac lives in a world that has put its old troubles behind it. People there are healthy, educated and free from the fear of war and want. Wells uses this setting to show what he hopes humanity might become.
Sarnac does not simply wander through it. He has had a dream so vivid and so long that it feels like memory. In it he was another man, in another age, with another name and a hard, narrow life. That dream is the heart of the book.
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The author
H. G. Wells
1866–1946 · English science fiction novelist
H. G. Wells (1866–1946) was an English writer born in Bromley, Kent. He wrote novels, short stories and nonfiction. His novels included The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). He died in London.
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What is The Dream by H. G. Wells about?
It is about a man of a calm future world who dreams a whole life as an ordinary Englishman of the early twentieth century. The contrast between the two worlds shows what Wells thought was wrong with his own age.
Who is Sarnac in The Dream?
Sarnac is the dreamer, a man of the future. In his dream he lives as Harry Mortimer Smith, and he looks back on that life from a better, more orderly world.
When was The Dream written?
Wells published it in 1924, a few years after the First World War. It is a novel, not a true story, though it draws on the real social life and worries of his time.
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