The Common Dream is a haunting and provocative work, taking the reader deep inside lives traumatized by the agonies endured in a historically repressed society. The taut narratives of refugees fleeing across the sea reveal facets of a brutal system that denied freedom, instilled fear and fostered hopelessness. The nightmare is compounded by cruelties of a different sort, some residual and some newly imposed at the emigrants' port of call. The Common Dream is an inordinately credible fiction documenting escape from an incredibly horrid reality and the dream of not having the need to do so.