Yu Hao has always lived on the margins: poor, closeted, shunned by those around him. When a stolen watch inexplicably appears in his backpack, the accusation threatens his future and extinguishes what little hope he has left. Desperate, he turns to death as escape...only to awaken in a realm where dreams become battlefields.

There, Yu Hao meets the General, a knight who drags him back from despair. Night after night, they fight through the figments of Yu Hao's unconscious mind, discovering strength he never knew he had. Each victory ripples into the waking world, where Yu Hao discovers unexpected allies, like his compassionate instructor, Chen Yekai, and his fiery classmate, Zhou Sheng.

But Yu Hao isn't the only one on the brink. Others are trapped in thorny battles in their own strange realms, and he can't ignore them--or the growing attraction he feels for the dashing General, who seems far too real to be just a dream.

Seizing Dreams: Duo Meng has a story by Fei Tian Ye Xiang and art by Ying. English translation is done by amixy with an adaptation by Max Machiavelli. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (November 17, 2026).

Content Warning: child abuse

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

When something becomes a trauma or an experience you can't quite cope with, dreams are one way to process it. College student Yu Hao has had more than his fair share of these – he was bullied in middle and high school, his parents abandoned him, his grandmother who raised him has just died, and he's been accused of theft by a man who hired him to tutor his daughter. So when he begins having lucid dreams, it makes sense. But what he doesn't expect is that these dreams are very real battles to reclaim control of his psyche and to face his fears in a way that allows him to defeat them.

This book came for me where I live. Processing trauma isn't easy, and the way that the author presents it as literal battles is how it feels, whether you're fighting an actual monster or a warlord attempting to overthrow the castle. Yu Hao's dreams take the latter scenario, landing him on the Great Wall of China in a series of pitched battles against his oldest childhood enemies – the friends he tried to help. Later in the book, a sixth grade girl's dreams pit her against a series of monsters as she tries to come to terms with the abuse endured at her father's hands; to her he is an actual, tentacular, all-seeing monster. Yu Hao and Shi Ni are at two different stages in life, and how they process trauma is different. As G. K. Chesterton said, what's important isn't that monsters exist, but that they can be defeated.

Of course, it helps if you have a faithful knight to aid you. For Yu Hao, that's a bit literal – in his first lucid dream, he meets the General, a man in actual shining armor. As the book goes on, Yu Hao learns that the General is something of a dream traveler, appearing in nightmares to help people defeat their monsters…and he's probably someone Yu Hao knows in real life. Right now, it's likely he's either Zhou Sheng, a classmate, or Chen Yekai, his advisor, and I keep going back and forth about which one he is. The General never presents in dreams in his true aspect, taking on the form each dreamer finds most reassuring (in Shi Ni's dreams, he's the Monkey King while Yu Hao, amusingly, appears as Jesus to her), so as Yu Hao falls for him, it's entirely based on the person he is rather than his appearance.

There are some very dark aspects to this story. Shi Ni's entire storyline is about helping her to escape from her abusive father (and the implication is that he's sexually abusive, not just physically) and Yu Hao has experienced a lot of homophobia and economic prejudice. But the theme, that monsters can be defeated and that there'll always be someone there for you because you deserve someone on your side, makes it worth it. It's never so dark that there's no dawn, as Yu Hao and Shi Ni discover.