...if you hadn't asked. And since I'm looking at plot points here and also at writing strategy, this may be twice as long and half as organized as it ought to be. Please bear with me.

I'm glad that you're at least trying to justify the four-chapter dream sequence. I consider major disruptions like that a breach of trust on the part of an author, obliging us to innocently invest our thoughts and feelings into something long and extensive that turns out not to be real in story terms.

True, the events here were consistent with a dream sequence, with everything turning out right for Jo to transition without interference. But I don't think a reader could be expected to consider that possibility, not even to reject it.

(Unless there was something subtle there that I didn't catch, in which case it's my problem. But since we'd never been to their hometown or met their families, we weren't placed in a position where we could find inconsistencies there, short of Jo having told us something -- that he's an only child, perhaps, or that he only has one parent living with him -- that the dream section then contradicted. Even then, the nature of sites like this one would make it more likely that we'd think it was an author glitch than a plot point, and alert the author either privately or publicly.)

The other important problem with stories continuing after lengthy dream sequences is that we can no longer trust the author as to whether or not what we're seeing now is real. (Even more so when the narrator/lead character tends to black out pretty regularly.) I don't believe we have any way of knowing whether or when you're going to pull the rug out on us again.

And here, when we're being told the island induces hallucinations as well as real-seeming dreams, how can Jo be a trustworthy narrator?

Consider how we got here. From a high vantage point, Mikey pointed out something in the sky; Jo looked and saw a major flare and a ship. Mikey tells her afterward that they headed back to the cave at full speed to relay the news, with Mikey in the lead; Jo fell, got injured and blacked out. If that story's true, we don't know whether Mikey saw the same thing in the sky that Jo did, but whatever he saw -- and he saw it first -- was enough to justify ending a make-out session and speeding down the hill as quickly as possible. That strongly suggests that he saw something, at least in the sky, that the group would need to react to right away, even while trying to save Jo. (An alternative, I suppose, is that Mikey saw something lethal up there -- a velociraptor, a WWII Japanese fighter plane or a drone with a bomb, or something comparable -- that made him conclude that fleeing for their lives was their best choice, and somehow it wasn't a threat that the group would have to deal with after they left the overlook.)

Another alternative is that it was Mikey -- as an willing or unwilling enemy agent, whatever the enemy might be -- who distracted Jo, knocked her unconscious (or got a confederate, possibly someone we hadn't met, to do that; we now know that there were at least two others on the island) and made up everything else. We have only his word on the accident, or even that they were running to the cave with important information. (And Jo's, as to what the thinks she saw.)

A motive for any of this is hard to come by whether or not the incident was real. Isolating the pair from the rest of the group? Nothing seems to have happened while they were gone that would indicate that their adversary would want to do that. (Although, of course, since they traffic in illusion, we can't know that.) Was there something at the overlook that their adversary didn't want them to see, and for some reason couldn't use the illusion power to make it invisible to them? , I guess that'd be possible, but if so, why let them (or induce them to) start a romantic interlude and then interrupt it?

If one accepts that the enemy can change anything at all -- reactions, opinions, personalities -- then there's nothing we can rely on: Mikey could forget why they were running, or the coach could say that he doesn't trust the potential rescuers and wants the group to hide until they leave the area, or there could be any number of totally illogical developments that nobody in the group would notice or at least say anything about. IMO that's a terrible thing for an author to set up; it essentially defeats or fundamentally distorts the whole point of the narrative without letting the readers know, assuming the narrator is one of those affected. (It can be done -- the narrator starts throwing in non-sequiturs like enemy emplacements or upcoming pitched battles against an opposing army that didn't exist before then -- but I think it's not optimal and it's certainly distrscting.)

Getting back to dream sequences in general, the classic "aha!" full-length dream stories, Alice and the film version of Wizard of Oz, both end the story with the reveal, with just a brief coda after that. The dream settings, Wonderland and Oz respectively, are surreal anyway. Even the two long stories I know of in that category that are or were on this site -- to make it less of a spoiler, I'll just say that one happens to Kaleigh Way's Marcie and one to Maddy Bell's Nena, and that most of their stories are not dreams -- end that way. IMO that's not a good thing: the author has disrespected her readers' goodwill by having them look for a resolution that never arrives.

But doing it after a detailed, "realistic" four chapters and then continuing the story puts an author at risk in that it can make readers disengage. Even if they continue reading -- right now I plan to -- they can't or at least won't (IMO) treat the story quite the way they did before.

I hasten to point out that this analysis doesn't focus on the story's many good points. They're certainly appreciated: solid writing, good action, good proofing, character development that in most cases is solid and substantial enough that adversary-induced major shifts will be recognizable.

Eric

I'm having trouble figuring out Tommy's failure to respond to Ben at the end. If he's not an illusion in that final scene, one would think he'd at least deny that he tied up Ben. If he's seeing something different from everyone else - possible, under the terms of the story -- I'm not coming up with anything that could make him think that he actually did tie Ben up.

Eric