In “Of All Who Dream,” we descend into the depths of a dream world where starving gods fight to survive. Where did the inspiration for this story come from?

The inspiration came from my own fascination with the true nature of reality and consciousness. I mean, what is this world we live in? How are seemingly psychic dreams possible? Does consciousness emerge from matter, or is it the other way round? Exploring those questions led me down the rabbit hole where ideas of panpsychism and gnosticism began to intersect in my imagination, and gradually a story started to take shape. I liked the idea that human thought and beliefs create autonomous entities; thought-forms that feed on attention, and if enough people believe in them, eventually become gods.

I found the narrator’s grandmother to be a mysterious and compelling character. Can you tell us more about how her character took shape?

Yeye was inspired by a grandmother figure in my life. She had these green, traditional tattoos on her inner forearms that captivated me as a child. She was an astute businesswoman who could speak multiple languages and was well-traveled. When I began shaping Yeye’s character, it was her image that kept returning to my mind. I wanted to capture her specific combination of wisdom, mystery, and quiet competence.

The scene in which we witness the voracious revelry of the favored gods really stayed with me after I read the story. Where did the connection between hunger and belief come from?

It comes from the same framework that shaped the story’s gods. If gods are created by thought, then their existence must depend on a source of energy to sustain them. I imagined thought as something ephemeral, weightless, like a feather suspended in the air. It can only remain in the air as long as someone is blowing on it. From that idea came the notion that all gods must be born starving. Their hunger is for human belief, attention, and devotion. I go a little further in the story by making this emotional energy a currency of sorts; the gods consume, hoard, trade, and even steal it from one another. Their revelries, acts of cannibalism, are expressions of their desperation to survive.

I had many questions I wanted to ask after reading, especially about the narrator and his reasons for seeking out the inhabitants of the dream world. Is this story part of a larger work?

In an early draft of the story, I explored the narrator’s reasons for wanting to make a god of his own, but in later drafts, I realised it was better to leave that a mystery. At present, the story is not part of a larger work, but my longer works have all started out as short stories, so who knows what the future holds. The world of “Of All Who Dream” fascinates me, and it is possible I may return to it someday.

Are there any upcoming projects that you would like to talk about?

Absolutely! My new novel, A Dying Giant in the Palm of Your Hand, published by Masobe Books, is available worldwide through Amazon. It is about a fisher boy who must fight to save a captive merman and a dying forest god in a Nigerian village devastated by oil pollution.

I am also working on a completed novel set in the Sauútiverse, a shared science-fiction and fantasy setting spanning five planets orbiting a binary star. It is a wildly imaginative world generating more stories than we can keep up with.