The Dream is a 1924 novel by H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

 about a man from a Utopian future who dreams the entire life of a 20th century man, Harry Mortimer Smith.

Synopsis

Sarnac may have become a successful scientist, a leading light in the research of chemical reactions of cells, but he would never forget the dream. It was a dream he had had while on holiday, after visiting a museum to the terrible days of the Age of Confusion. In that one dream, he lived an entire life, that of Harry Mortimer Smith, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Upon waking, he had to explain to his friends the life and loves of Smith and the terrible half-lives of Humanity of that time.

H. G. Wells' The Dream is a powerful and enchanting childhood romance.

World War I

Smith becomes a soldier fighting against the Germans in World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

Nowadays of course nobody reads the books of the generals and admirals and politicians of that time, and all the official war histories sleep the eternal sleep in the vaults of the great libraries, but probably you have all read one of two such human books as Enid Bagnold

Enid Bagnold

Enid Algerine Bagnold, Lady Jones, CBE , known by her maiden name as Enid Bagnold, was a British author and playwright, best known for the 1935 story National Velvet which was filmed in 1944 with Elizabeth Taylor....

's '"Diary without Dates" or Cogswell

Cogswell

-People:*Bryce Cogswell, computer expert*Fred Cogswell, Canadian poet*Henry D. Cogswell, dentist*Joseph Cogswell, 19th-century bibliographer and educator*Sue Cogswell, English squash player*Theodore Cogswell, American science fiction author*William F...

's "Ermytage and the Curate" or Barbusse's "Le Feu" or Arthur Green

Arthur Green

Arthur Green is a scholar of Jewish mysticism and Neo-Hasidism. He is a professor in the non-denominational rabbinical program at Hebrew College in Boston. He was a dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1987–1993.-Biography:...

's "Story of a Prisoner of War" or that curious anthology, "The War Stories of Private Thomas Atkins" ; and probably you have seen photographs and films and also pictures painted by such men as Nevinson

Christopher R. W. Nevinson

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was a British figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W...

 and Orpen

William Orpen

Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE, RA, RHA was an Irish portrait painter, who worked mainly in London...

 and Muirhead Bone

Muirhead Bone

Sir Muirhead Bone was a Scottish etcher, drypoint and watercolour artist.The son of a printer, Bone was born in Glasgow and trained initially as an architect, later going on to study art at Glasgow School of Art. He began printmaking in 1898, and although his first known print was a lithograph, he...

 and Will Rothenstein. All of them, I can certify now, are very true books and pictures. They tell of desolation passing like the shadow of an eclipse across the human scene."