Daniel O'Hare is an eighteen-year-old English medical student with an amazing secret - he has the ability to project his consciousness anywhere at will, but he sometimes projects involuntarily while sleeping. During one such astral projection Daniel finds himself in the presence of a meditating Buddhist: Samuel Stewart is a middle-aged, laidback businessman from Los Angeles. To Daniel's joyous amazement Sam can see Daniel's astral body because Sam's deep meditative state has put him too on the same plane where he strikes up an astral conversation with the dumbfounded Daniel.

On a flight from England to visit Sam in the physical, Daniel falls asleep and finds his consciousness projected into an elevator and the presence of the most beautiful woman he has ever seen: Stacy Frost is a very wealthy, feisty and hedonistic twenty-five-year-old member of a satanic sect; she is fleeing New York to get away from the sect, which she thinks is at the root of such horrendous nightmares she is on the verge of suicide.

In arrivals at Los Angeles airport Daniel spots Stacy and, in the belief that his projection was obviously no coincidence but some fate ordained occurrence, invents a lame excuse to speak with the beautiful stranger. Stacy finds Daniel modest, attractive - Daniel looks older than his years - and disarming. In need of company, due to her emotional state, Stacy offers him a lift in her limo to his motel and leaves him with her number and an invitation to call her anytime during his stay in LA.

That night, after Daniel dozes off in his motel room, he soon involuntarily projects to Stacy, where he has his first experience of projecting into what he presumes to be a dream or more precisely a nightmare, and witnesses Stacy being raped by a grotesque beast. The experience is only fleeting since Daniel's mental stamina to prolong his projection is almost immediately exhausted and Daniel is pulled back to his body and a deep sleep.

During Daniel's first meeting with Sam, in the flesh so to speak, Daniel is totally absorbed and excited by what Sam tells him of Tibetan Buddhism and other aspects of spirituality - perhaps he has found a meaningful reason for his amazing ability. When he tells Sam of his impromptu meetings with Stacy, both physical and astral, Daniel suggests the possibility that he may have entered a nightmare Stacy was experiencing and Sam agrees that it could be a possibility.

What transpires after Stacy instigates an intimate sexual relationship with Daniel turns his world upside-down - as if it ever needed compounding. Within a few short weeks he has left his sleepy home village in England, met up with a projecting Buddhist in LA, lost his virginity to the most beautiful woman he has seen, and is drawn into a bizarre and terrifying cat and mouse game with a demon on the astral plane and the one who summons it on the physical. This is the demon that haunts Stacy in unbearably sadistic and painful nightmares - nightmares with such an essence of reality that Stacy experiences them even more vividly and intensely than if she were in a waking state. Such pain and torment she knows would be unbearable and render her unconscious if not dead if she were awake, but she is not awake and cannot awaken during her ordeals.