This book was born from a dream. Not a wish, a longing, a hope. An actual dream that I really experienced, and I chose not to narrate in my literary debut because of the possible prejudgment that it might originate, thus conditioning the context.

However, I reconsidered this choice, because the truth must never be concealed for fear of other people judging wrongly due to a misunderstanding.

And the truth is that this book, like the previous one, and all the thoughts crammed into my mind over the past decades, originate from a dream. One of those that change your life forever, because they are so real, vivid, intense, that they remain impressed like the pain you felt when a bee stung you as a child. And are so inexplicable that induce you to investigate day and night to grasp and decipher their meaning. I was a 16-year-old young boy who a few months earlier had watched his father depart this life due to a stroke. One night I suddenly woke up in my room with a beating heart, filled with a flow of emotions that, shortly after, ended up dragging my adolescence with it. Because when I woke up, I immediately understood that something extraordinary had happened, that I was no longer alone, that someone had decided to appear to give meaning and direction to my life.

That someone was Jesus. Although he was not visually present, I immediately understood that something exceptional had happened, because in that dream, in a context that had nothing to do with me, I spoke words I could not understand, to the point that when I woke up I wrote them down in my diary. A majestic scene opened the dream: St. Peter's Square, in Rome, crowded with believers, Heads of States and Governments from all over the world at the center of the square, facing the Basilica, holding hands like children, drawing a cheerful semicircle.

I still recall, as if it were a photograph, the flags’ sparkling colors, the coats of arms and clothes of the powerful of the world of every ethnic group, language ​​and religion. An incredible scene, totally filmlike. I was viewing it from top to bottom because I was facing the window of the Apostolic Palace, no less, where the Pontiff recites the Angelus prayer. And standing next to me was St. John Paul II, while I was wondering what I was doing next to the Pope on that occasion.

At one point John Paul II, facing this spectacular audience, grabbed the microphone, simply introducing my speech by means of a few words like: listen to this young boy, because he has something important to announce. The peculiar thought that still surfaces in my memories is that I had no idea what I would say. Yet a motion pushed me without hesitation towards the microphone, the Pope hugged me affectionately and with him next to me I began to speak.

My memory stored that speech as a heartfelt appeal to conversion: stop and convert to Jesus Christ, I said, addressing the powerful of the earth, because humanity has reached a crucial crossroads. I remember perfectly well that I used a metaphor to explain what I meant, comparing the world to a train launched at maximum speed against a steel wall. Unless you stop, I said, the world will blow up.

The polar ice caps will melt, the oceans will rise, and the heat will devour a substantial portion of the planet; wars, famines and plagues will follow, decimating humanity. This was the meaning of that speech as I recall it. It was a sort of warning and call to conversion of ecological inspiration, issued by a teenager who - at the end of the 80s – had no idea what the environmental crisis that would be so devastating in the following decades could be like.

I had not quite understood what I had said, but I was sure I had said it, remembering everything, every detail of that magnificent scene where I was with the Pontiff looking out of the window of his study. That dream changed my life. In fact, it was then that I began investigating what that vision could mean, so I would randomly open the Bible every evening to read a few verses: almost a propitiatory ritual, in search of something that could make sense of that enigmatic experience.

And then the dream was soon followed by another event that initiated my real life: I cried.