I Am

Chris Murphy is not a physicist. He is not a scientist. He graduated high school with a 2.3 GPA, spent years working bars and restaurants, and lost roughly fifteen years of his life to addiction. He is the last person anyone would expect to change how physicists think about the universe.

But since childhood, every time Chris sleeps, something happens.

He has always called them dreams because he had no other word. But they may not be dreams at all. In these experiences, Chris has no body. No eyes. No sense of standing somewhere and watching something else. He exists within what is happening. He feels gravity, distance, time, and a kind of connection that makes scientists reconsider what connection actually means.

When scientists eventually ask what he does in these experiences, the question confuses him. He tries to explain. Finally he says: I am.

I Am is the story of an ordinary man who spent years trying to silence the most extraordinary part of himself, and a woman who loved him before there was any evidence that made sense. It is a novel about addiction and recovery, love and identity, consciousness and physics. About what it means to exist. About whether the life we can touch and feel is the only kind of life there is.

And what happens when the most uneducated person in the room turns out to be the one person some of the greatest physicists alive cannot work without.