Eighty per cent of this story is a dream that the main character has while in a coma. The book begins with his miscellaneous interaction with people and events that annoy him. These encounters and people are real life but then re-surface as nuisances, villains, and victims in the dream that follows. One influence on the dreamer's subconscious is a doomsday publication he reads a week before his injury. Although the central player's experience is a delusion, the readers soon adjust to the surreal conversations and drama. The story is not apocalyptic and steers from unrealistic melodrama and sensationalism.

The setting is on the west coast and takes place during the 21st century. There are four main characters. The older married couple Robby and Janis is in their late twenties. It wasn't their idea to grow up and be forced out of high school after graduation. But their age is finally beginning to dawn on them. The younger married couple, Leigh and Ursula, is their best friends. One of their commitments in life is to hang out with their two older friends.

In the dream, the world community is deceived by the propaganda of a newly established one world government, which maliciously deviated into an international alliance of dictators. Mankind basks in a false sense of peace and security. But economists warn that money will lose its value and that rich and poor alike will abhor it and throw it away. Robby, Janis, Leigh, and Ursula believe the doomsayers. Quietly they build an underground shelter in their back yard before the world order of things collapse in on itself. When the earth wide chaos reaches their neighborhood, they hole up in their bunker. At great risk, they sneak out some nights to keep from going mad.