I have started reading the book with mixed enthusiasm which soon turned to skepticism. The pages turned revealed a Nietsche-meets-Oprah motivational narrative, with eyebrow-raising claims such as:
"Man is a God".
"The world exists only in your mind".
"There is no time".
Bearing on just a little more, I've read the "Dreaming vs desiring" chapter, which completely changed my view of the book. Written entirely in aphorisms, a style popular to ancient greeks but rarely used today in "serious" literature, the text hides deep, profound truths behind general, sometimes simplistic sentences.
However, Elio D'Anna's truths are subjective in the existential sense:
"The dreamer is you" - that which you may become, as long as you search, in your own unbiased and honest way, for personal meaning.
And, I did feel, to a certain degree, the book concealed a personal message, addressed to myself and myself only. I have to grant that as a merit to the author's writing.
As for the more general themes, D'Annas dreamer echoes Nietsche's ubermensch: he is alone, outside social or political structures, acting with ignorance and disregard to them, pursuing perpetual self-development, embracing pain and suffering as a means of growth, and growing through action.
Unlike him, the dreamer seems to reject human culture and his afiliation to the race as a whole. The world is seen as a mere projection of the individual. It does not exist outside of the dreamer.
The ubermensch is the natural next-step in human evolution, whereas for the dreamer, there is no time, hence no evolution to worry about other than one's own. The ubermench carries the weight (& responsibility) of humanity's future whereas for the Dreamer, future, like the past, do not exist.
Rejecting the "others", history, science, medicine or any identification with the "worldly" for that matter, seems a little cynical to me, but I have to admit it is liberating for those in suffering, in search or need for validation outside social frameworks.
I had trouble accepting these very same ideas, which I can only interpret as release of any kind of preconception or bias (social, historical, etc.) in search for the self.
To sum up, this book is not a self-development manual, nor is it a "system of thought" (not a complete one, for sure). To me, it is a set of suggestions, an exercise in imagination, occasionally naive but sometimes powerful, for those (of us) who exercise (still) a willingness to dream.