The dream that started Veins of Light. Why a software engineer turned to glowing veins and haunted houses to write about the science of inherited memory and why fantasy became the only language that could hold what epigenetics proved true.
I was in my 20s when the dream came.
I stood in a house I did not recognize, watching a woman whose face I could not see. She held out her hands. The veins beneath her skin were not blue. They were luminous — pulsing with light that seemed to carry memory itself. She did not speak. She did not need to. The light was the language.
When I woke, I knew I had been given a story I did not yet understand.
I was not a fantasy writer. I was a software engineer. I believed in systems, in logic, in cause and effect. Dreams were noise. The supernatural was metaphor at best, delusion at worst. But that dream did not feel like imagination. It felt like transmission. As if something had traveled through sleep to reach me — something that knew my vocabulary was too small to receive it.
I spent two years trying to write the story as realism. A family drama. A psychological portrait of inherited trauma. But every draft felt thin. The characters spoke their pain eloquently, and the eloquence was the lie. Real inherited pain does not announce itself in therapy sessions. It arrives in compulsions. In dreams. In the inexplicable feeling that you have lived in rooms you have never entered.
The dream came again. The same house. The same woman. But this time, the light in her veins was fading. She looked at me — I felt her look, though I still could not see her face and I understood: she was not haunting me. She was dying. Not her body. Her memory. The transmission was failing because I had refused the language.
I woke and opened my laptop. I did not write a chapter. I wrote a single sentence: "The veins remember what the mind has buried."
That sentence became Veins of Light.
I did not know the word epigenetics when the dream first came. I learned it because the dream demanded explanation not to reduce the mystery, but to honor it.
Epigenetics is the study of how experience alters gene expression across generations. Trauma, starvation, survival, love — these do not end with the body that experiences them. They are passed. Not as stories. As biology. The body remembers what the mind forgets.
A 2015 study on Holocaust survivors found trauma-induced genetic changes detectable in their children. Research on African diaspora populations suggests the Middle Passage, colonial violence, and systemic oppression may have left molecular signatures that persist. My grandmother's anxiety. My mother's vigilance. My own restlessness in crowded rooms. These were not personality quirks. They were inheritance.
I am Nigerian. My people do not need science to know this. We have always spoken of the dead as present. We have always understood that a child can carry what the parent could not name. But I am also a software engineer. I needed the science to ground the knowing. To give it structure. To make it undeniable.
Veins of Light exists at the intersection of these two truths: the elder wisdom that says "the ancestors are not gone," and the science that says "trauma literally lives in your blood." The glowing veins are not magic. They are manifestation. The body making visible what the mind has buried. The ancestor appearing not to frighten, but to transmit — because the living generation must complete, or repeat, or finally release what was left unfinished.
I tried realism. I tried literary fiction. I tried memoir — I would later write The Scars of the Beginning in that form, because that story demanded nakedness. But Veins of Light demanded something else. It demanded a language that could hold the simultaneity of presence and absence, of past and present, of the living and the dead as co-occupants of a single consciousness.
Realism separates. Fantasy integrates.
In realism, a haunted house is a metaphor for grief. In Veins of Light, the haunted house is mechanism. The house does not symbolize memory. It operates as memory — rooms that appear only when certain emotions are felt, corridors that lengthen when the protagonist resists, doors that open when she finally asks the question she has spent her life avoiding. The house is not setting. It is character. It is the ancestor's body, made architecture.
The protagonist does not discover her ancestry through a genealogy test. She discovers it through symptom. Through dreams that leave her weeping without knowing why. Through the compulsion to touch certain walls in certain rooms. Through the inexplicable knowledge that she has buried something in the garden — something she has never seen, but her hands remember digging.
This is how inherited memory actually works. Not as narrative. Not as family history told at reunions. But as compulsion. As fear without object. As love without source. As the feeling that your life is being lived by someone else, and you are only now learning to take the reins.
Fantasy was the only language that could hold this because fantasy does not require the dead to be dead. It does not require memory to be past. It allows the body to be simultaneously itself and its inheritance, the self and the ancestor, the present moment and the accumulated weight of every generation that made this moment possible.
Veins of Light traces the threshold between who we are and who our ancestors need us to become.
The protagonist's journey is not about discovering her past. It is about integrating it. She does not banish the ancestor. She becomes her — not by surrendering her own identity, but by expanding it to include what came before. The veins stop glowing not because the memory is gone, but because it has been received. The body no longer needs to scream what the heart has finally heard.
This is the book's central question: What do our ancestors need us to remember?
Not everything. That is the terror and the mercy. They do not need us to carry their entire burden. But they need us to acknowledge what they could not name. To complete the grief they swallowed. To live the freedom they died without tasting.
I wrote Veins of Light because I was tired of treating my restlessness as a flaw. Because I wanted to understand why certain rooms made me weep, why certain songs felt like memory, why my body knew things my mind had never learned. I wrote it because the dream would not stop coming until I said yes to the language it offered.
I wrote it because I am Nigerian, and I am a software engineer, and I am a woman who inherited more than she chose — and I needed a story that could hold all of that without reducing any of it.
The veins remember what the mind has buried.
This is the story of what happens when we finally let them speak.
[Buy Veins of Light] | [Join the Reader List]