What American dream? Each short story in I Have a Nightmare takes place in a different part of the United States: New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, a suburb, a university town, and a commercial fishing boat in Alaska's Bering Sea. Instead of experiencing the American dream the whites, blacks, immigrants, and men & women in these short stories experience the reality of the American nightmare. I Have a Nightmare is written in a mostly conventional narrative style, and was Wolf Larsen's first book.