John Monegal, rootless, alienated, beset by the manifold complexities of modern life, lives a secret life in his dreams, his spirit traveling to a bright equatorial world he comes to love.  A product of the postwar baby boom, he is reared as an air force brat, the adopted son of a staff sergeant, dragged from one air force base to another, from Seville, Spain, to Fort Walton, Florida, and Van Luna, Kansas.  Monegal's interior world is strange and confusing and an even more intoxicating alternative to the harsh and painful realities of his life in the twentieth century.

As a young black, working in a dead-end job, he encounters a man, a scientist, who is interested in his dreams and offers him the possibility of living them.  A secret experiment in time travel sends him a million years into the past in Central Africa and, at last, he finds his dreams . . . and his home.  Stranded and alone, he joins a tribe of proto-hominids and learns to survive while providing them with a few of the handy benefits of his own time and place.  Out of this life comes love and, eventually, family.
[From the flyleaf of the Timescape first edition]

Dedication:
To Floyd J. Lasley, Jr., Our mild Irish Godfather