The abandoned couch, the video store movies, and the dream that gave birth to Beyond the Secret Land
The idea for the novel wasn’t born at a writer’s desk with coffee and a fresh notebook. It came out of chaos — between stacked boxes, a cut hand, and crickets chirping at dusk.
Phil Headway calls that period his personal shipwreck, and it was right there, at rock bottom, that Secret Land started to take shape. In 2009 he had just moved cities. His family was going through a tough financial time, and he left the huge childhood home in one of the best neighborhoods to live in a small two-bedroom apartment next to an empty lot.
All the furniture from his old life was crammed into that tight space. His mom was still traveling because his younger brother was in school back in the previous city, so Phil was alone handling everything — no car, no real prospects for his music career, and no one to talk to. His only company was his aging dogs, Miko and Geni. He said he felt like Tom Hanks in Cast Away: no one around, no one to speak to, just him, the pain, and the dogs.
Trying to organize the mess, Phil badly cut his hand on a glass jar that fell to the floor. With no car to get to the hospital, he wrapped cloths around the wound and stayed stuck for days, unable to work.
So he did what anyone would do facing boredom and pain: he surrendered. He spent his days on the couch watching one movie after another from a video store near his place, whose owner had great taste and recommended works that would become creative fuel.
The titles included Into the Wild, Once, The Illusionist, Twilight, Perfume, The Prestige, and Peaceful Warrior.
Between films, Phil would walk Miko and Geni, and the walk always ended at the empty lot next to the building. There was an old couch thrown in the middle of the weeds, and it became an obsession. He kept wondering who the owner of that couch had been, who had sat there, what story it held.
It was his mind trying to escape the present and build narratives to get through the isolation.
Alongside the movies, Phil dove into books. He was studying A Course in Miracles and alternating it with the Bible and The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Spirituality, religion, and philosophy were all fighting in his head at once. The mix was dangerous and fertile. The turning point came one evening at dusk, when Phil opened the window and the sound of crickets flooded into the room.
He leaned against the window, watching the night darken and the couch in the lot disappear into the shadows. The hypnotic sound pulled him into such a deep meditative state that it felt like he was floating outside his body. Startled, he jerked back and fell onto the bed. That’s when the question that would change everything hit him: what if the frequency of the crickets’ song stimulated the brain enough to open a portal to another dimension? He grabbed a notebook and pen right then and scribbled down loose words so he wouldn’t lose the thought. That night he dreamed the answer.
In the dream he was Andy, searching for Sarah — who was the embodiment of music — and there was an old man with him guiding the mission, the Dream Rider. Yes, the whole idea was born somewhere between dreams and questionable realities.
The book was born from the combination of isolation, journey-and-transcendence films, literature ranging from the Bible to Nietzsche, the mystery of the abandoned couch, and the pure company of his dogs. As words turned into paragraphs, Phil started hearing music in his head.
Notes that seemed like harmless little fairies calling him toward music became ghosts that forced him to sit at the piano and write down every melody whispering in his ears. So alongside the book, the musical The Dream Rider was born, inspired by the plot of Secret Land. The musical’s CD was released in September 2015 at an intimate cocktail event in his childhood home — the place Phil returned to after that difficult period.
The story proves that sometimes life throws you into a small apartment with a cut hand and no prospects just so you’ll finally hear the signs. He came out of that shipwreck with a bestseller and a fully orchestrated musical in his head. From the mess came order, from the empty lot came another world, from the crickets’ song came a portal. And Secret Land was a secret no more.