Passage to the Next Dream is "a possible self-critical novel about the exiles: of banishment in clandestine militancy, of European asylum, of exile in homosexuality".

The preface, on the dust jacket of the book, has the criativity of the text of his friend, the cartonist Henfil, brother of Herbert de Souza ("Betinho").

In his first book, autobiographical, Herbert Daniel conceptualizes and probes the first three exiles that he passed through before then. The book was finished in May of 1981, when he already was in exile in Paris, five months before his return to Brazilian soil. The illustration on the cover was conceived by Cláudio Mesquita, graphic artistic and his life campanion, who illustrated seven covers of the eight books published by Herbert Daniel.

Herbert Daniel wrote the unfeigned text of his baggage of so many memories without the jornalistic intention of creating a register of memories or register of an age. Its actions , his history, far from being analyses of an age, are reflections on stories vivid in our history.

His need for interlocutors, for dialogues, made him write the good-humored and curious "tales" of a sad history of a society at bay, silent and unprepared... or of some few who armed themselves with courage and indignation. Herbert Daniel shared his stories and reflections that described the motive that led some hundreds of young men to rebel quixotically and millions of others to remain silent before a totalitarian state, of the unpreparedness of the left and its desperate subsistence.

He recounts the myth of a generation already distant... of our fathers; certainly facts that never should be forgotten for the comprehension and the perception of current socio-political facts. He recounts thrilling "tales" of his participation in the kidnappings of two ambassadors and explains the origins of the revolutionary groups that were forming hardily and succumbing because of the prisons, tortures and deaths. He recounts his inexplicable and awkward escapes from the military cordons that hunted him eagerly, dedicating him to death.

He also writes to us of how destiny presented him to Cláudio Mesquita, friend revered as his life partner, companion of so many joys, many sadnesses and difficulties, brother until the last day of life. In the pages of his remembrances he relates emotions and torments shared by two, clandestine with Cláudio, and the rediscovery of his homosexuality, suffocated by his asexual political militancy in the lands of a foreign exile.

Of the patriotic exile, he threaded his discourse with strong human focus, inserting homosexuality in the list of questions debated by the left, proceeding from his thoughts of the ghetto and homosexual life in Paris, where he worked as porter in a sauna. His instruments of perception are the passersby, the clients, the daily life of the underworld of the ghetto, and he narrates to us one more series of good-humored "tales" which impel us to democratic reflection about banishment, the fear of a socio-political reality of oppressors and oppressed, of prejudices and discriminations. Herbert Daniel perceived and notated the banishment of a sexuality "that he did not consider a sexual difference, a sexual quality, but fundamentally a social difference", therefore, political. Those years, which appear to be the history of a distant land, of hatreds and guerillas... were only there, nearby, yesterday, and anachronistically lay bare the political relations little different, in substance, of the Brazil of today.