Into the Dreaming Space

Once upon a time, there was a small boy named Percy. He grew up just like anyone else. He learned his colors, how to count to ten, and that green food wasn’t quite so bad. But then a day came when everything changed.

It was your average summer afternoon. His parents were busy tending to Percy’s new baby sister, and so he was left to entertain himself. Not too far from home, there was a great and ancient forest brimming with possibility and adventures. So, into the woods Percy went, stick in hand pretending to be a sword.

It was a grand afternoon to be sure. Percy climbed trees and chased butterflies and even once swore he saw fairies dancing out of the corner of his eye. Yes, the day truly had all the makings for a grand adventure. And that’s when he came across the gnomes. They were a small, funny people whose favorite pastimes was to lounge in people’s gardens pretending to be statues. Percy had always thought of them to be funny things, like tiny Santas playing long games of freeze tag. But they were a tricky, unpredictable sort, and Percy knew no better. If he had, maybe he would have ignored their voices. Maybe he would have kept on walking and made it hope for a nice glass of lemonade. And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have stumbled into a hole hidden between the roots of a great tree.

This hadn’t been an ordinary hole of worms and rabbits and dirt. No, this hole was an ancient doorway into an unseen world of monsters and magic and imaginary friends. It was a place little Percy called the Dreaming Space.

Down and down and down he tumbled until he landed firmly in the pale heart of the Dreaming Space, far from any help whether it be imaginary or real. He was trapped in a fluctuating landscape from which all the imagination in the universe originated. It might have been only minutes to us, but time is funny in the Dreaming Space. To Percy, he was stuck wandering those ever-changing paths and battling monsters for seven years until he was finally saved by a wizard named Albion.

Now wizards, as everyone knows, are a strange breed of person. They wander from here to there on a whim, crossing realities as they please as easily as stepping through a door. Few ever put down proper roots, most preferring the life of an adventurer or a traveling scholar. But Albion was not your typical wizard. He lived in a haunted house and tended a garden where infinite possibilities flowered. And nothing helps fertilize possibilities like what you could find in the heart of imagination. So down into the Dreaming Space he walked with a basket in hand. What he had never expected to find, though, was a boy trampling all over imagination.

“Anyone can get lost in imagination,” said Albion wisely. “It happens to the best of us. But the very heart of imagination. The Divine Spark. No mortal was ever meant to walk its changing roadways. You’re very lucky I came along. You never would have been able to find your way out on your own.”

Now wizards are very powerful, but they often don’t like to get themselves directly involved in other people’s stories. They are all about helping other’s help themselves. And so, after taking pity on poor little Percy and carrying him up from the pale heart and into the less temperamental lands of the Dreaming Space, Albion the wizard set Percy on an adventure to climb his way back up into our world.

He gave Percy three choice on how to get home.

The first choice was for Percy to befriend a passing daydream and bargain for a ride back to reality. The challenge with this option was that daydreams are wildly unpredictable. They may say they’re going one place, but they’ll zigzag and switch directions thirty-one different times along the way before likely never even making it to where they’d originally intended to go.

The second choice was to tame a rampant nightmare and ride it all the way back home. This too came with its considerable number of risks. All nightmares, no matter how tame they may appear, are inherently monstrous and cannot be trusted. For a boy to try and take one on in the waking world is difficult enough. Had Percy tried to hunt one in the Dreaming Space, where it would still be finding its shape and be at its most powerful, would have practically been a death sentence.

This left Percy with only the third and final choice. Naturally, this meant embarking on a grand adventure.

You’d think it could have been as simple as the wizard just taking Percy all the way home, but no. As annoying as it might be, wizards don’t operate that way. They’re all about helping others help themselves. So, after Albion told Percy exactly where I needed to go and what he needed to do, he turned on his heel and disappeared.

The adventures Percy was forced to undertake would make for a lovely children’s book, filled with monsters and daring escapes and no less than three instances where he crossed blades with pirates. The wizard sent him on a quest to find a compass. Only it wasn’t an ordinary compass. No, this compass had been made a very long time ago by a mythological inventor and it was designed to guide its owner towards many, many different things. Towards fantastical, wonderful things. Instead of pointing north, it navigates its holder to a still point between where they want to go and where they need to be. If Percy were to find it, it could help him discover the right path between realities and back home.

Off into the great wide unknown Percy went, armed with nothing but his childish wits and a wizard’s encouraging words. He traversed great mountains made of diamond and silver, braved twisted forests of poisonous thorns and giant spiders, explored haunted castles plagued by monsters and carnivorous marauders, sailed upon the rushing tides of consciousness, and even had time to share a cup of tea with a nomad who could command the very air around him. But it was not until he had the fabled compass in his hands, which he won fair and square from a pirate captain after besting him at an intense game of hide and seek, that the real adventure supposedly began.

The compass guided him to a labyrinth of immense sprawling corridors that could interconnect all places, realities, and times if you knew how to walk it. The labyrinth had been designed by the very same man who created the compass, and he realized through betrayal and hardship that something that could allow someone to be in all places and all times was perhaps the most dangerous thing to exist throughout all of imagination. And so, the inventor placed a terrible monster within the labyrinth to watch over the infinite paths. It was the very same monster that began to hunt Percy the very moment he stepped foot within the maze.

It took some trial and error, as well as a fair share of cleverness to continuously outmaneuver the beast clawing at his heels, but Percy was finally able to find his way home. Up he climbed from the very same hole he had fallen into, covered in all kinds of dirt and muck and who knows what else.

Can you imagine a boy walking out of the woods looking like that and then justifying it to his parents with such an imaginative story? It would be every bit as adorable as it was impressive. And while his parents delighted at his story, they soon sent him to take a bath before dinner was ready. So upstairs he went with a smile on his face. He didn’t care if his parents didn’t believe him. He knew his story was the truth. And maybe - just maybe - if him mom and dad had bothered to look closer at the compass he still had clucthed in his hands, they would have believed him too.