The Dreamfarer

15

It was a strange sensation, Dreamfaring.

Try to remember how you feel, when you drift off to sleep at night. Do you ever remember the exact moment that your subconscious took over? Of course not. But you do remember when you started drifting off. Perhaps you had been reading, and the words on the pages began to blur. You had to put the book down and roll over to switch off the lamp that had been emitting a faint light. Or perhaps you had just been lying there, thinking. Your mind began to get foggy, and you knew that sleep was coming.

That was what it was like. A Dreamfarer felt sleep coming upon them, and the moment their eyes closed, their dream-self launched into action. In a way, a Dreamfarer never caught a break; whether they were awake or asleep, they were always destined to be doing something.

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Mae, already expecting to suddenly be somewhere unfamiliar and strange, straightened quickly when she landed and looked around.

She was glad that it was something beautiful. She had been worried that her hateful thoughts would have carried her dream-self more towards something gruesome or frightening.

She was standing on something large, white, and fluffy. It was so soft that it was difficult to jump on, she noticed; it was more like something she would fall onto when looking for a good sleep.

The substance she was standing on seemed to last for miles. The place reminded her of her and Folco's special place when it was just blue; an endless box, she had thought it as. This seemed to extend just as far.

Above her was a dome of blue, the same subdued shade as the inside of her tent. She smiled when she looked down and saw that the surface of what was holding her up was transparent. A bird flew by under her feet, and then she understood what the substance was.

She was standing on top of the clouds.

Mae would have known that earlier, of course, had the clouds looked more like... well, clouds. However, the white substance she was surrounded with reminded her more of what she thought clouds looked like when she was a child; some were shaped like things she recognized - a duck, a tree, even a little person - but others were just round, with curved, bumpy edges. They were all pristinely white as well, and she wondered at the coincidence of being surrounded by the only two colors she had really seen all day.

She walked on for a while, just gazing around. Now that she knew that she was traveling through someone else's dream, she could not help but be intrigued by every detail. The dreamer's mind came up with all of this, somehow. Everything in here was here for some unknown reason, and Mae found it interesting that she would end up remembering this place and what happened here probably more than the dreamer himself - or herself.

Eventually, as she knew she must at some point, she heard a voice. It was gleeful and young, as she had supposed it would be. Most of the dreams she had traveled through so far had been children's dreams, and she found herself questioning if that was merely a coincidence or if there was a reason behind it. She remembered that Kroma had initially assigned Folco to pay specific attention to children's dreams, almost as if he knew she was more likely to pop up in one of them than anywhere else.

Maybe it was because children dreamed more than adults? Hmm, no, that didn't sound right to Mae. She knew that everyone dreamed, but many didn't remember doing it.

So maybe it was because children's dreams were so much more vivid. Perhaps the wonders that a child's imagination could bring forth drew Dreamfarers to them more than to adults, who were more likely to have nightmares or dreams about the daily troubles they had in life. Children were happy, usually... happy and innocent. They did not yet know the troubles of the world and they could not care less about them in their youth. Their dreams were magical and cheerful, and Mae would not be surprised if she had come to the correct conclusion. She would much prefer to be in this dream, or Ayvy's, or even the first dream she had - because that must have been the dream of a child, though she never met one in it - than something like Vivienne or Araminta's nightmares.