The Dreamfarer

Prologue

The first time it happened, she was sure she was dead. A moment of bam, boom, pow, then dead as a doornail. She did not remember dying, but she was sure there was no other explanation. Surely her imagination could not think up something so beautiful as the scene she had been floating around in.

However, she woke up like any other day, and when she went to look out the window, it looked the same as ever. The sun just rising, the village sleeping, a profound silence in the air. The most exciting thing she noticed was the spider clinging on to a strand of its web for dear life as it swung around in the breeze.

No matter how ordinary everything seemed, she knew that something was different. She had never had a dream like that before. That... vivid, that real. It seemed beyond the boundaries of where her imagination could take her. But how could it have been anything but a dream?

She still felt disoriented as she walked into her kitchen. Her parents were gone, but that was not surprising; they basically ran the town. Her mother was an Enforcer, so she worked almost constantly. Her dad was high up in the Congregation, so he was almost always somewhere or other, making this decision or that. She wasn't complaining, though; having the house to herself was a relief. It gave her time to think about what on earth went on in her mind last night.

And she still came to the same conclusion: she dreamt it.  

Even with all the evidence pointing that way, she could not convince herself. She had had dreams her entire life, just like any other normal person. And she had never experienced a dream like that. A dream so painstakingly beautiful and surreal that it gave her the closest glimpse to Heaven that she was surely ever to glean in this lifetime. A dream in which she felt completely out of her own control, letting the powers that be weave her in and out of its substance as they willed. And that had been okay, because she was lost. The place was unfamiliar to her, and the feeling was entirely new.

Eventually, of course, she forgot all about it; this impossible dream, this knock on the door of the sky. There was only so long someone could hold on to an idea, no matter how important they felt, at one point, that it was. And so there it went, one of the billions of thoughts to be forgotten or pushed away from the minds of those unwilling to delve into their contents. It fluttered away, and one would think that it was never to be seen again.

Except, of course, that is not how this story goes.  

It did not take long for that thought to resent the separation. For it to come zipping back towards her with more force than she was ready to confront. And so it came to pass that just a few weeks after her first so-called dream, another invaded her mind... and this time, it was not so pretty.