Awa and the Dreamrealm

by Isa Pearl Ritchie

  “There you are!” she said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “Was it you,” I looked around, “…following me?”

  “I just got here,” Veila said. She looked back in the direction I had come from.

  “Shall we leave this place?” she asked.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Deeper into the Dreamrealm; there’s not much work to do here.”

  “What is this place?” I asked, “and what kind of work are you talking about.”

  “Dreamwork, silly!” she said, smiling at me. “And this place is what you humans would think of as an ordinary dreaming place if you thought very much about it at all. It’s what we call the Rooms of Mind.”

  “We’re not in any rooms,” I pointed out. “We’re outside.”

  “Are you so sure about that?” Veila asked, grabbing my hand with her tiny glowing fingers sending nice shivers up my arm.

  Veila led me to the door. It was an ordinary-looking door, painted blue; only it didn’t seem to be attached to anything. It was just standing in the middle of the path.

  “Open it,” she said.

  I laughed. “It’s just a propped-up door; we can walk around it.”

  “Oh no, that won’t get you anywhere useful,” Veila insisted. “Open it.”

  “Okay,” I said, and laughed, mostly because I thought it was a funny thing to do. I turned the knob and pushed the door wide open, expecting to see the same thing through it as all around it – the skyline around the carnival, only…

  “What?!”

  Behind the door was a dark hallway.

  “No way!”

  “Let’s go!” she said and pulled me inside. I closed the door and took a closer look at the hallway.

  “I guess this is just a dream,” I said.

  Veila laughed as if that was the most hysterical thing she had ever heard.

  “Just a dream. Oh my!” she said. “You don’t believe in dreams.”

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “Oh no, you think they aren’t real.”

  “Well…”

  “Never mind, you’ll see soon enough.”

  We started moving down the hallway for what felt like a very long time, turning corners into other similar hallways.

  “Does this go on forever?”

  “Forever is a funny thing to say,” Veila said.

  “Do… other people come here when they are dreaming?” I wondered.

  “Not much,” Veila replied. “Most humans dream in the Rooms of Mind – in whichever room they find themselves in, not many find the hallway.”

  “So, where are we going?” I asked.

  “You’ll see,” Veila said, she slowed down as she approached a door. I realised there were doors all along the hallway; I just hadn’t seen them before. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, or maybe they hadn’t been there a second ago.

  “Shall we go into one of those rooms?” I asked.

  “They’re not all rooms,” Veila replied. “But sure – pick one”

  I heard a muffled noise from behind a door to my left, which was slightly ajar. I pushed it open to find a large pile of multi-coloured mattresses reaching up into the white ceiling. At the top of the pile, ten metres high was a golden throne, and on that throne sat a very odd figure, small and squat with shoulder-length brown hair.

  “Hello?” I said. “Who are you?”

  “I am special.”

  The voice was deeper than I expected.

  “Special?” I asked.

  “I am special. I must be chosen…”

  The voice sped up as if it was on fast-forward, becoming much higher in pitch.

  “…because I am special.”

  “Is that your name?” I asked, curious about this strange being on a mattress throne.

  “All the names belong to ME!”

  “She’s a splinter,” Veila whispered. “A part that has splintered off from the Whole.”

  “Like a splinter in my foot?” I wondered out loud.

  “Exactly – so she gets stuck, and she’s irritating,” said Veila.

  “Don’t call me that,” the splinter growled.

  “They prefer to be called ‘fragments’,” said Veila.

  “I prefer special!” the fragment said.

  We backed out of the room and continued down the hallway, past doors in various colours. My mind was swimming with questions that I couldn’t quite put into words.

  “Open this one,” Veila instructed.

  “Okay,” I said, wondering if she couldn’t open them herself.

  The door opened to reveal a sunset view. We were up high, looking down on the ocean. The hills around us were bathed in orange light.

  “If you want to come with me – you just have to trust,” Veila said.

  “Trust what?” I asked, realizing that I hardly knew anything about this small glowing creature, and here she was telling me to trust her.

  Do I? I’ve followed her this far, haven’t I?

  “Trust enough that when we fall, we carry on.”

  We had reached the edge of the cliff.

  “We need to fall off the cliff?” I gulped. This seemed pretty extreme.

  “It’s more about trusting than it is about falling.”

  “What does the trust do?”

  “It carries us through to the other side of the Dreamrealm – where things are not so random and confusing, where we are deeper into being.”

  That did sound better than the way things had been so far, but could I really trust her? What if she was dangerous? What if she was evil? I looked at her little shining face. It made no sense in my head, but my gut reaction was to trust her.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But we can’t go now.”

  “Why not?” I felt a bit disappointed – strangely.

  “Because you are too afraid to fall. It only works here if you are not afraid,” she said.

  “I can’t help that, though,” I said.

  It seemed like there was a real purpose to all of this, and if I could only get to the other side, I could get away from the confusion and figure out what was going on… only now, she won’t let me.

  “No, but we can play,” Veila said, she opened her mouth wide and began to sing a little song:

  When the fruit is ripe, it will fall,

  Not through any effort at all

  By being ready to let go.

  At the right time, it knows!

  “Whatever that means,” I muttered to myself.

  “Here,” Veila reached out and grabbed at the air. A rope-swing appeared that had definitely not been there just before.

  “Let’s play!”

  We swung on the rope, around and around until I was dizzy, higher and higher; the butterflies fluttered in my stomach again. I tipped my head back and relaxed, enjoying the upside-down sunset as it swam in and out of focus in front of me.

  Veila looked at me. “You’re ready now,” she said.

  I thought of her song. I don’t need to try... I just need to let go.

  I let go…

  …and fell.

  Instead of terrifying, it was fantastically exhilarating!

  I woke – but instead of waking to my bedroom, I found myself lying on the dark, cold floor in the pitch black. The air was thick and still.

  “Veila?” I called out. There was no response. “Veila?! Where are you?”

  I lay there, terrified, not knowing where I was or what was around me in that heavy darkness.

  Calm down; it’s okay. I told myself. It will all be okay.

  Up above, I saw a tiny light, like a firefly. It got bigger as it moved closer until I recognised…

  “Veila!” I said. “Thank goodness!”

  “It takes me a while to get down,” she explained. “I don’t fall, I float.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Almost there,” she said.

  I stood up and followed her. I could tell from
her glow that we were nearing the faint outline of another door.

  “Open it,” she said.

  I pushed at the door and was blinded by the light behind it.

  “What is this place?” I asked, as my eyes adjusted. I was looking out through the doorframe into a world, unlike any other I had ever seen.

  All around us were bright green hills, speckled with dazzling colours, and up above the sky was… Purple!

  “This is the meadow,” Veila replied. “Welcome to the Dreamrealm.

  “Wow!”

  The air was so still, compared to the strong Wellington winds, but it wasn’t just the lack of wind – there was a deep sense of calm like I’ve never known before – a kind of tranquil peacefulness.

  There was only the slight hint of a breeze on my skin, making shimmery ripples in the vivid green grass that stretched out over the gently rolling hills towards the spiralling purple sky.

  As I stepped through the door, I had the strange sensation that I was expanding, like a balloon being filled with helium. I didn’t realise how heavy my life had been feeling until that moment when it was suddenly light – like I could float all around this peaceful shimmering place and never need to worry about a thing ever again.

  “Is this… is this like a level of the heavens?” I asked Veila. My great-aunt Rosetta used to tell me stories about the atua, the Māori gods, and how some of them lived in the twelve heavens.

  “Could be,” said Veila, “what’s a heaven?”

  “It’s…” my voice trailed off as I got distracted again by the shimmering colours all around us – so intense and brilliant – and so real! – more real than anything I’d ever seen in my life. I looked out across the meadow to see hundreds of pink jellyfish gliding gracefully through the sky; a patch of what looked like multi-coloured flowers took flight, becoming a spectacular cloud of butterflies; bubbles the size of basketballs drifted lazily around, before bursting into stunning sparkles in the air.

  The more I looked, the more details I noticed, or maybe they just changed right in front of my eyes. Even the surface of the luxurious green grass shifted into different patterns as if it was somehow reflecting a delightful kaleidoscope.

  “No way,” I said, trying to take in all the astonishing things. “This is impossible!”

  “What a silly thing to say,” Veila said, hovering next to me. “There is no impossible… only different shades of possible.”

  “But it isn’t real,” I insisted. “It’s just a dream.”

  “Of course it is a dream,” said Veila, “and of course it is real. What is it with you humans – assuming that only the things you see when you’re awake are real?”

  Everything seemed to shift – just as I looked at it, and I had this feeling like anything was possible – even more than that – probable – as if everything I wanted was somehow within reach.

  “It’s so different out here,” I said, looking back to see whatever it was I had just walked out of. The building was made of a series of interconnected domes.

  “The Rooms of Mind?” I wondered out loud.

  “Yes,” Veila responded. “Until now, you were exploring the Rooms of Mind – which is where most people dream.”

  “Why am I here, then?” I asked as I continued to stare at the breath-taking view of the meadow all around me. “If most people just dream in there, why am I outside?”

  “You’re a sensitive, which makes it easier for you to navigate the Dreamrealm. There is much more than you humans usually see – you were going around the usual dream spaces in there,” she gestured to the dome buildings. “They seem to transform to reflect what people project from their heads.”

  “Seem to?”

  “Yes,” Veila said. “They are blank, otherwise. If I go in there by myself, they are mostly just a series of white rooms, with the occasional fragment that has wandered in there to make a nest.”

  “But surely we can’t all be in there – every single dreaming human, all at the same time?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too small!” I said. “We would be squished up against each other with even a small fraction of the population.”

  “First of all, you assume dreaming is not real, and now you assume it follows the same rules as waking!” Veila said, laughing at me.

  I looked around at the horizon at all the colours and patterns, swirling and glowing.

  “Wait, is this place even on earth?” I asked.

  “Not in the way you might think,” Veila said, looking at me, curiously.

  “Then, in what way?”

  “It’s undecided,” Veila said. “It can’t be in any one place at once – it can only be in many places simultaneously… so the answer is always yes and no.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said.

  “There you go with your boring assumptions again!” said Veila, flipping around in the air.

  I looked down to see I had no feet or legs again. I closed my eyes and imagined them into being, then I walked, barefoot on the soft grass. It felt amazing under my toes; a warm feeling spread all the way through me.

  I sighed.

  “It’s so beautiful here!” I said, enjoying the light breeze on my skin, bringing with it the scent of fresh spring blossoms. “And it’s so much more peaceful than back there,” I gestured to the domed building.

  “I feel like running!” I said, and began to sprint down a hill. I ran until I collapsed on the soft, squishy grass, looking up at the swirl of purple sky, brightened by the golden sun.

  I was wonderfully calm and happy, so unlike how I usually felt at home or school. My mind was clear – my thoughts were sharp and bright instead of muddled and fuzzy – whatever this feeling is, it’s the exact opposite of anxiety!

  “I wish I could stay here,” I said to Veila.

  “You can come back,” Veila said, coming to rest beside me, on the grass. “We might need you to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you, sensitives are very rare. They have certain abilities that most humans don’t have. They can help with the dreamweaving.”

  “I don’t understand what that is.”

  “All in good time,” said Veila again.

  “I just wish I had proof that this was real!” I said.

  I saw a sparkle of light in the corner of my eye and looked out to see a glimmer of gold on the other side of the meadow.

  Just then, my foot struck against something hard; I looked down to see a boulder that I was sure wasn’t there a moment before; pain shot through my ankle, and I lost my balance.

  I’m falling!

  Just as I was about to hit the ground, I woke with a jolt in my bed, my heart pounding.

  I reached for my ankle.

  “Ouch!” I touched the place where, only moments before, it had hit the boulder.

  I hurt myself in the Dreamrealm, and it carried through to my waking life.

  There was no way I could have gotten a sore ankle from anything in my soft bed. I had asked for proof, and I had received it.

  The Dreamrealm is real!

  Chapter Eight

  The feeling of magic stayed with me the next morning, even though my foot was still sore from when I had fallen in the dream, and I was walking with a little limp. I was also relieved that I had an excuse to avoid basketball games for a while. I told Mum that I must have fallen over and hurt it during school sports, and she wrote me a note.

  As I walked out of the school gates after class, I was too busy thinking about the Dreamrealm and how it has to be real. I didn’t even realise that someone was waiting for me.

  “Awa,” said a man’s voice. I almost jumped out of my skin.

  “Dad!” It wasn’t that I didn’t know my own dad’s voice; it was just that I wasn’t expecting him. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “It’s good to see you too, honey,” Dad said, shaking his head. His dark, straight hair shined in the sunlight. I had always wished I looked more like
Dad with his naturally straight hair – his Chinese heritage didn’t quite carry that gene through to me.

  “You need a haircut,” I said, reaching up to ruffle his hair.

  “You can talk,” Dad said, smiling and messing my hair up too.

  “It is good to see you!” I said, giving him a big hug. “I just… I didn’t know you would be here. It’s been…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Dad said, looking down. “It’s been too long, and I’m sorry. You know, work has been crazy, and the move was hard.”

  “Dad, you moved months ago,” I said. I didn’t want to let him off the hook – not with such a lame excuse.

  He looked at me. “I’m sorry Awa,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on, but I’m here now. How about we go out for pizza like I promised?”

  “I can’t say no to pizza,” I said.

  It didn’t take long for me to forgive Dad for not making more of an effort to spend time with me. It was so good to see him. He told me about work being crazy busy, and about some new gadgets he had ordered online and how he hadn’t even unpacked at his new place yet because things had been so hectic. I could imagine Dad’s apartment full of boxes; Mum always said he was a bit of a hoarder, like me.

  We walked the couple of blocks to Toni’s Pizza, our favourite place. Once we had ordered a large pepperoni pizza with extra chili, we sat down at a booth and opened our sodas.

  “Listen, Awa,” Dad said. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  A whole load of freaky thoughts crashed through my mind: Dad is moving overseas, he’s met someone new, and they are getting married; I don’t even know my new step-mother, and she’s going to be a nightmare; he’s having another child; he’s sick, sick with cancer and dying; Mum’s sick; we are all sick…

  Obviously, my heart was racing by this point; everything was going grey.

  “Don’t look so worried,” Dad said.

  “Are you going to survive?” I asked.

  “What?! Nothing’s wrong with me,” Dad said.