Fairy Dreams

by Gwyneth Rees

  ‘I’m really meant to be visiting my grandma,’ Evie said quickly. ‘I’d better go back now.’ She said goodbye and left Harry with his daughter.

  She thought over what he had said. If he was right, she would need to wait until she went to bed tonight to find a fairy postbox. But she still couldn’t see how anyone could find a postbox while they were sleeping . . .

  It took Evie a long time to fall asleep that night because she was worrying so much about what would happen when she did. Harry had seemed so sure that she would somehow be able to post her letter in her sleep, but she still couldn’t imagine how.

  She went to bed with the letter in her hand anyway, and as she closed her eyes and began to drop off she found herself imagining what a fairy postbox might look like in the place where dream fairies lived. Perhaps all the postboxes would be floating on clouds. Or perhaps they would be decorated with stars from the Night Sky, like the ones in Star’s hair . . .

  Evie was soon dreaming about being in fairyland. In her dream she had a letter in her hand and was stepping on to a shimmery white pathway. She carefully moved her feet along the moonbeam path until she saw a postbox in the distance that was the same size and shape as the one on the corner of her road at home. It wasn’t the same colour, though. Instead of being red, it was a brilliant white, decorated all over with sparkling stars, and it was sitting on what looked like a puff of cloud. She saw that a little footbridge led from the end of the moonbeam path on to the cloud and, as she crossed the bridge, the rectangular mouth of the postbox changed into a big, red-lipped, smiling mouth that actually spoke to her. ‘Is that letter for me?’

  Evie jumped. ‘Y-yes,’ she stammered. ‘Well, it’s for Queen Celeste really.’

  ‘There’s no stamp on the envelope,’ the postbox pointed out.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Evie stared helplessly at the letter in her hand. It hadn’t occurred to her that she might need something as ordinary as a stamp to post a letter to the fairy queen.

  ‘All letters to dream fairies have to be stamped with a star or I can’t accept them. But don’t worry. You can use one of my stars. Make sure it’s stuck down firmly, though. I don’t want it falling off inside my belly. Stars can be very tickly when they get stuck inside your belly.’

  Evie looked nervously at the stars that were decorating the postbox. They were so beautiful that she somehow didn’t like to touch them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the postbox reassured her. ‘They’re quite used to being borrowed to put on letters.’

  Evie carefully peeled off a small shiny star and placed it in the top right-hand corner of her envelope. She gave the letter a shake to make sure the star was firmly in place. ‘Shall I put it inside your mouth then?’ she asked the postbox shyly.

  ‘That’s right. Then I’ll take it to Queen Celeste.’

  As Evie crossed the bridge back on to the moonbeam path she saw the postbox start to float away on its cloud.

  She was starting to feel very sleepy. The path she was walking on seemed to be going on forever. Maybe if she just lay down where she was for a few minutes and rested . . .

  When Evie woke up the next morning, she immediately remembered her dream about the talking postbox. If only you really could post a letter in your dreams, she thought.

  She got up and it was only after she had washed and got dressed that she thought of her letter to Queen Celeste. She went back and looked for it inside the bed, under the bed, down the side of the bed and everywhere else in Grandma’s bedroom that she could think of, but she couldn’t find it anywhere.

  She sat down at Grandma’s dressing table, frowning. Could it be that she really had posted Queen Celeste’s letter in her dream last night after all? Her common sense told her that was impossible. But what was her fairy sense telling her?

  Evie spent the whole of that day wondering if Queen Celeste had received her letter. She visited Grandma as usual in the afternoon and she tried to visit Harry too, but he wasn’t in his room. The nurse told her he was having a bath.

  She went to bed early and, in the middle of the night, she was woken by familiar fairy voices. She opened her eyes to see Star and Moonbeam sitting on her pillow.

  ‘If you sprinkle fairy dust on her top half, I’ll do the bottom,’ Moonbeam was saying. ‘That should work, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘So long as we don’t leave a gap in between.’

  Evie sat up quickly. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, you’re awake! We’re just talking about how we’re going to shrink you.’

  ‘Has Queen Celeste said I can come then?’ Evie asked, excitedly.

  ‘Yes. She got your letter and she says you obviously have plenty of fairy sense as well as very neat handwriting. So you can come with us to Dreamland. We can take you now if you want.’

  ‘Now? ’

  ‘Yes . . . well . . . after we’ve had one of your chocolates. Shrinking spells can be quite hard work. We’ll need something to keep our strength up.’

  Evie felt her heart beating faster as she got up to fetch the chocolates for them. ‘What happens? Do I just lie in bed and let you shrink me, or what?’

  ‘Yes, but you’d better get dressed first. You don’t want to find yourself in Queen Celeste’s palace in your pyjamas, do you?’

  Evie put on the only smart summer dress she had brought with her to Grandma’s, while Star and Moonbeam shared a violet cream. ‘I’ve got a sparkly necklace too. Shall I wear that?’ she asked as she sat down at the dressing table to brush her hair.

  ‘Oh, yes! Queen Celeste loves sparkly things!’

  ‘Will it hurt, getting shrunk?’ Evie asked, feeling a bit nervous as she got back under the covers.

  ‘Oh, no. Not if we do it right.’ Star started to sprinkle something that looked like gold-coloured dust over Evie’s head as Moonbeam flew down under the covers to sprinkle more dust over her bottom half.

  ‘What if you don’t do it right?’ Evie asked anxiously. But she didn’t get an answer – which was probably just as well. She was starting to feel very strange indeed.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Star ordered, ‘and don’t open them until we tell you.’

  Evie did as she was told. She felt her skin tingling all over and the sheets slowly moving over her in a way that was quite ticklish.

  ‘OK, you can open your eyes now!’ Star called out.

  Evie found that she was lying on the floor of a vast white tent. She stood up and discovered that the ground was soft and springy. The tent was lit only by the two lanterns Star and Moonbeam were holding above their heads. Her two fairy friends were the same size as her now – as if they had changed from fairies into little girls with wings. Then Evie remembered that it wasn’t Star and Moonbeam who had changed size – it was her. The springy ground she was standing on was really Grandma’s mattress, and the sides of the tent were the sheets.

  ‘You’d make a very pretty fairy,’ Star said, peering at her in the lantern light, ‘though you look a bit funny without any wings.’

  ‘Follow us!’ Moonbeam ordered, starting to fly down what looked like a long dark tunnel but was actually still the inside of Evie’s bed.

  The fairies’ shimmery wings created a strong breeze as they flew. Evie tried to keep up with them but found that she kept losing her balance as she struggled to walk on the springy ground.

  ‘It’s much easier if you fly,’ Star said, stopping to wait for her. ‘You can fly with us if you like.’ The fairies each took one of Evie’s hands and they lifted her up into the air.

  Now that Evie was able to fly through the tunnel with them, the fairies seemed to be going faster and faster.

  ‘Shouldn’t we have got to the bottom of the bed by now?’ Evie asked.

  ‘Magic beds don’t have bottoms,’ Star explained. ‘Well, not on the inside anyway. They lead all the way to Dreamland.’

  ‘We’re going to switch to top speed now,’ Moonbeam told her. ‘Otherwise it’ll take all night to get there.’


  For the rest of the journey Evie felt like she was hurtling through a black hole at lightning speed and she wondered if this was how it felt to be an astronaut speeding away from Earth in a rocket.

  Suddenly the tunnel came to an end and they shot out into a huge open space.

  ‘Where are we?’ Evie gasped, as she took in the black sky lit up by stars, and the moon, huge and white, above them.

  ‘In Dreamland,’ Star replied. ‘This is where we live.’

  Evie stared around her in awe. There was nothing under her feet, so it was just as well that Star and Moonbeam were holding on to her. Floating in the sky around them were lots of clouds in the shape of houses, with doors and windows and little floating gardens attached. The cloud houses were clearly moving about, but miraculously they weren’t bumping into each other. There didn’t seem to be any continuous ground here at all. A big grassy area with flowers and trees was floating in the middle of the houses, and Moonbeam told her that that was the park.

  ‘We have a massive party there whenever there’s a Blue Moon,’ Moonbeam said. ‘We all have to wear blue and the Moon is our guest of honour. It’s great fun! We even have blue fireworks!’

  ‘What’s a Blue Moon?’ Evie asked.

  ‘Oh, it’s just what happens when the Moon is feeling sad. If you looked up at him you’d see he was blue instead of his normal colour. It never lasts long because we’re always here to throw him a party to cheer him up.’

  ‘Look! That’s the dream garden over there,’ Star said, pointing to another garden, which was surrounded by a wall covered in glowing white flowers. It had a little house attached to it and pink smoke was coming from the chimney.

  ‘Who lives there?’ Evie asked.

  ‘That’s the dreamkeeper’s cottage,’ Star explained. ‘We all take it in turns to stay there and look after the garden. It’s quite a difficult job because the garden changes all the time depending on what dreams are going on inside.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Queen Celeste will explain everything. We have to follow the star path through the Night Sky to get to her palace. There’s the path over there. Come on.’ Moonbeam folded in her wings to land on the shiny path, which seemed to be made from large stars lying flat like paving stones. Evie watched Moonbeam tread lightly on each star as she followed behind her. Star was following Evie, skipping along and humming a tune. The path seemed to be leading them up through the Night Sky, twisting its way in between cloud houses and other bits of the fairy town – if you could call it that – until they came to a huge white cloud that completely blocked their path.

  ‘Queen Celeste’s palace is through here,’ Moonbeam said, stepping inside the cloud and disappearing.

  ‘Go on,’ said Star, giving Evie a little shove from behind.

  Evie stepped into the cloud too – and gasped as she emerged out the other side. Ahead of her was a beautiful palace. Its walls were pearl coloured and it had four round turrets and numerous brightly lit, star-shaped windows. The massive silver front door was set in an archway of twinkling stars, and the whole building seemed to be shimmering in the moonlight. It was sitting on a big pink cloud, around the edge of which was a pink hedge that seemed to be completely covered in the same brilliant white flowers that Evie had seen decorating the walls of the dream garden.

  ‘Let’s put a moonflower in your hair!’ Star suggested. She went and picked a white flower from the hedge and gave it to Evie.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Evie said, turning it round in her hand. The flower seemed to be glowing just like the moon.

  ‘I know. The flower fairies keep begging us for cuttings, but there’s no point in them trying to grow them. Moonflowers will only grow in Dreamland.’

  ‘Hurry up,’ Moonbeam called to them impatiently. She was already banging the big star-shaped knocker on the front door of the palace. The silver door swung open just as Star and Evie caught up with her.

  Evie stepped nervously inside to find herself in a large hallway, with walls that were also glowing. She looked up and couldn’t see a roof. All that was visible was the Night Sky, filled with twinkling stars. A pretty fairy in a yellow dress was sitting on a stool in the corner playing a golden harp. As Evie listened to the music she started to feel more relaxed.

  ‘Queen Celeste likes to have fairy music playing in her palace all the time,’ Star explained. ‘You’re lucky this isn’t a fairy lullaby. You’d fall asleep straight away if it was. Fairy lullabies work especially fast on humans.’

  Several fairies in different pastel-coloured dresses were appearing now from various doorways off the hall. Moonbeam quickly explained who Evie was and that she had come to see the fairy queen.

  ‘You’d better show her into the Meeting Room then,’ said a fairy in a turquoise dress. ‘I’ll go and tell Queen Celeste she’s here.’

  Moonbeam led Evie across the hall and into a very grand-looking room. There was a huge ornamental fireplace at one end with a vase of moonflowers sitting in the hearth. A long table that seemed to be made entirely from a beam of light stretched across the length of the room. It felt as solid as a beam of wood when Evie touched it, though, and so did the matching benches on either side of the table.

  ‘Wait here. Queen Celeste won’t be long,’ Moonbeam said.

  As soon as she was alone in the room, and Moonbeam had closed the door so she could no longer hear the harp music, Evie started to feel nervous again. What if Queen Celeste wasn’t as easy to talk to as Star and Moonbeam? And what if she got cross when she heard why Evie had come?

  Suddenly a door at the back of the room opened and a tall, elegant fairy in a long floaty dress entered. She had silky dark hair that fell to her waist and cornflower-blue eyes. Her lips were shimmery pink. She was wearing a crown of real stars, and her dress seemed to change colour as she walked. First it was a plain light blue and then the blue was covered in white clouds. Then the dress became a much darker blue and the clouds became grey with sun rays shining out from behind them. Finally the dress changed to a blue-black colour and started to sparkle with tiny stars.

  Evie was so busy staring at the fairy queen’s dress that she completely forgot to curtsy. Queen Celeste didn’t seem to mind, though.

  ‘You must be Evie,’ she said, smiling.

  Evie nodded, still unable to take her eyes from the dress.

  ‘My gown is made from a length of real sky. That’s why it’s so changeable. Do you like it?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Evie looked up at Queen Celeste’s face. ‘Th-thank you for letting me come,’ she stammered shyly.

  ‘Are you enjoying your visit?’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s wonderful!’

  ‘Good. Now . . .’ She sat down and gestured for Evie to do the same. ‘What was it that you wanted to ask me?’

  Evie swallowed. Now that she had the fairy queen right in front of her she was almost too afraid to ask. ‘I know . . . I know Star and Moonbeam said you don’t normally let grown-ups come to fairyland . . .’ she began hesitantly, ‘but I’d really like it if my grandma could come. She believes in fairies and I’m sure she’s got lots of fairy sense. She’s very sick, you see. She’s in hospital and we don’t think . . . we don’t know . . . if she’ll ever be well enough to come home again.’

  ‘Star and Moonbeam have already told me a little about your grandmother,’ Queen Celeste replied. ‘You do understand that we won’t be able to make her better, even if she comes here, don’t you?’

  Evie nodded.

  ‘We can’t use our shrinking spell on her because her body isn’t well enough for that. But we could bring her here in her dreams instead – we do that sometimes for children whose bodies are very sick.’

  ‘In her dreams?’ Evie didn’t understand.

  ‘You see, your grandma’s body isn’t much use to her any more so she might as well leave it behind. That way we can bring her to our magic dream garden while she sleeps – and her poor old body can just stay where it is in bed.’<
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  Evie didn’t really understand how that could happen, but she didn’t like to question Queen Celeste any further. ‘Star and Moonbeam showed me the dream garden on the way here and I was wondering what was inside.’

  ‘That depends on the dreamer,’ Queen Celeste told her. ‘The dreamer can choose anything or anyone they want to be inside.’

  ‘Anyone?’

  Queen Celeste nodded. ‘But any person who enters the dream garden has to believe in fairies and be sleeping in a magic bed.’ She paused. ‘Which brings us to our problem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your grandmother has to be sleeping in a magic bed herself before we can bring her here – and her hospital bed isn’t magical.’

  ‘But she isn’t well enough to leave hospital!’

  ‘I know. But it might be possible to transfer the magic from her old bed to her hospital bed.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘I can’t. But you might be able to.’

  ‘Me? ’

  ‘Yes.’ Queen Celeste reached into a pocket in her dress and pulled out a shiny white envelope, which she handed to Evie. ‘This will explain how. Read it when you get home.’

  Suddenly the door to the hallway opened and harp music could be heard again, only this time the tune was different. Evie started to feel incredibly sleepy.

  ‘The fairy lullaby will take you home now,’ Queen Celeste told her. And before Evie could reply, she had fallen asleep.

  Evie woke up the next morning in Grandma’s bed to find that she was holding a tiny white envelope in her hand. Nothing was written on the outside, but Evie knew it was the one the fairy queen had given her. The letter had seemed a normal size last night, but now that Evie was back to her normal size it was so tiny she wasn’t sure she’d be able to read it.

  Evie carefully opened the envelope and found a folded piece of very delicate paper inside. It was folded over so many times that when she opened it up completely it was the same size as a human letter.