Dreambender

by Kidd, Ronald;

  The Meadow was my home. I had grown up there. All of us had. It was our bedroom, clubhouse, and playground rolled into one. The adults lived in cottages as singles or couples, while the five of us, like all young dreambenders, had been raised in the children’s house, a big dormitory at the center of the Meadow.

  Carlton Raines felt that since the future of dreambending—the future of the earth—was in the children’s hands, their upbringing shouldn’t be left to individual families. We knew who our parents were but had no special connection to them; we were children of the Meadow.

  We were raised by caregivers who watched over us and taught us about the world and our special place in it. They took us around the Meadow, showing us what it was like and explaining why we lived there. They told us about the one place in the Meadow where we couldn’t go—the dreaming field, where the dreambenders worked. We would go there someday, when we began bending dreams.

  One place we could go when we were younger was Looking Hill, at the edge of the Meadow. Leif and I would climb to the top and peer out over the woods, trying to imagine what lay beyond them. Of course, there was nothing. The woods, called the land of Between, were the edge of our known world. The City was out there someplace, but we didn’t know where.

  The caregivers had changed as we grew older until, at age thirteen, groups of five were assigned a trainer. Ours was Dorothy.

  “In ancient times,” she went on, “people used to believe in a place called heaven where life was perfect and everyone was happy. I don’t know if such a place exists, but if it does, it’s probably a lot like the Meadow.”

  Behind me, Hannah Chee giggled. “The Meadow is boring,” she said.

  Dorothy smiled. “It’s a simple place. And yes, maybe it is a little boring.”

  Hannah’s brother, Phillip, shook his head. “I love the Meadow. It’s quiet, so you can hear the dreams.”

  I said, “I love it too, but why can’t we go to the City?”

  No one answered. Crickets chirped. Somewhere in the trees, an owl hooted.

  Finally Leif spoke up. “I’d like to.”

  “I’ve seen it in dreams,” said Gracie. “It’s crowded and noisy.”

  Dorothy smiled. “I wondered how long it would take you to ask. Sooner or later, all dreambenders talk about it. We visit the City in dreams; why can’t we go there in person?”

  “Well,” I said, “why can’t we?”

  “Because the dreamers live there, and we’re not allowed to have any contact with them.”

  “Have you been to the City?” I asked her. Since we weren’t allowed to go, I had no idea how to get there.

  Dorothy hesitated, then said, “I went there once on a special assignment. When I got back, I was never so happy to see grass.”

  “Wasn’t it exciting?” I asked.

  She thought for a moment. “It was like having someone shout at me all day, every day. It never stopped. The buildings leaned over me. They blocked the sky. I could barely breathe. Believe me, the Meadow is better. Dreams are better.”

  “What was your special assignment?” Leif asked.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” said Dorothy.

  I knew that Leif, being Leif, would worry about it. I had a feeling I’d hear about it again.

  Phillip glanced at the rest of us, then took a deep breath. “Look, history is fine. Stories are good. But all of us know why we’re here. We want to bend dreams.”

  Dorothy studied the group, watching our faces, judging our mood. Then she turned to me.

  “All right then. Jeremy, you go first.”

  “Me?” I asked. “What do I do?”

  “Prepare yourself,” said Dorothy. “Close your eyes. Quiet your mind. Imagine a lake. A wind blows over it, then a breeze, then nothing at all. The lake is still. The water is clear.”

  I tried it.

  “My lake is more like a puddle,” I said. The others laughed.

  “Keep trying,” said Dorothy.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  I tried again. “The puddle is bigger. But it’s muddy.”

  “You’re frightened,” she said.

  “Maybe I like dirt.”

  “Focus,” said Dorothy.

  I tried to concentrate. “There’s wind.”

  “Good.”

  “I can’t get it to stop,” I said.

  “Maybe the wind is your questions,” said Dorothy.

  “Questions?” I asked. “What questions?” The others laughed again.

  Dorothy said, “Jeremy—”

  I looked up. The others watched, grinning.

  “This is serious,” said Dorothy.

  “Sorry.”

  “Do you want to try it?”

  “I think so.”

  Dreambending might be creepy. It made me nervous. But I had to admit, I was curious. I had heard about it my entire life and wanted to find out what it was like.

  So I closed my eyes again. I tried to relax. The puddle became a pond, then a lake. The wind may not have stopped, but it slowed down.

  “Are you ready?” asked Dorothy.

  I took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “Now open your eyes,” she said. “We’re going to the dreaming field.”

  3

  Jeremy

  They say there are a few special places in the world where energy surges and ideas flow, where colors are more intense, where the air is thick and your senses come alive. The dreaming field was one of those places, or so I’d been told. I’d never been allowed there. None of us had. It was where the dreambenders worked.

  Dorothy led us there now. We rounded a group of trees, and there it was, stretched out in front of us. We could easily see the other side and could have walked across in just a few minutes. The only building was a large canopy at the back of the field where dreambenders worked in bad weather.

  There was dark-green grass, and flowers were planted in neat groups. Ringing the field was a stand of evergreens. Above it, stars blazed across the sky.

  Shimmering under the stars, glowing like ghosts, were the dreambenders. They were scattered over the field—standing, sitting, reclining. Sometimes I forgot how small the group was. There were just a few hundred of us, compared with many thousands in the City. Dreambenders did their work in shifts, rotating through the dreaming field to give each other time off. That night, there were about sixty.

  Most of the dreambenders had jobs to keep the Meadow going. In the early evening, before night came, they did these jobs in and around the little cluster of buildings at the eating hall. Planters harvested a modest field of crops. Herders ran a dairy farm, producing milk and cheese. Bakers made bread and pretzels, my favorite. Weavers created clothes. Whatever their jobs, dreams were their calling and their passion. Compared with dreams, everything else seemed pale and inconsequential.

  Phillip gazed at the dreambenders and murmured, “They’re amazing.”

  “They look pretty normal to me,” said Hannah.

  Thank goodness for Hannah. She gave Dorothy someone else to glare at.

  “Of course they do,” said Dorothy. “You’ve known them your whole lives. But they’re special, and you’ll be too. Each one of them contains a world. It’s invisible to you, but they can see it. They’re in it right now, observing and adjusting.”

  Soon I would be one of them. The thought frightened me. What if I couldn’t do the job? What if I messed things up and ruined someone’s life? Worse, what if I could do the job? What gave me the right to change a dream? How would I know I was helping?

  Dorothy led us to an empty place on one side of the field. She gestured for the group to sit in a circle with me in the middle, then sat down beside me.

  “Can someone else go first?” I asked. “What about Leif?”

&
nbsp; “Shut up,” he said.

  Dorothy smiled. She said in a low, soothing voice, “Close your eyes, Jeremy. We’ll start with an easy one. I’m scanning the dreamscape, looking for a dream that’s simple and clear.”

  Trying to relax, I scanned it too. So did my friends in the circle. I could feel them with me in the dreamscape. You might say I could see them, though my eyes were closed. We could sense one another’s presence.

  All of us had roamed the dreamscape since we were little. We did it without thinking, the way other children hummed or clapped or skipped. Dreams flashed by like cards in a deck.

  “Ah, yes, here’s one,” said Dorothy. “The streets of the City are speeding by. Do you see it?”

  I looked for motion and saw a blur of people and buildings. “I think so.”

  “Remember, this is from the dreamer’s point of view. We’re watching through his eyes.”

  The dreamer was a young man. I couldn’t see him, but I knew. We always did. I’m not sure how.

  “He’s excited,” I said.

  It was something all of us had learned from a lifetime of watching dreams. You didn’t just get the sights and sounds. You got the feelings.

  I said, “How is he going so fast? No one can run like that.”

  “Good, Jeremy. This is where your questions will help. Can you figure it out? Look down. What do you see?”

  “A metal bar,” I said. “His hands are gripping the ends. The bar is attached to something underneath, something that’s spinning around.” I strained to see it. “It’s a wheel! He’s on a machine.”

  “Excellent. It’s called a bicycle.”

  “Machines are illegal,” I said.

  “It’s a dream,” said Dorothy. “But the dreamer knows what a bicycle looks like and how it feels. Maybe he rode one when he was awake. Maybe he’s planning to ride one again. We don’t know. But it can’t be good. We need to discourage him, so we bend the dream. Are you ready?”

  I said, “Riding the bicycle looks like fun.”

  The words popped into my head and out of my mouth. They do that sometimes. When it happens, my friends shake their heads. Think before you talk, they say. I’d like to. I really would.

  To my surprise, Dorothy chuckled. “Yes, it does. But machines hurt the group. They’re against the rules. So we bend.”

  “Will this stop him from riding?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “We’re not changing his actions—only he can do that. We’re adjusting his dreams. That’s all. We’ll take a few of his impulses and snip them out, tie them off. Maybe the next time he sees a bicycle, if he can find one, he’ll look at it and wonder why he ever thought it would be fun.”

  “Isn’t that mind control?” I asked.

  “It’s more subtle than that. We adjust people’s desires and goals, not their thoughts. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Over the years, little by little, through the work of the dreambenders, the world changes. It shifts gradually, like the colors in a sunset. Red becomes pink. Orange turns to rust, blue to indigo. Violence decreases. Order improves. The ecosystem grows stronger. Before you know it, the sun sets and trouble fades away.”

  “I like the sun,” said Hannah.

  My eyes opened. I stared at Hannah; we all did. Dreambenders love the night. That’s when people in the City sleep, but we’re wide-awake. In sunlight, you think you can see everything in perfect detail, but it’s an illusion. There’s a whole world that’s invisible until darkness falls and the stars come out, a world of shadows and wishes, a world of want, of need. People think they live in the sunlight, but darkness is where they truly come alive. At least, that’s what we believe.

  But Hannah liked the sun.

  “It’s all right,” said Dorothy. She didn’t seem concerned, but there was a look in her eyes as she watched Hannah. Trainers usually didn’t take notes during sessions, but we knew they were watching us and evaluating. Hannah’s comment had registered. Perhaps later Dorothy would write a note in a file.

  Dorothy turned to me. “All right, Jeremy. Close your eyes again. Find the dream.”

  I flipped back to it as if I’d placed a bookmark. The others looked on. We saw the dreamer race through the streets of the City. People gaped, then leaped out of the way.

  I said, “How do I bend it?”

  It was what all of us wanted to know. Like the people Raines had discovered so many years before—our ancestors—we could see dreams but had never changed them. From an early age we had been told that changing dreams was forbidden to all but the dreambenders. Secretly, though, all of us had tried it. What kid wouldn’t? But none of us had succeeded.

  “Remember a few minutes ago?” said Dorothy. “The lake? The breeze? Imagine them again.”

  “I’ll lose the dream.”

  “That’s the surprising thing,” she said. “The dream stays. In fact, if you do it right, the dream slows down. You can pause it, examine it, adjust it. But first you have to slow yourself down. That’s what Carlton Raines discovered one day when he was exploring dreams. He had stumbled on an ancient religion called Booda, involving stillness and concentration, and that day he decided to try it while watching dreams. It turned out that the two practices fit together perfectly, as if they were made for each other, as we believe they were.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Picture the lake. You’ll find out.”

  I tried it.

  “I can’t,” I said. “The dream is in the way. It’s distracting me.”

  “Now you know why children can’t do this,” said Dorothy. “It’s counterintuitive. You want to rush toward the dream and embrace it. But to bend a dream, you do exactly the opposite. Sit back. Be still. Focus.”

  I tried again. “I can see the lake. It’s deeper than before. The water’s clear.”

  “Good, Jeremy. Hold that image in your mind. Now, look up.”

  Buildings sped by. People stared. Beneath me, the wheels of the bicycle whirred.

  “I see the dream,” I said.

  “Slow it down.”

  “How?”

  “With your mind,” she said.

  I’m not sure how to describe what happened next. I placed my mind over the dream, the way a fisherman might throw a net. I pulled it close. As I did, the bicycle slowed. The buildings no longer flashed by in a blur. They floated with every detail clear, more slowly with each moment. Finally they stopped. I heard myself breathing.

  “Now, reach out,” said Dorothy. “Touch it.”

  I did. To my surprise, I didn’t feel the wheels or metal bar. I felt strands, cords, threads, woven together like one of the ancient, faded tapestries in the Memory Museum.

  I said, “It’s like cloth or a rug. The surface is rough. There are patterns.”

  “Excellent. Now, find the strand where the bicycle is. See it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pull it,” she said.

  “You mean—”

  “Give it a yank. Don’t be shy.”

  “What if he stops dreaming?” I asked.

  “He won’t,” she said.

  I located the bicycle strand, feeling it with my fingers. I tugged, and it came loose. I held it in my hands like a rope.

  Dorothy said, “You’re doing wonderfully. Now for the most important part. Tie off the strand.”

  “Huh?”

  “Take the strand and tie it in a knot.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “It’s a dream, not a pair of shoelaces.”

  “We’re working at a deep, symbolic level,” she said. “The lake, the dirt, the wind—those aren’t real. Neither are the patterns or strands. We don’t know much about the mind, Jeremy. We observe it. We use it. We’re grateful for it. But we don’t pretend to understand. Carlton Raines stumbled onto the technique you’re try
ing.”

  “If I tie off the strand, will the dream go away?” I asked.

  “The bicycle will.”

  “That’s sad. Riding it was fun.”

  “It was dangerous.”

  I sighed. In the silence, my breath sounded like the wind. I took the strand and looped it around itself, forming a knot and pulling it tight.

  “Congratulations,” said Dorothy. “You’ve bent your first dream.”

  There was a distant noise, and I realized it was applause. Opening my eyes, I looked around the group. They were smiling and clapping. They had seen me working in the dreamscape, and now they were watching me in a new way. I was someone different and apart, someone unknown.

  “That’s all for today,” said Dorothy. As the others drifted off, she touched my shoulder.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I feel bad about the dream,” I told her. “Maybe it was dangerous, but it didn’t seem harmful. It was fun! Now he’ll never see it again.”

  “That’s right,” she said, “but you will.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  She gazed at me with a strange look on her face. “Before we bend dreams, we’re a part of them. We gain experience that the dreamers are denied. We like to think that the experience helps us, that it makes us wiser and better able to guide others. But no one really knows. The dreams live on in our minds, unbent, with all their danger and beauty. The dreamers don’t have them, but we do. It’s the dirty little secret of dreambending.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  She said it almost defiantly. Maybe Dorothy was more than just a lady with her hair in a bun.

  “You shouldn’t have picked me first,” I said. “I ask too many questions.”

  She said, “I chose you on purpose. You have the seeds of greatness, Jeremy. All of us sense it. You’re bright. You’re quick. Yes, your questions can get you in trouble, but they can also help you. They could help all of us. It’s been years since Carlton Raines started dreambending. Maybe it’s time for some new ideas.”