The world didn’t remain silent for long. You remember, of course, that sound did not take long to follow. People invent things at a furious pace. And the first thing to suffer from sound was, without a doubt, the human voice. It must have been the Dreamer, then, that invented sound.

Reader, you see how everything is falling into place? All we have to do is forget, and the past becomes unmistakably clear. Surely the Dreamer was so sad to have lost his world of dreams, he might easily have broken the world’s silence with his own tears. The water fell from his eyes. He cried so loudly that his voice circled the earth and returned back to him.

The Dreamer’s own voice answered him and, strangely, it sounded just like a reply. In that faraway voice the Dreamer found his first friend. He had invented a companion to cry with him. He probably gave her a beautiful name, too – like Echo.

She wouldn’t have been perfect though. At first Echo was only a sound in his ears, only a voice in his heart. She was a pure echo – she repeated all his sad words. But the Dreamer couldn’t see her voice. He couldn’t touch it, as he would have liked. Her voice probably had a beautiful tone – hollow, but full of song. I think Echo must have sounded like a lullaby.

And maybe soon after the sound had surfaced, Echo’s image did as well. She would have appeared to the Dreamer as would a dream. He found her in a pond of his own tears. Echo was the reflection that had strained through his sadness. She was beautiful. She repeated his words; she mimed her actions. Echo was lovely, like a dream.

Echo must have delighted the Dreamer. He might have thought for a moment that he had been given back to dreaming, that Echo was a wish come true. Perhaps, Reader, she was – I can’t say. But still the situation remained imperfect. Echo remained without a body. He could not reach her. Each time he touched the pool, she wavered and rippled. Then she broke, just as his dreams.

Touching that pool must have been terrible. When he saw the water rippling the image away, the Dreamer must have realized that his world of dreams was really gone.

Sometimes when the Doctor wakes me up, I feel the same way. She tells me she is anxious when I begin sleeping for long periods of time. But she doesn’t realize how much it hurts to wake up, and how uneasy I often feel with my eyes open. It seems that one of us has always to be afraid.

Oh! this story starts off sadly, doesn’t it? But that’s quite all right. Luckily, a world that starts off sadly can only get happier.