The world was once a much easier place. Reader, I’m sure you remember this, too. Before, you could share your stories and ideas with a smile. Smiles used to mean something so beautiful. But this isn’t exactly true anymore. Today people smile at all the wrong times. They smile when they’re nervous, they smile when they don’t want to speak. Some people can even smile when they lie – but how they do this I have no idea.

When I smile at the Doctor and try to tell her a forgetting, she looks down quickly and scribbles furiously on a chart. She doesn’t seem to find any joy in the stories I tell her, even though I tell her all these things with a smile. The Doctor doesn’t want to hear stories that are told out of order, especially if the happy part is not at the end.

The Dreamer, too, used to smile because he was happy in his dreams. And his happiness made him want to share. After all, dreams are made of feelings and, like love, it multiplies itself by sharing. The more it gives of itself, the more it seems to have. That’s why I like to share my dreams with you, Reader, instead of with the Doctor. I can feel them getting bigger, and even a little more real. In some way, I feel they must be your dreams, too.

And so dreams must have expanded beyond the Dreamer himself. Its area was larger than a world, or a million worlds. Reader, do you think that could have been the problem? His dreams became so large that it frightened someone, just like my dreams frighten the Doctor. I suppose that somewhere there is someone that guards all of our dreams. There must be a Dreamkeeper that keeps one person’s dreams from confusing another’s.

Maybe it was the Dreamkeeper that was frightened by the Dreamer’s expanding world. He decided to stop the Dreamer. The Dreamkeeper must have feared that dreams would encompass the heavens. He didn’t want that to happen. Yes, certainly it was the Dreamkeeper. Really, the most astonishing people are those who cannot let things be – or be gone.

Although the Dreamer told his story to Echo, he couldn’t have known at all of the Dreamkeeper’s plot starting against him. Of course the Dreamer knew nothing outside the world of dreams. But we can imagine what he told her. Reader, let’s take a moment to remember how things were before. Remember also that, in sympathy, these are the words that Echo repeated.

"I remember," said the Dreamer, "but barely, because dreams are not meant in that way. Dreams aren’t meant to be explained. They are like flowers in the shadows not wanting to draw attention from the sun. Dreams are just wishes. I could talk forever about my wishes, but it seems that now they have all gone."

You realize as well as I do that the Dreamer was mistaken. He should have known better. Wishes never disappear from this world. Sometimes we just close our eyes so tightly that we can’t see them anymore. That’s why so many dreams appear in the dark. Since people insist on closing their eyes, there is no other way for the wishes to show themselves.

We should be grateful to our dreams. I think we are lucky that our wishes are so persistent. This way, even the most tired people can still have dreams.