She was special. Just like everyone else. She liked to think of herself as an artist-- restless and free. Her paintbrush was her imagination, and her canvas was the Dreamscape.
They were few in number. And although she did not know it, Sarah was one of the most skilled among the Sleepers. For ages people had been intrigued by the notion of sleep. For ages people had tried to decipher their dreams. For ages they had failed. Some thought of dreams as bridges built across memories, while some looked at them as merely irrelevant resonances of neurons. Some speculated that dreams served as recycling and reorganizing processes to consolidate the massive information input to the brain, while some believed dreams to be a fulfillment of unsatisfied emotions. Some agreed that all these may be true, and some declared that each one was false. Sarah was intrigued by their confusion. She perceived them with the same mixture of amusement and exasperation of an artist who paints a beautiful painting, and then listens to observers voicing their interpretations and critique. Only the artist knows what the painting really meant. And Sarah was an artist. An artist of the Dreamscape.
She stood alone in a dark room. Around her a hundred candles were glimmering in a circle. This was always where she collected her thoughts. There was a subtlety involved in the technique, which she had learnt to master. The trick was to float in that realm between the conscious and the unconscious -- to be present and absent at the same time. It was the so-called 'sweet spot'; where she was aware that her mind was wandering, but made no effort to change its course. She was soon asleep.
The window was open. Beyond it lay the magnificently unknown Dreamscape. The eagle swooped down in its majestic flight and a bell started ringing rhythmically. She was moving very fast. Suddenly she was the eagle. The mountains below her beckoned her to descend. She landed on the highest peak. Her white dress flowed in the wind and the clouds lay beneath her. She could see the bell now. It was on another peak far away, and each chime created waves of colors. She had what she needed. She walked in an endless field. A huge tree stood at the brink of the horizon. She opened her hand and found the bell. She opened her other hand. In her palm lay a watch, whose hands moved at her will. In the Dreamscape, time and space were her tools. But like any tools, one needed the skill to handle them. And the Sleepers had the gift to be able to do so. This was why they could create their own dreams and observe what others dreamt. This was why they were artists.
"Reality is what the mind perceives", she had heard her father say. "What the mind sees, what it hears and what it senses by touch, it perceives as real."
"So if I close my eyes and shut my ears and float in space, will reality disappear?" she had asked.
Her father had smiled, pleased that she had asked the question."No, it would only mean that your reality is different from everybody else's. Now sleep, my dear."
Sarah had slept. She had dreamt. She had made the Dreamscape her reality.
