“That’s it? The watchers adjust a few goals?” said Hannah. “It doesn’t sound like much work.” Leif shot her a look, and she shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t.”
Dorothy smiled. “It’s a good question. Watchers don’t just work on the Document. Keeping those long-term goals in mind, they roam the dreamscape, looking for big dreams that can cause trouble. The watchers discuss what they’ve found, and based on those discussions, they draw up a list of dreams to be bent—risky dreams, dangerous dreams, dreams that could hurt someone. Then they decide which dreambender should handle each one. Every day they write up a report called the Plan. When it’s ready each evening, they come to the Meadow and make assignments.”
“Have you worked on the Plan?” I asked.
“All of us have,” she said. “Periodically we rotate and become watchers. I had my chance two years ago.”
“Could we try it?” asked Phillip.
“Be patient,” Dorothy replied. “You’ll get your turn someday.”
One of the watchers approached us. He was a tall man with dark skin and close-cropped hair. He wore the same flowing robe as the others, and it flapped behind him like a pair of white wings. He went to Dorothy and said something we couldn’t hear. Surprised, she glanced at him, then turned to me.
“Jeremy,” she said. “Arthur wants to talk with you.”
Great, I thought. Now what had I done?
Arthur studied me, then came over and put his arm around my shoulders. “Let’s walk,” he said.
He led me to a corner of the Meadow, away from the others, where he sat on a rock and motioned for me to join him.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked.
“Dorothy tells me you’re gifted,” he said.
“She does? I wasn’t even sure she liked me.”
“Dorothy is an old friend. I can tell you she’s hardest on those who show the most promise.”
I tried to hold his gaze. “I have to warn you. I ask a lot of questions.”
He watched me. “Well?”
“Huh?”
“Ask away.”
I was nervous but also curious. In the end, curiosity won out.
“What’s it like on the island? Why do you go there? How do you pick big dreams? What happens if you don’t? What happens if you do? What gives you the right? And why do you want to talk to me?”
Arthur laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I like your style,” he said.
“Are you going to answer my questions?”
He looked off into the distance, as if trying to remember something. “All of us have questions. Maybe not as many as you, but we all have them. We’ve learned that it’s best for people to answer their own.”
“I can’t. That’s why I asked you.”
He said, “The answers will come, I promise.”
“Then why are we talking? What good will it do?”
I got up from the rock. He reached out and gripped my arm.
“Jeremy, you show great promise. Most dreambenders are good at little dreams. A few are skilled at big dreams. Every once in a while, a dreambender comes along who has other skills, different skills. Someone who wants to know more. More can be good. Of course, more can also be dangerous. So we watch that person carefully.”
“Are you watching me?”
“Oh yes,” he said.
“And?”
“We think it’s time for the next step. Follow me, Jeremy. There’s a big dream I’d like to show you.”
A man was considering suicide. He stood on top of a cliff, gazing down at a pile of broken rocks.
“Does he have the dream often?” I asked Arthur.
“Every night. Lately it’s been more intense. The cliff is higher. The rocks are more jagged.”
“He’s scared,” I said.
“Anything else?”
“There’s something strange,” I said. “When he considers jumping, he seems almost…happy.”
“That’s the bad part,” said Arthur. “And the part that we can use.”
“How?”
“You’ll find that it works best if we don’t make new thoughts. We use what’s already there. Think about the dream. How can we use the man’s happiness?”
I looked down at the rocks, then up at the sky. Clouds billowed. A hawk circled overhead. It gave me an idea.
“Can I try something?” I asked. “You might think it’s strange.”
“Go ahead.”
I reached out to touch the dream, the way Dorothy had taught us.
“Hey, this feels different,” I said. “The surface is rougher. The strands are thick, like cables.”
“Big dreams are hard,” said Arthur. “They’re tough.”
I found the strand containing the hawk and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. I tried again. It took all my strength, but finally I managed to work the strand free and loop it back toward the man. I could feel his thoughts slide away from the rocks and up to the sky. With a surge of excitement, he jumped off the cliff.
Next to me, Arthur stiffened. “Jeremy—”
But the man wasn’t falling. He floated. He dove. He swooped over the rocks. Catching an updraft, he shot past the cliff and into the clouds. His arms were spread wide, but they were no longer arms. They were wings. He was a hawk.
“My goodness,” said Arthur.
“Pretty good, huh?”
“Indeed,” he said. “An elegant solution.”
“Do you think he’ll jump? In real life, I mean.”
“Maybe,” said Arthur, “but it won’t be because of the dream.”
“Will the dream come back?” I asked.
“Probably. But he’ll be flying, not jumping, at least for a while. The watchers will check on him. We may need to bend the dream again. But now we know how.”
“Can I do another one?” I asked.
“Let’s stop for tonight,” he said. “Don’t worry though. I’ll be back.”
He was true to his word. Over the next several weeks, whenever the watchers arrived, Arthur would come to me. I had to admit, it made me feel good.
I built up to two and then three big dreams a night. Every once in a while, another dreambender would wander by in the dreamscape. When they sensed a big dream, they would move to avoid it, as we had been taught to do. In the same way, I avoided big dreams that Arthur had not assigned to me.
One night though, a big dream seemed especially intense. It gave off a dark-green fog that rolled across the dreamscape, and I couldn’t resist looking. As I approached, an awful scream rang out, and the dream suddenly went dark. There was confusion, then silence. The dream was gone.
I asked Arthur about it the next time I saw him. Looking off into the distance, he seemed to pick his words carefully.
“You know, Jeremy, bending big dreams is a serious business. It doesn’t always work out the way we’d like it to.”
“I know. It’s hard.”
“Yes, it is,” said Arthur. That’s all he would say.
On the nights between Arthur’s visits, I worked on little dreams with Dorothy and my friends. Ever since my conversation with Dorothy, I’d been noticing how often the dreams involved music—sometimes a song, sometimes just the feeling of a song. It was always there, bubbling beneath the surface, and our job was to keep it down.
I also noticed that since Arthur’s arrival, my friends had treated me differently. Leif didn’t shove me the way he used to. Hannah wouldn’t make fun of me. Phillip was the worst.
Whenever I looked around, he was holding a door for me or offering to run errands. “I don’t have errands,” I told him. “I’m thirteen years old.”
“Right, right, of course,” he would say. Then he’d do it again.
On Arthur’s first few visits
, he worked next to me, but then he saw that I could bend the dreams without his help. He said I had a knack for it. After that, he did what the other watchers did, stopping by to give me assignments and then moving on.
I liked working by myself. I felt strong and useful. I was a dreambender—not a kid fooling around, but a worker with an important job. I was part of the Plan. I was improving the world and keeping it safe.
Wasn’t I?
Part Two
The Dream
8
Jeremy
Leif seemed to be perfect, but he could surprise you. In fact, that was one of his favorite things. He would slip away, then pop out at you. That day was no different.
“Boo!” he said, leaping out from behind a bush.
I jumped, the way I always did.
“Got you that time,” he said, grinning.
It happened so often that I’d taught myself a rule: never forget about Leif. If you did, you’d be sorry.
He chuckled softly to himself, and we moved on. We were walking along the river, headed for the dreaming field. It was the time of day I liked best. The sun was getting low in the sky. The colors were softening. The air had cooled down, and a breeze blew gently across the water.
“Hey,” I said, “do you remember when we used to sneak off in the mornings and go swimming?”
“We should have been sleeping,” said Leif. “Even dreambenders have to dream.”
“Yeah, I know. The Book of Raines, chapter blah-blah-blah. Is that all you ever think about?”
“It’s important,” he said.
“Can’t we just relax once in a while? You know, laugh together? Be friends, like the old days?”
He smiled. “You ask too many questions.”
Months had passed since Arthur had first come to me. Dorothy’s lessons had ended. Our training was over. Now the group spent its nights bending dreams. Most of the dreams were little, but occasionally, when the watchers came, they would tap someone on the shoulder and assign a big dream. I was the only one in our group who always got selected and always by Arthur. I liked it when he told me I was special. Mostly, I liked the dreams.
Leif liked the rules. He always had. It was one of the reasons he was good at math. When he wasn’t quoting The Book of Raines, he was asking about the fixers, the people who enforced the rules. For a while I think he was jealous that Arthur had picked me, but then he began following the fixers. He offered to help. They took him up on it, and his path was set. He was still part of our group, but we saw less of him.
Suddenly, one day, when the fixers arrived in the dreaming field, Leif was with them. I asked him about it, but his answer was vague. After that, he was a fixer. We set out together every day, but he went one direction and I went another. Sometimes it bothered me, but then I thought about the way I had been pulled aside. We had both been chosen, just for different things.
We reached a fork in the path. He slapped me on the back. “Be good.”
He had been saying that since we were little. It used to be a joke between friends. These days, considering his new job, I wondered if it had a different meaning.
“What if I’m not?” I asked.
He drew a finger across his neck, a grim expression on his face. Then he burst out laughing and trotted off down the path.
“There’s one kind of dream we haven’t talked about,” said Arthur that evening as we strolled together across the dreaming field. “Of all the big dreams, it’s the hardest to bend.”
I asked, “Can I try?”
Over the past few months, I had seen lots of big dreams, some woven as tightly as steel mesh, and had bent them all. At first I’d been unsure of myself, but I’d gained confidence quickly. I would scan the dream, spot an entry point, and make an adjustment. It seemed easy to me, though Arthur assured me it wasn’t. He said the new type of dream, the kind we hadn’t yet talked about, would be even harder.
“These dreams are stubborn,” he said. “You can’t just change them once and be finished. They keep coming back.”
“Why?”
Arthur studied me. “You like asking questions. Let me ask you one. Of all the human emotions, which is the strongest?”
I remembered what I’d been taught in school and what I’d learned from my friends.
“Love?”
“Good,” said Arthur. “And after that?”
Hate? Joy? Jealousy? It was hard to say. I decided I liked asking questions more than answering them. I recalled the dreams I’d seen, and a thought occurred to me.
“Hope?” I said.
He eyed me appreciatively. “Dorothy always said you were smart.”
“Hope is stubborn,” I said. “It keeps coming back.”
Arthur nodded. “It’s about the future—not what was or what is, but what’s going to be. It’s a feeling, a wish. How do you change that?”
I thought of my own hopes. I liked to joke around, but I really did have some—to help people, to make the world a better place, to be a dreambender. Every once in a while, I wondered if dreambenders really did help people, but most of the time I believed it was true. I hoped it was true.
“Think about this, Jeremy. Hopes clash. Let’s say you hope to be the best dreambender, but I do too. What happens?”
I shrugged. “Someone’s going to lose.”
“What if my hope doesn’t just clash with your hope? What if it clashes with everyone’s hopes?”
“Everyone’s? Is that possible?”
“What do you think?” asked Arthur.
By then I had gotten to know Arthur pretty well. He knew that the way to catch my interest was by asking questions.
“Are you talking about the Document?” I asked. “That has our long-term goals, right?”
He chuckled. “You’re really very good, Jeremy. The Document isn’t just about dreams. It’s a blueprint for living. It shows what we can be and how to get there. When Carlton Raines and his friends created a world without machines and pollution, a beautiful place where we could all live in peace, they did it by using the Document. We still do, along with the daily Plan.”
I tried to follow what he was saying. “The Document helps us shape the world,” I said. “And people’s hopes don’t always fit in. They work against our goals.”
“Right.”
“So, when that happens, what do we do?”
“I think you know the answer,” he said.
Sometimes the truth moves in circles. The conversation was back where it had started.
“Those are the stubborn dreams,” I said. “The ones we were talking about.”
Arthur nodded. “Maybe I dream of being a war hero. Maybe I want to build machines. My dreams could be courageous, even beautiful, but if they don’t fit the long-term goals, we have to bend them. For the good of the group.”
“Can I do one?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said.
Her mind was quick and lovely. She had a talent for numbers. And she was restless. I could tell that right away.
“She seems unhappy,” I said. “Do you know why?”
“Hope,” he said. “It’s all about hope.”
I had found an open spot in the field and settled onto the grass and into the dreamscape. Arthur stood beside me.
“What does she hope for?” I asked.
“Music,” he said.
He tried to say it casually but couldn’t hide the feeling in his voice. I remembered what Dorothy had told me about music and how we snipped it out like a weed.
Arthur said, “Music is strong in this one. It’s distracting her. She has an important job as a computer, and we need her full attention. Work on the distraction, Jeremy. Eliminate the music.”
Across the field, a woman called Arthur’s name and gestured for him to come. He glanced back
at me. “I need to go. You’ll be fine, right?”
“Sure. No problem.”
He moved off, leaving me alone with the dream.
I sat back and watched, trying to get my bearings. Some people would dive in right away and start changing things. Gracie was like that, maybe because she was nervous. I found that it was better to start slowly, scanning the dream and getting a feel for the dreamer.
She was on a mountain. Somehow it had a hallway and doors, dozens of them. Looking on from behind her eyes, I saw the dreamer open a door. Beyond it was an empty room with a man at one end and a woman at the other. They were reaching out for each other but could never quite touch.
“Mom! Dad!” she called. They didn’t hear her.
She pulled the door shut and opened the next. Numbers spilled out like a swarm of ants. They crawled over and around her, moving up her legs and into her eyes and ears. Moaning, she slammed the door. The numbers fell away, piling up at her feet like dead leaves.
She hesitated in front of the next door. I could hear her ragged breathing. She was worried about what was behind the door. Finally, she took a deep breath and pushed it open. She was facing a mirror.
It’s funny what happens with dreams. You start by watching from the outside, and before you know it, you’re inside and it seems like yours. Then something jolts you, and suddenly you remember you’re only a visitor. That’s what happened with the mirror. I looked at it, expecting to see my own face. Instead, I was staring at a girl.
She wasn’t exactly beautiful. Her nose was a little crooked. Her mouth was full and expressive. Her skin wasn’t perfect, but her hair was. On the line between blond and red, it seemed to glimmer back and forth between the two. As I watched, she pushed it behind her ears. She blinked, and I gasped. Her eyes, the color of emeralds, bore into me with an intensity that was frightening.
Without thinking I ducked, then sheepishly looked back. She studied her reflection, as if she was searching for something and didn’t know what. I felt a longing deep inside her.
Dreambender Page 5
