The Palace

The Door

 

In the Dream Palace it is always nighttime.

The door is so big I can barely see the top. I watch the children run around me. They giggle and laugh and push and shove and chase and shout, “You’re it!” as they go inside. They never pay much attention to the door. I can’t stop staring at the dark brown oak, smooth as marble from all those happy hands brushing against it. There are huge iron bolts connecting the wooden slats, with the faces of children molded into the exposed metal. The faces are shiny too. But they’re not smiling.

The door hangs on iron hinges from the stone walls of the palace gate. It opens in the middle and locks with a wooden post that’s bigger than a railroad tie. It locks from the inside. A little boy could never reach it, even if he stood on another boy’s shoulders. If he could, it still wouldn’t matter. The crossbar is far too heavy for his tiny hands to budge.

I know, because I’ve tried.

My name is Chris. In the Outside, I’m thirteen years old, but whenever I go to the Dream Palace, I talk and act and look like I’m a kid again. I don’t want to go back there tonight. I didn’t last night either. Or the night before. But I know in my heart I’ll always keep coming, over and over, until I get it right. Until I do what I have to do. Until I look at that starless velvet sky overhead and see the first sign of sunrise.

Until I find Daisy.

 _____________

Daisy

Daisy’s smile is as bright as…well, a daisy. As soon as I come awake inside my dreams, like Dad taught me to do, I think about Daisy and I start looking. As soon as I start looking, I find myself at the door of the Dream Palace. I know she’s inside. Somewhere.

Daisy is my little sister. She’s eight years old now. In my dreams, Daisy talks in long, perfect sentences. I love hearing her voice. She doesn’t talk much in the other world, the world I call the Outside.

Dad thinks Daisy was always different. When I was born, Dad caught me in his hands, “Like I was wearing a catcher’s mitt.” It’s a gross way to say it, but that’s Dad. I’m not much different I guess, which is why I laughed so much when he told me. He said I looked right at him as he held my red, slimy body.

It was different when Daisy was born. “She didn’t look at me at all. She seemed upset to be out in the open, exposed like that.” Dad had a hard time calming her down when she cried, and she cried all the time. Even when Mom nursed her, she squirmed around like she wanted to escape.

Mom used to think that Daisy changed gradually, between her first and third birthdays. Now she’s starting to wonder. And me? I can’t say for sure, but something happened one night and nothing was ever the same again. Not for Daisy. Not for any of us.

We had spent the day at a huge mansion on the Hudson River. My dad is a scientist at a big bio-tech company called Vertigen, which is part of an even bigger pharmaceutical company called Becker-Bloch Chemicals. The CEO is Dalton Becker, a big guy with a red face and a thick southern drawl. Every summer he invites all the people who work for him to come upstate for the annual company picnic. Dad had only been working for Vertigen about six months, so it was our first time at the picnic. The mansion was so big it even had a name – Kingsview.

I was eight years old then, and Daisy was only two and a half, so nobody noticed she didn’t talk much, except maybe the other kids who she wouldn’t talk to at all. All of us had a really nice time anyway, hanging out together, swimming, eating hot dogs and playing on the gigantic lawn. At the end of the day, we took the train back home. We were all exhausted, but Daisy didn’t fall asleep until Dad carried her upstairs to bed.

That’s when it happened. After she fell asleep. She didn’t fall out of bed and hit her head, or run a high fever that wouldn’t go away. It happened in the Dream Palace.

It was dark. Not stormy. I was alone. At least I thought I was. I fumbled my fingers along the door, looking for a switch. I couldn’t find it.

Suddenly, the lights went on. I was in a big library. I knew I’d been there before, but I didn’t know where it was or how I got there. I didn’t know anything about the Dream Palace back then. I wasn’t able to figure all that stuff out until Dad and I talked about it five years later. At the time, I only knew I had been to that library before. Many times before. It wasn’t a scary place. I always felt safe there, until that night.

I heard the sound of footsteps above me, on the balcony lined with bookcases. I couldn’t see anyone, but the feet sounded small. Then they stopped.

“Chris!” shouted the voice above me. It was Daisy. She was holding a book. The title and the picture on the cover were covered by her small white hand.

“Are you okay?” I yelled up to her. Her eyes glazed over like she hadn’t heard me. Like she was looking through me. There were two stairways on either side of the balcony, but the closest one was still twenty feet away. “Wait right there!” I shouted, running as fast as I could.

“Help!” she cried, her eyes coming back into focus while the rest of her started to fade. She was disappearing.

“WAIT! I’m coming!” When I reached the balcony, the book was lying on the floor. There was a picture of a princess on the cover. Daisy looked as white as the princess’s dress. “Daisy!” I shouted, her ghostly outline even more blurry at the edges.

“Chris!” she cried, reaching for me. Her voice was so faint I could barely hear it.

“DAISY!” I shouted again, racing to grab her hand. It was barely visible now. By the time I was close enough to touch her, Daisy was gone.

I fell to my knees, crying. The book Daisy dropped was right in front of me. The letters on the cover began moving around and I couldn’t read the title. The picture was changing too, from a princess to a dragon. I was still trying to read it when I heard the sound of footsteps below. Heavy footsteps. I jumped up and leaned over the balcony just in time to see a tall blond man in a bright colored robe walking out the door. I ran down the staircase after him, but my feet slipped and I knocked my head against the railing.

I woke up screaming. When Mom ran in to see what happened, I frantically told her about my dream, because I knew, I knew for sure something really bad had happened to Daisy, not just in my dream, but in the real world too. I was so convinced Daisy had actually disappeared that Mom led me by the hand into Daisy’s room so I could see she was still in bed, safely sleeping. I caught my breath and nodded my head and she walked me back to my room. I made her lay down with me until I fell asleep.

When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I did was go into Daisy’s room to check on her. She was still sleeping, the bulges of her corneas moving back and forth under her eyelids. Dad told me it was called REM, Rapid Eye Movement. It meant she was dreaming. She kept on dreaming, just like she kept on sleeping, hour after hour, her eyes rolling back and forth like the waves of the ocean, over and over and over.

She had never slept that much before, even when she was sick. At one point, Mom crept into her bedroom, pressing her hand against Daisy’s forehead as lightly as she could, not wanting to wake her if she was sick or just needed the extra sleep. When Daisy didn’t have a temperature, we became even more worried, especially me, my radar on extra high alert, on the lookout for any problem Daisy might have after my horrible nightmare.

When she finally woke up, it was almost suppertime. I was the first to notice. Something even more bizarre happened next. She didn’t get out of bed. Daisy never, ever, ever stays in bed after she wakes up. She’s the household alarm clock, always the first to wake up, at least half an hour before anyone else, running from room to room, making sure everyone understands that sleep-time is over and we all need to get out of bed and make pancakes right now!

But there she was, still in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, sucking her thumb, rubbing the lime green blanket she calls Cokie against her cheek, staring blankly at the ceiling.

“Daisy, are you okay?” I asked, sitting next to her. She had no reaction – didn’t turn her head, didn’t flinch. She just kept looking up at the ceiling like she was watching something else, something more important and compelling than anything I could ever say or show her.

“Daisy’s awake!” I called out.

Mom bounded through the doorway seconds later. “How’s my baby? Are you okay?” she asked, vaulting over me.

“Mommy came! Mommy came back!” Daisy replied, her eyes electric with excitement and intense relief, like the cavalry had finally come to rescue her.

Maybe that’s exactly what happened. Daisy jumped up and down on the bed like Scrooge on Christmas morning. It was all just a dream! Mommy came back! And so had Daisy.

The rest of the evening was business as usual. Daisy had a good appetite and polished off her pancakes in record time. “She’s okay,” I thought, trying to convince myself. But something was different. It wasn’t like she’d been chattering away at the picnic, like the other kids her age, and when she woke up, she never spoke again. For the last year, she’d been talking less and less, like all the language was being siphoned out of her brain. So the difference wasn’t in the way she talked, or how much she talked.

At first I couldn’t figure out what had changed. Then one day, when our awesome black cat Merlin curled up on the couch next to her, she got right up and moved across the living room to another chair. She just sat there, sucking her thumb, glancing at Merlin once in a while like she wanted to make sure he hadn’t moved – that he wasn’t coming closer. Daisy? Afraid of Merlin? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She used to lay down for hours with him, on the carpet under the big windows, soaking up the sunshine, Daisy rubbing his sleek, black fur while Merlin purred like he was in heaven. Now she was afraid of him?

I tried to tell myself that Daisy just wanted to be alone, but when Dad came home from walking our dog and Sharky ran over to her like he always did to slobber all over her face, she jumped up and stood on the chair screaming, “Mommy! Mommy come!”

Mom came rushing downstairs. “Daisy! What happened?” she shouted, cutting Dad off as they both ran to Daisy’s side. “What’s wrong? Did Sharky bite you?” Mom asked, as Daisy leapt off the chair and into the safety of her squeezing arms.

“No!” Dad yelled back, like he’d been accused of biting Daisy too. “Sharky ran over like he always does and she just started screaming her head off!”

Mom glared at Sharky and then Dad and me like we were in a conspiracy to terrify Daisy. Her frown didn’t soften one bit as she carried Daisy upstairs to safety.

After that, Daisy avoided Sharky whenever she could. No more sunbaths with Merlin on the carpet either. When Merlin came near her, she walked away. Whenever Sharky ran over, she started screaming again. We would have had to keep Sharky in another room whenever Daisy was around, but after the third time it happened, Sharky got the idea and slinked away, his eyebrows raised like sad dogs do. Now when he comes home and sees Daisy, he looks at her, whimpers a little, and runs to me instead.

Daisy’s new fear of dogs wasn’t limited to Sharky. Whenever someone walked a dog anywhere near us, she would get as far away as she could, repeating, “It’s okay! It’s okay!” until she knew the dog’s leash wasn’t long enough to reach her. With cats, she wasn’t as much afraid as she was indifferent, which suited most cats just fine. If it was a really furry cat like a Persian, she might even go up and pet it.

Daisy changed in other ways too. When we called her name, she usually ignored us, staring blankly ahead, watching whatever it was that captured her attention so completely, safe and content in her own private world. When she did try to connect with us, it was as if some kind of static or white noise was interfering with whatever she tried to do, making everything hardertalking, playing, making eye contact, paying attention to what we saidlike she was tuned into another channel and only once in a while the channel switched all the way back to us again.

She was happy though, with a big grin on her face almost all the time. I suppose that’s why it took us so long to accept the truth. She was so happy.

People told us not to worry. Even her pediatrician said Daisy was fine. She said a lot of kids don’t talk until they’re even older.

“But Daisy was talking before,” I pointed out to Mom after she told me.

“Yeah, I know,” she said with a still-worried frown. Dad was nodding too.

Later that summer, we went to Cape Cod on vacation like we used to do every year. By then, Daisy was barely looking at anyone. She began acting weird too. Flapping her arms like a bird. Spinning around like someone was making her do it. Things got really scary when she began running toward the street like she didn’t see the cars coming, and jumping into the huge ocean waves even though she couldn’t swim. She was still afraid of dogs — but she wasn’t afraid of anything else.

When we came home, Mom and Dad had her evaluated by some specialists. They said Daisy was autistic. By then she was speaking less and less, if at all. When we talked to her, she wouldn’t even look at us. If it weren’t for her reaction to music and loud noises, you’d think she was deaf. She wasn’t deaf. She still danced. She still sang (just the melodies, not the words). She still laughed. But even five years later, after all the therapy and the miracle cures that never worked, she’s still in her own little world. And I can’t help thinking that her little world is the same place where I watched her disappear that night.

  _____________

 

déjà vu

We live in the West Village of Manhattan in an old brownstone with a garden and a carriage house in the back. My mom is a fabric designer. She has a studio in the carriage house. Dad fixed up a laboratory in the basement so he could work at home sometimes, instead of pulling late nights at Vertigen or having to go in on the weekends, even though he still has to once in a while.

When I was younger, I liked having Mom and Dad around the house so much. But when I got older, and Daisy got older, and she wasn’t getting better, and M&D were getting more depressed and cranky…I needed to get away by myself more often.

I was allowed to go out of the house by myself when I turned thirteen, though it still makes Mom and Dad nervous every time I leave. I don’t blame them. New York can be a scary place and there are a lot of scary people on the streets. With everything that’s going on with Daisy, if something happened to me toowell I don’t want to think about it any more than they do. I have a cell phone and I call to check in, so they don’t worry so much. Plus, I almost always bring Sharky with me, so they worry less anyway. He’s a Bull Terrier. Dad named him Sharky because his head looks like one. I take him with me everywhere, unless I’m riding the subway or going to a movie or shopping for sneakers.

I like to walk. Most of the time we walk around the Village, the Meat Packing District, Chelsea or Soho. We go to Central Park at least once a week, which is like dog heaven for Sharky. I always bring a book with me so we can lie in the grass together when it’s warm enough. I like reading almost as much as walking. I read fantasy adventures and scary stuff mostly. I like monsterson the Outside. I don’t like them so much in the Dream Palace.

A few months ago, Sharky and I were walking around Madison Park. I sat on a bench beneath a thick maple tree and Sharky got into snooze position at my feet. I pulled out a comic from my backpacka story about an evil wizard I picked up at Forbidden Planet. I had just started reading when I felt like someone was standing behind me. I turned my head quickly, but no one was there. Well, no one was there, but there was something. Up though the trees, against a blue sky that was so blue it looked fake, a massive stone building loomed over us. I knew the style was Art Deco, but it wasn’t like any Deco building I’d seen. It was wide and heavy, with an angled façade that rose into bulky turrets way up into that too blue sky. It looked like a castle. Or a fortress. Or maybe something more grand. A palace.

I stared at it. I couldn’t look away. It was mysterious. Inviting. Sinister too, like it was saying, “Come inside,” and “Stay away,” at the same time.

There was something else about it. Something familiar. The déjà vu feeling was so strong I wondered if I had seen it there some other time, but hadn’t really noticed. I shook my head and tried to laugh the feeling away, but I couldn’t anymore than I could stop staring.

The more I stared, the more I realized the déjà vu wasn’t coming from an earlier trip to Madison Park. I had seen that building, or another like it, somewhere else. And I’d seen it more than once. That was the thought that tipped the scales…the more than once part. Suddenly, I remembered. I’d seen it in my dreams.

The first time I went there I was six or seven years old. After that, I dreamed about it all the time, running around inside with the other kids there like it was our secret fortress. I never told Mom and Dad. I probably thought everybody dreams about the same places all the time. When I grew older I went there less and less. After a while, I never even thought about ituntil I saw that building. As soon as I remembered, I remembered something else. The library where Daisy disappeared. It was inside the same building.

Sharky and I ran all the way home. I felt like it was really important to tell Dad about it as soon as I could. I was right. When I told him that the building on Madison Park looked like a palace I went to in my dreams, his eyes grew wide and his head bobbed up and down. When I called it the Dream Palace for the very first time, his response gave me all the validation I neededand a chill that made me want to climb into bed and pull the covers over my head.

Dad asked, “ You’ve been there too?”

  _____________

 

The Palace

 

Dad asked me to describe everything I remembered about the Dream Palace. It had been such a long time since I dreamt about it that I didn’t remember much. The door. The terrace on the other side leading to a huge archway. He listened patiently, saying nothing. Nodding. When I finished, he folded his arms across his chest. “Yep,” he said. “That’s the place.”

I felt like my head was going to pop off. This was so creepy and scary, yet exciting too, like we had discovered a wormhole to another dimension. I didn’t know what to say or ask next, but when my mouth finally opened, out came the only question that seemed to matter:

“Do you think it’s real?”

“Real?” he asked, gazing into nowhere. I could tell from the way he said it that he wasn’t expecting an answer. That far-off look in his eyes made me wonder if he’d asked himself that same question before. Many times before. And was asking it again now.

“Yeah,” I said, giving him the time he needed to chew it over.

“I think what you mean is…” he began slowly, like he was weighing every word, “…maybe the dream world has its own…topography. Maybe there are places…that exist independently…places you can always go back to.”

“Yeah,” I whispered staring at the candle Dad always kept on his desk. “Like a parallel universe or something.”

Dad laughed. “Whatever,” he said, mimicking the ‘W’ I made with my thumbs and forefingers whenever he said something that deserved it.

We kept talking and the more I talked, the more I remembered, like the act of sharing my big secret with someone who had been there too was unleashing a flood of memories I had locked away. Like the dream I had where Daisy disappeared. Dad got really serious then and made me tell him every detail about my dream over and over. I guess Mom never told him that I woke up screaming that night and she took me into Daisy’s room to make sure she was still tucked under the covers.

Dad asked me about the book Daisy was holdingwhat it looked like, about the princess on the cover…and the dragon. He asked if I remembered any of the letters that kept moving around or if I saw them form any words at all. “No,” I answered dully, though a feeling in my gut was nudging me hard, like it was saying: Yes you do! You’re not trying hard enough!

Dad must have noticed I was getting stressed, because he didn’t keep pressing me, changing the subject to the man in the green robe and what I could remember about him.

“The Dragon King,” I whispered.

Dad’s mouth hung open. “I call him that too.”

“OMG,” I gulped. That déjà vu feeling was back, even stronger than before. When Dad told me about his own dream, I had the shivers before he finished his first sentence.

“That same night I had a dream about Daisy too,” Dad said with a guilty look, his eyes lowered to his folded hands. “He was with her. When I woke up, all I could remember was the Dragon King holding Daisy’s hand and walking away with her. I tried to run after them but I couldn’t move.”

I knew he was beating up on himself like I’d been doing, so I asked him questions about his dream to see if I could distract him and prod his memory like he’d done with me. He still couldn’t remember anything else so I asked him to tell me more about the Dragon King.

As he described him, I felt the goose-bumps raise on my arms like we were sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories. I could picture the Dragon King perfectly, but it didn’t feel like I was doing it with my imagination, even though Dad did a great job of describing him, which isn’t easy. It isn’t easy because the Dragon King never stops moving. I don’t mean walking or pacing or running. He never stops moving. So if you asked me what he looks like, I’d have to say…different. He’s a man with bright blue eyes and thick blond hair most of the time…until his chin turns into lips and devours the rest of his face. Then a new head turns inside out and reappears as…well just about anything. Usually, a dragon. When he’s a man (or maybe I should say menthere’s different heads besides the blond one) he wears a long thick robe that comes right down to the floor. It’s deep scarlet red on the inside and dark emerald green on the outside. Very regal. Shiny too. Like scales. The robe changes too, like his arms and the legs. I guess it won’t surprise you to hear that it changes into wings. Wide. Strong. Terrifying.

The Dragon King scares me more than anyone or anything I’ve ever seen in the Dream Palace or Outside. Even so, there’s one thing that scares me even more than him. It’s the thought of what he’d done to Daisy. Even though I knew how crazy it would sound (even crazier than everything we’d been talking about), I told Dad my wacko theory:

“I always felt like my dream of Daisy disappearing in the library had something to do with…how she is now. I know it’s totally impossible, but the Dragon King…I think he took some part of Daisy away with him. I think he still has her, like a prisoner.”

Dad got really quiet and closed his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, but he didn’t answer. After a few more seconds, he opened his eyes slowly, like it hurt to see the dim light in his office. “Chris, Daisy is autistic. She’s autistic because…well, nobody knows for sure what causes it…but she was autistic before you had that dream, and she’s still autistic. There isn’t some part of her that’s missing. She is who she is and she’s wonderful just the way she is. Do you understand that Chris?”

“I guess,” I said quietly, feeling ashamed of myself. I’m not sure if it was the embarrassment, or my stubbornness, or because I still thought I was right about what happened to Daisy, but I got a little pissed and said, “What about you and mom? If Daisy’s fine just the way she is, then why are you guys always trying to cure her?”

Dad gave me the total stink-eye. He opened his mouth and I thought he was going to really blast me, but he paused a second, took a deep breath and said, “Even if Daisy were completely…”

He paused again. I knew why this time. He was trying to work around the word normal, like he always does whenever he talks about Daisy.

“Even if Daisy were neurotypical,” he continued, keeping his cool, “we would still worry about her the same way we worry about your future…if anything…happened to us.”

I hate it when Dad talks about dyingand he talks about it way too much. It’s not like Mom and him are old geezers. I didn’t say anything, cause I knew he had to finish his “what if we get hit by a bus” speech, but I was even more pissed than I was when he started.

“What if we got hit by a bus?” he continued, right on cue. I shook my head in frustration, but that wasn’t going to stop him. “You’d be okay. You could live with Grandma or Uncle Bert. But who would take care of Daisy? We don’t have a single relative who can cope with her for a week, let alone the rest of her life. We want Daisy to be able to live on her own someday, have a family, everything we want for you. So yeah, we’re going to keep doing everything we can to help her, the same way you would if you were in our shoes. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t perfect just the way she is…it just means we want her to be able to…navigate in our world, so she can live independently.”

His speech was winding down, but I knew he might get a second wind from the size of the breath he was taking, so I jumped in and cut him off. “Okay, okay…I get it, Dad. But just listen to me for a minute.”

He sucked in another big breath, which was a good sign. When he nodded, I knew he’d at least hear me out.

“You and Mom want what’s best for Daisy, right?” Another nod, this one more impatient. “So what if…what if the Dragon King really did do something to her? Maybe he didn’t take some part of her away. But maybe he did something else. Remember how long she slept the next day? Then stayed in bed after she woke up? Remember how scared she was when Sharky ran over to lick her? She still afraid of dogs, and she doesn’t even pay attention to Merlin anymore. What if he scared the hell out of her and she’s still scared? What if something else happened in her dream after I woke up? You saw them in your dream that night too. I mean, look how weird it is that we both had the same dream in the same place. We both call it the Dream Palace. We both call him the Dragon King. If something that crazy is possible, how do we know something even crazier didn’t happen to her? Can’t we just talk about it?”

Dad took another deep breath and the biggest pause so far. When he finally spoke he said something I never could have imagined in a million years.

“We can do more than just talk about it,” he said with the strangest grin I’d ever seen. “If we can find Daisy in the Dream Palace, we can ask her.”

 _____________

 

Lucid

“Ask her?” I asked, like I hadn’t heard him right, even though I knew I had. It was just such a crazy thing to say. I couldn’t tell if he was about to punch my shoulder and say, “Gotcha dude!” or if he’d gone bonkers.

“Well, first we’d have to find her in our dreams. But once we found her, yeah, we could ask her what happened,” he said, like it was as simple as doing the laundry.

“Dad, even if we found her in our dreams, we wouldn’t remember what to ask her and if we did, she wouldn’t be able to answer us.”

“Daisy can talk just fine in my dreams. What about you?”

“Yeah, I guess she does, but that’s because I’m dreaming. Anything can happen in your dreams. When I dream about her, she’s not the real Daisy, it’s just me dreaming her up. So if I asked her something I’d just be listening to myself.”

“Unless we can find her in the Dream Palace,” Dad interrupted, “If the palace is real in some kind of way, real enough for both of us to go to the same place and see the same things, maybe if we see Daisy there it would mean she’s dreaming about it too. Maybe she’s there all the time because something really did happen to her that night, like you think, or maybe she goes there for the same reason you and I dowhatever that is. That’s what I really want to know. Why would all of us go to the same place in our dreams? How did we get there? Why do we keep going back? I’m not saying it would work, but if we can find Daisy, and ask her what happened, she might be able to tell us what’s going on.”

“Dad, you’ve lost it,” I said, feeling like I was the only adult in the room. “You’re acting like we have total control over what we do in our dreams. Dreams just happen. You can’t make plans about what you’re gonna do, like Mission Impossible. Once you’re dreaming you wouldn’t remember any of that stuff.”

“What if you could?” Dad asked.

“You can’t,” I said, trying to sound more sure of myself than I felt.

“But what if you could?” he repeated, this time with a big grin, the kind you get when you know where the treasure is hidden and can’t wait to tell someone.

I sat there and looked at him with that grin, wanting to argue, wanting him to answer his own question even more. He asked another one instead.

“Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?”

I shook my head.

“It means you wake up inside your dream.”

“Wake up inside my dream?” I repeated, needing time to let it sink or in, or for him to start laughing and say he was only kidding. He wasn’t kidding.

“Yeah,” he said with another dude-I’m-about-to-blow-your-mind smile. “You have the same waking consciousness you have right now…except you’re in your own dream world.”

Wow. Of all the crazy things we’d ever talked about, all the weird stories and fantasies, nothing made me more excited than when he told me that. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know, but when it actually happens, it’s always the same: You’re in your normal dream state, groggy, moving from one weird scene to the next, then suddenly you remember you’re dreaming. Once you remember you’re dreaming, you also remember that you can act in your dreams, make decisions. And as soon as you make a decision in that frame of awareness, you wake upinside your dream.”

“Are you messing with me?”

“Nope. And it feels even more awesome than it sounds. Waking up gives you such a jolt. Like you got hit by lightning. Suddenly you’re awake and everything is so strange. You can do just about anything. You can fly.”

“You can fly?”

“Yep,” he nodded, his grin even wider. “The first time I flew was one the most incredible experiences I’ve ever had. After that, I couldn’t wait to go to sleep each night so I could fly all over the place. The more I practiced, the more I could do. And because it’s a dream world, I could do just about anything you can imagine…except…’

“Except what Dad?”

He hesitated. “I don’t want to tie down your thoughts or imagination because of my limitations. It might be totally different for you.”

“Just tell me Dad,” I groaned impatiently.

“The Dream Palace is different than other places when I’m having a lucid dream. There are some things I can do there that I can’t do anywhere else, and other things, like flying that I can’t do at all.”

“You can’t fly in the Dream Palace?”

“I can’t. Maybe you can,” he said like he was a little embarrassed. “The truth is, I can’t even remember the last time I had a lucid dream. I know it’s been over a year. I used to meditate a lot more before…” Before we knew Daisy was autistic. He just skipped right over that and said, “Lucid dreaming is basically an awareness practice. When you’re meditating you become more aware of everythingyour breath, sounds, the way your skin feels. So if you’re more aware of everything when you’re awake, you become more aware in your dreams. Eventually, you’ll stop whatever you’re doing in your dreams and say, ‘Hey, I’m dreaming!’ Then you wake up.”

“So if I want to have a lucid dream, does that mean I have to start meditating?” I asked, cringing. I’d tried it a few times before, sitting next to him, but I always fell asleep. “No offense Dad, but meditation is totally boring.”

Dad laughed, shook his head and messed up my hair. Then he gave me my first “dream lesson.” He told me to make a dream journal, because the better I got at remembering my dreams, the better I’d get at remembering them when I was dreaming. The other thing he told me was totally weird, like embarrassingly weird. He told me I had to do reality checks.

“When you’re awake, you ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?” and then you notice a few things that prove you’re not dreaming, like reading a few sentences without the words changing, or counting backwards.”

“Dad, that sounds so…”

“Yeah, I know, it seems ridiculous but it makes sense when you think about it. If you ask yourself whether you’re dreaming all day long, eventually you’ll remember to ask yourself when you’re actually dreamingand then you’ll wake up.”

“Yeah, I guess that does make sense,” I agreed, even though I knew I’d still feel like an idiot when I was actually doing my “reality checks.” Which was absolutely true.

Dad gave me more suggestions about how to have a lucid dream and how to stay awake once you have one. When he finished, he asked me how I felt about everything he’d told me.

“Like I’m already dreaming,” I answered. Everything he said sounded so crazy that my mind was doing somersaults, but at the same time I was so excited too. I couldn’t wait to go to sleep and try to wake up. “How long do you think it’ll take for me to have a lucid dream?”

“I have no idea, but I’ve read that it’s easier for younger people to get started than it is for adults. It’s been a long time for me, so maybe you’ll have one first,” he said with a little frown. Then his face broke into a smile and he added, “I guess you better get to sleep and start trying.”

  _____________

Kids

I didn’t wake up in my dreams that night, but I did go back to the Dream Palace. It was just like I remembered. Even more shocking, I was just like I remembered. I was a little boy again. I woke up and ran to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, but he wasn’t there. I knew where he’d beeven in the middle of the nightback downstairs in his study, probably writing.

“What’s wrong Coomer?” he asked, calling me by the same nickname he’d used since I was as old as the boy in my dreams.

“I was just there!” I huffed and puffed. “In the Dream Palace!”

He looked worried. “What happened?”

“Nothing. I woke up as soon as I got there. I totally freaked out because…I was a little kid again.”

Dad didn’t say anything at first. He rolled his swivel chair around so he was looking out the big window over the garden. “Whenever I go there…” he began hesitantly, “…I’m always a little boy too.”

“Dad! That’s crazy!”

“Yeah,” he said, swiveling back to face me. “It is.”

“Dad…if you go there…and I go there…do you think we’ve ever seen each other?”

“ I’ve been wondering about that,” he said, building a steeple with his fingers that touched the tip of his goatee. “If you saw me, you’d be seeing another little boy. You probably wouldn’t know what I look like.”

“Right…” I said glumly, then brightened up. “Yeah, but you’d know what I looked like! Have you ever seen me there?”

“It’s weird. I know I’ve seen you there. But I can never remember those dreams.”

“I wonder what we were doing.”

“I wish I knew,” he muttered. “But I do know this: If we’re going to find Daisy and ask her what happened, we’re going to have to find each other first.”

“Okay, so how are we going to find each other in the Dream Palace?” I asked, so geared up I was practically spinning around in my chair. “I guess you’ll have to find me, since I won’t recognize you as a kid.”

“Right…” Dad nodded again, pausing a while like he was planning it out. “Okay, so if you meet a boy who asks your name, tell him it’s Coomer!”

I snickered. “And if a boy ever asks your name, tell him it’s Mr. Butthead!”

Dad laughed harder. “Okay, okay, let’s keep it simple and use our real names. You tell me it’s Chris…and I’ll tell you it’s Jimmy.”

As soon as he said that, I got such a chill. What I saw in my head was more than a memory. More than déjà vu. It was a movie. I knew from the tip of my toes to the hair standing up on my head that what I was seeing had already happened. A long time ago.

I was in the Dream Palace, watching a boy. Daisy was there too and the boy was holding her hand. I felt protective, and yanked his hand away.

Then Daisy said, in a sentence longer than any I’ve heard her utter on the Outside:

“Don’t be silly, Chris. You know it’s only Jimmy.”

 _____________

Real

 

When I told Dad about my dream with Daisy and himI mean Jimmyhe told me something even stranger. “Chris, you know how I just said that I could never remember any of the dreams I had where I saw you in the Dream Palace?”

“Yeah…?”

“Well, as soon as you told me your dream, I rememberedand that was one of them.”

“Whoa!”

“Do you know what this means?” he asked, clearly hoping he’d get a better response than the shrug I gave him. “Well, if we had the same dream in the same place at the same time, and talked to each other and said and heard the same things, it means we had a shared dream!”

“Yeah!” I cried, acting like I actually understood how important this was.

He shook his head like he knew I was totally bluffing and said, “Shared dreams are very rare. They’ve been documented, but not in a clinical setting, as far as I know. There’s a dream research institute called Clarity that’s going to do a full-blown study next year. If they can prove conclusively that shared dreaming exists, that would mean dreams are real.”

“Real? Like really real?”

“Remember when you asked me if I thought the Dream Palace was real?”

“Yeah…” I replied, feeling my own excitement build as he spelled it out for me.

“In science, ‘real’ means something is objectively perceivable. The primary criterion of objectivity is that the experience is shared by more than one person. So that would make shared dreaming as objectively real as the physical world.”

“Right,” I nodded, the light finally starting to shine behind my eyes.

“When two people are sharing the same conscious experience, where they’re in the same place, doing and saying the same things at the same time, then…”

“Then it has to be real!” I cut in excitedly. “And that would mean the Dream Palace is really real too!”

“Yes, it would,” Dad nodded, his chest puffed up like he was the proud father of this crazy theory.

“Wow!” I shouted and we hugged each other like two happy maniacs. We talked about dreams and reality and perception and consciousness and all kinds of weird stuff for close to an hour before he told me I had to go upstairs and get some sleep. I moaned and groaned, but went back to my bedroom and got under the covers. I was so excited it took a long time to fall asleep. When I finally conked out, I didn’t have any dreamsor if I did, I couldn’t remember them. I woke feeling totally bummed, but something happened after breakfast that pumped me up even more than I’d been the night before. It wasn’t because Dad had an awesome dream experience to share with me, or more words of wisdom about dreams and reality.

It was Daisy who made my day.

 _____________

Pancakes

 

“Make pancakes?” Daisy shouted happily, running down the stairs. Mom was already in the kitchen with me and gave Daisy a tired smile when she hit the floor with a loud thump.

“How about some toast and cereal?” Mom asked half-hardheartedly, knowing what Daisy’s response would be.

“Make pancakes?” Daisy repeated, her expression instantly changing from gleeful bliss to a worried frown, then wide-eyed panic when Mom didn’t immediately say yes.

“Mommy, make pancakes?” she implored, going over to Mom and tugging her robe. Daisy was about ten seconds away from a full meltdown.

“How about I make pancakes for dinner?” Mom negotiated. “We can have toast and cereal now and when you get home from school, we can make pancakes together.”

“Make pancakes later,” Daisy nodded, her eyes still wide and worried.

“Yes, we’ll make pancakes later sweetie,” Mom said, wrapping her arm around Daisy’s shoulder while her own shoulders slumped in relief.

Daisy shrugged Mom’s arm off and repeated, “Yes, make pancakes later.” She was either confirming Mom’s 100% commitment to the after-school pancake session, or trying to calm herself, or being echolalic (that means echoing what someone said, or what she said earlier), or all of the above. No matter what, it meant she had moved beyond the looming pancake crisis.

Whew. Another meltdown defused.

I helped Daisy pour the milk in her Cheerios, because she always fills it to overflowing. When the toast popped up, Mom buttered it and Daisy came over to watch. “Smell it?” she said/asked and Mom moved out of the way while Daisy lifted the buttered slice up to her nose and sniffed. She repeated her nose inspection with the other slice and put it back on the plate so Mom could spread the raspberry jam. Same bread, same jam, same plate, same bowl, same cereal, same sniff as every other day before. Daisy likes her routines.

“Can you take Daisy down to the bus this morning?” Mom asked me. She was clearly wiped out. Dad and Mom usually take turns on breakfast duty, depending on who got the most sleep the night before. Daisy often wakes up in the middle of the night and wants Mom to lie in bed with her until she falls back asleep. If Mom can’t deal with it, because she’s done the Daisy night-shift too many times in a row, Dad will try and fill in, and if Daisy isn’t too upset that Mom won’t come, she’ll let Dad lie down with her instead, though she’s just as likely to scream her head off until Mom comes to the rescue no matter how tired she is.

I knew Dad was still snoozing, because like me, he’d been up half the night. Mom is more of a morning person anyway and likes to get into her studio early, so she’s usually not too grumpy about doing the morning shift solo, unless she’s had a rough night too, which seemed to be the case. I told her I’d take care of Daisy and get her ready because my school bus comes later than hers anywayand also because I wanted to do something without Mom around to watch and probably freak out.

Mom thanked me and trudged upstairs back to the bedroom. Dad didn’t have to get into work until ten o’clock, so he wouldn’t be up for another hour. Even though Dad and I were partners now, I thought he might not go along with my plan and I didn’t want to have another too-long Dad debate about it. So I helped Daisy clean her dishes, brush her teeth and hair, get dressed, pack her lunch and charge her iPod for the bus ride.

Daisy loves music. She has perfect pitch (according to Greg, my piano teacher), plus she’s a natural born rock star. There’s nothing she loves more than singing and dancing in front of an audience…any audience. Every time we have guests they can count on some after-dinner entertainment from Daisy. Michael Jackson songs are her favorites, especially Beat it and Wanna be Startin’ Somethin’ for which she’s invented some pretty outstanding dance moves, like a lightning-fast note-for-note head shake during the guitar solo of Beat it and perfectly timed cartwheels leading into each chorus of Wanna. She sings along with Michael, belting it out loud and proud. She doesn’t know the words, so she fakes it, which is exactly what I’d do, because I can’t understand what Michael is singing and I’m not autistic.

Before the bus came, I talked Daisy into cutting her set list down to one song so we had time to talk, even though I’d be doing most of the talking. There was a question that had been nagging at me all morning and I had to know the answerone way or the other. Could Daisy tell me anything about her dreams?

The bus comes to pick Daisy up right in front of the house because she’s disabled. It’s probably the one and only VIP perk she gets for being autistic, but it’s a good one. I have to walk three blocks for my bus, which is not a lot of fun in the rain or during the winter. It was a warm, sunny day and Daisy was wearing a long, loose summer dress with flowers stitched on the front, one of her favorites. She picked it out along with a pair of matching green Crocs, her preferred footwear. Crocs are okay, but I like sneakers more. I have about fifteen pairs, but I think they must feel too tight, too rough, or too something for Daisy, because she hates sneakers.

As soon as we made it to the sidewalk, Daisy began doing her balance-beam routine on the low iron railing around the tree in front of our house. People walking by usually give her a worried look and me a frown, like I wasn’t doing a god job of looking after my little sister. But Daisy has been walking around the railing since she was tiny and never fell once, so I just let them gape and scowl and focused my attention on Daisy, trying to sense the right moment when she might be tuned into my frequency.

“Daisy do you have dreams?” I asked, when she turned a corner of the fence and smiled at me.

Nothing. No reaction at all. She did another lap and when she tight-roped in front of me again, I asked, “Daisy do you have dreams when you sleep at night?”

Pause. And then, “Yeah.”

Daisy says “Yeah” with a real twang, like she picked it up from some country-western music, which she probably did. She says “Nyeah” exactly the same way. She’s totally goofing when she does it, and she cracks me up every time. Not everybody gets Daisy’s silly sense of humor, probably because she doesn’t have the language to make up jokes, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t funny. She uses a lot of physical humor and plays with sound. Like those old Three Stooges cartoons.

When she said “Yeah” this time, I wasn’t laughing. I knew she meant it.

“What do you dream about Daisy?” I asked on her next round-trip.

“The key is in the clock!” she said loudly, not looking at me, not looking at anything, her eyes unfocused or maybe focused on something far away that I couldn’t see.

“What?” I asked, totally floored. Not only was her response totally bizarre, non-nonsensical, and just plain, well, dream-like I guess, but it didn’t sound like Daisy talking. I don’t mean her voice was different, or non-Daisyish, but she doesn’t talk like that. For one thing, she hardly ever uses “the little words” when she speaks, especially ‘the’. For another, whenever she does talk like that she’s usually repeating something she heard someone else say. But it didn’t sound like that, it sounded like she needed to tell me something important. Plus, it didn’t make sense that she was being echolaic, because who would say something like that?

Then it dawned on me. Nobody would say something like that on the Outside, but in the Palace it might make perfect dream-sense.

“Yes, the key is in the clock,” she repeated, nodding gravely, like whatever she was talking about was really serious. At that point, I started getting chills.

“You have to tell Mommy,” she said next, still not looking at me, not acting like she was giving me orders. She was holding onto the tree, balancing motionless on the fence. It seemed like she was talking to herself, telling herself what she had to do. She nodded her head as she spoke and repeated, “Yes, you have to tell mommy.”

“What do you have to tell mommy?”

“Too late, too late, he’s coming,”

“Who’s coming Daisy?” I asked, then blurted out what I really wanted to say, needed to say, if only to see what kind of reaction she gave me when I asked, “Is it the Dragon King?”

She looked directly at me for the first time. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t nod or shake her head. Just looked at me. “Is the Dragon King coming?” I asked, staring right back at her, certain I’d get some kind of clear reaction while we were making eye contact.

“The Dragon King,” she repeated and a smile brightened her face. A smile? That didn’t make sense at all. You can’t look at the Dragon King and feel happy. Was she just echoing me? Did the Dragon King mean nothing more to her than a group of sounds coming out my mouth?

“Bus!” she shouted happily, hopping off the fence as the yellow flashing lights came into view up the block. She tightened the straps of her backpack and hopped up and down in excitement a few times as the bus came to a stop in front of us. There was no sense in trying to ask her anything else in the last few seconds we had before the door opened, so I just waved.

“See you later, Daisy,” I said, not expecting an answer, or even a look back in my direction, because she almost never did. But like everything else that had happened, Daisy wasn’t following her typically predictable behavior.

“See you later, Chris!” she shouted, turning around and giving me a huge Daisy grin. “See you tonight!”

 _____________

Plan A

“I think she wants to meet us there…in the Palace,” I told Dad excitedly, when he came down for breakfast. Mom was still upstairs sleeping, so we had enough private time to talk about what happened while we were waiting for Daisy’s bus. “When she said, ‘See you tonight!’ I just know she was talking about meeting me in her dreams.”

“What did she say when you asked her if the Dragon King was coming?” Dad asked, not even half as excited as I thought he’d be.

“I already told you, Dad,” I huffed, moving from frustrated to pissed off much quicker than I thought I would. “She just repeated ‘The Dragon King’ with a big smile.”

“A smile,” Dad repeated, not smiling. “Don’t you think that’s weird? He’s not exactly Captain Kangaroo.”

“Who’s Captain Kangaroo?” I asked, instantly regretting the question. Leave it to Dad to throw in some ancient reference to a kid show host from his childhood that he then had to explain for five minutes before getting back on topic.

“And what exactly did she say about the key and the clock?” he asked, after describing Captain Kangaroo’s bowl-shaped haircut in excruciating detail.

“She didn’t say anything else, Dad. Just, ‘The key is in the clock,’ okay?”

I was practically shouting at that point. I’m not sure why I got so upset. It’s not like Dad doesn’t always ask a lot of questions, or go off on tangents when we’re talking about something. That’s all part of his Dad-ness. I just wanted him to feel the same excitement I was buzzed about, instead of mulling everything over while he sat there wearing his scientist hat.

“I’m worried about this,” he said, staring at me with a frown. That really threw me off. It was one thing not to get pumped up about my theory, but worried? When he told me why, I got worried too. “First, she says this riddle about the clock. She has never said anything remotely like that in her entire life. She just doesn’t talk that way. Then she smiles when you talk about the Dragon King, who is definitely not some warm, fuzzy Cookie Monster kind of guy. Maybe none of this means anything and she doesn’t even dream about the Palace. It’s not like she said, ‘Yeah, I go to the Dream Palace and know the Dragon King, so why don’t you meet me there tonight’? And even if she did say something that clear-cut, and we managed to find her in the Palace, I’m worried things could spin out of control and it might…bleed over into our world.”

“How would it bleed over? What could go wrong?”

“Anything. Everything. We’re dealing with dreams here, Chris. There isn’t a scientist alive who fully understands what dreams are and can prove it. Some say they’re just random neurons firing up disjointed memories. Some say dreams are an overlapping dimension. Then you can throw all the mystical theories into the mix. No matter how you explain them, if there is an objective reality to dreams, then who knows how our actions in that world might affect our lives here. What exactly are we trying to do with Daisy, if we meet her in the Palace? Are we trying to rescue her? Find the part of Daisy you think is ‘missing’? ‘Fix’ the real Daisy in some way? What if Daisy doesn’t want to be fixed? What if she’s even more blissfully happy in her dream world than she is in ours? Maybe she isn’t afraid of the Dragon King at all. She might be even more fearless in her dream world than she is here. We could infect her dreams and maybe even her waking consciousness with our own fears. You know how amazing her memory isif Daisy has a traumatic dream experience she might remember it forever. She could bring it with her into all kinds of real-life situations where she was never afraid before. There are a zillion things that could go wrong, so we better know for sure what we want to do that’s ‘right’ before we go riding in there like the cavalry with some lofty agenda, then screw things up and ruin her perfect dream world. If she starts having nightmares all the time because of us, that’s going to seriously impact her happiness here. And we both know that regardless of the difficulties she has to deal with, Daisy is the happiest kid on the planet. I do not want to mess with that in any way, shape or form. Do you understand what I’m saying, Chris?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I moped. I really did get it, by the way, I wasn’t just saying that. I was as worried as he was after hearing all that stuff. But I was worried about Daisy too. I still believed the Dragon King did something to her and she needed our help. Yes, I was afraid we might mess with Daisy’s dreams and maybe even her mind. But I was also afraid of what Daisy’s life would be like if we didn’t try to help her. And even though I don’t want to admit it, what scared me most was Dad bailing out of the whole mission. I sure didn’t want to find myself awake in the Dream Palace without him by my side and the Dragon King bearing down on me.

I sat there for a minute thinking. Amazingly, Dad didn’t launch into another speech, so I was able to concentrate long enough to come up with a pretty amazing idea.

“The Prime Directive,” I said excitedly. Being an even bigger Star Trek geek than me, his eyes immediately lit up and a big smile erased his frown.

“Yes, the Prime Directive. Non-interference with alien life and culture. It doesn’t completely relate to the situation…we’re not introducing advanced technology that’s going to interfere with the dream world…but I get what you’re going for.”

“Yeah! We’ll just be explorers…or detectives,” I said, totally excited again. “We’ll find Daisy and ask her what happened and what’s going on there, just like you said. But we won’t do anything she doesn’t want us to do and we’ll only try to help her if she asks us, or if she’s being hurt or scared, or something bad like that.”

“That sounds right to me,” Dad said with a big grin, giving me an awkward first bump that only grazed my knuckles. He really hasn’t gotten the hang of that yet. We practiced a few times while he gave me more tips on having a lucid dream and staying awake once I had one.

“Once we’re awake, we’ll try to get to the Dream Palace, if we don’t wake up there in the first place,” Dad said, getting down to the nitty gritty. “We’ll need a place to meet, so we don’t get lost or waste all our lucid energy just trying to find each other.”

“How about the terrace?” I suggested. “It’s just on the other side of the door, so it would be easy to find each other there.”

“Good idea,” he nodded, rubbing my shoulder. “Then we’ll go inside together and see if we can find Daisy.”

“Maybe she’ll be there tonight, like she said this morning,” I said excitedly.

“Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. Maybe we will, or won’t, or just one of us makes it. Just don’t get your hopes up too high. It could take a long time before we have a lucid dream. And even when we do, we make not be able to get to the Dream Palace right away either.”

“What if one of us makes it to the terrace and the other one doesn’t show up?”

Dad stopped to think about it. “I’m not sure you should go inside alone if it’s your first time in a lucid dream. That could get a little scary if the King shows up. If I’m not there already, or I don’t show up after a while, maybe you should go somewhere else or wake yourself up.”

“Yeah, I nodded eagerly. “But what about you, if I’m not there?”

“I’ll look around, see what I can find out. If I find Daisy, I’ll ask her what’s going on, like we talked about, but I’ll stick to the Prime directive.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I smiled. And with that simple statement and the much improved fist bump that followed, our quest had begun.

 _____________

Awake

I didn’t wake up in my dreams that night, so I’ll never know if Daisy was waiting or not. Dad didn’t have a lucid dream either. It took him five nights before he had his first wakeful dream and another three nights before he made it to the terrace. Me? Nothing happened for a couple weeks. I didn’t wake up in any of my dreams, and I didn’t have a dream where I was in the Palace either. Dad and I got together every morning at breakfast and shared our dream updates. I got more bummed with each day I had nothing to report. Dad was doing really well, which made me feel even more depressed, and I’ll admit it, jealous too. He started exploring the Palace on his own after I didn’t show up for a while, but he didn’t see Daisy, or the Dragon King, or anything special, or mysterious or scary, so he was starting to feel a little down too.

Then one night it happened, just like Dad said it would. I was dreaming about Central Park. I love Central Park, and I dream about it almost as often as I go there, which is about once a week. In this dream, everything looked totally psychedelic, like the cartoons in Yellow Submarine would look if they were real. The grass was dayglo green and the trees were neon-colored with flowers the size of umbrellas. I was gawking at how amazing and weird and beautiful everything looked when it happened. I knew all this stuff couldn’t be real. I knew I had to be dreaming. As soon as I realized I was dreaming, I remembered I could do something. So I did what Dad suggested and raised my hands in front of my face (he said to use my hands because they’d always be there, no matter what I was dreaming about). As soon as I looked at my hands I got that zillion megawatt jolt he told me about, like I had just been plugged into a light socket. It was so incredible. I was awake. I was dreamingand I was awake!

After I looked at my hands, Dad told me to look at four other things around me so I wouldn’t fall “asleep” again. I looked at the pink clouds and the ultra-green meadow and the electric flowers and the angel-cloud sun and then back at my hands again, which gave me another jolt. The second time it happened I realized what the jolt was. It was power. The power to do all the awesome stuff Dad said I’d be able to do. So I decided to fly, of course. And I did. Like Superman. I jumped off the ground with my arms in front of me and just kept going higher and higher. It was amazing.

After a few seconds, I could feel gravity pulling me back down so I looked at my hands again and got another jolt and I tore through the sky like a screaming rocket. It was even more incredible than Dad said it would be, because it was actually happening to me…and it felt as real as anything I’ve ever experienced on the Outside.

Unfortunately, the thrill didn’t last much longer. I felt gravity tugging at me again and even though I looked at my hands and got another jolt, I kept sinking lower and lower while the sky grew darker and darker. I wondered what was going on, but when I looked down I realized why I couldn’t keep flying. The giant towers of the Dream Palace were looming closer and closer. It was nighttime again.