Dream A Dream

What is it to dream a dream

The city of Veridian was a monument to the practical, a sprawling geometry of iron, glass, and perpetual shade. Above its tiered skyscrapers, the sky was not blue, nor black, but a permanent sheet of pale, sulfurous gray�"a condition mandated by relentless industrial output.

Here, in the highest, yet dimmest, spire lived Elara, a cartographer by trade, mapping sewer lines and pneumatic transport routes. Her tools were precise, her life measured, yet her spirit was forever leaning against the window, straining to pierce the celestial varnish of the smog.

Dream a dream

Elara’s true sanctuary was a hidden room beneath the tower’s unused antenna array, where she had salvaged fragments of discarded astronomical equipment. She had a cracked lens, a rusted azimuth, and a single, ancient text bound in verdigris leather, titled The Doctrine of Internal Ascent.

The doctrine did not speak of rocket fuel or velocity; it spoke of necessity. It claimed that the universe was not something to be traveled to, but something to be willed into being.

Every night, Elara sat, polishing the cracked lens until it shimmered, trying to hold the impossible image of a nebula in her mind. Her dreams were not restful; they were workshops. She dreamt of indigo seas and diamond dust, of gravity defying the laws she meticulously mapped during the day.

She dreamt until the desire became an ache, a persistent, physical pressure behind her sternum. This ache, she realized, was the dream’s first attempt at locomotion. It was the seed, pushing upward through the concrete of her reality.

One night, the old book fell open to a page illustrated with a figure sitting still, yet trailing comet tails behind them. The accompanying passage read: The distance to the stars is but the circumference of the self.

Fly a fantasy

The cracked lens, which she called the Oculus, seemed to hum after that night. When she held it up, it still showed only gray static, yet now, the darkness beyond the glass felt responsive.

Elara closed her eyes and held the Oculus against her forehead. She did not seek to observe the sky; she sought to inhabit it. She forced her mind to discard the concepts of pressure, atmosphere, and distance. She forced the very notion of Veridian to dissolve behind her eyelids.

If you cannot travel to the imagination, she whispered, recalling the doctrine, then let the imagination travel to you.

And with a silent, internal roar, she flew.

It was not a physical flight, but an expansion. She felt herself stretch past the confines of bone and skin, past the gray ceiling of the city. Her consciousness became a spectral light, slipping through light years of unmapped quiet.

She flew through the Ribbon of Cygnus, a glorious serpent of gas and fire, and saw that the colors were richer, the silence deeper, than any photograph could ever hint. She did not merely see the stars; she felt their age, their cold, enduring brilliance. She flew past the Pillars of Creation, not as static clouds, but as monumental, breathing lungs of the cosmos.

This was her fantasy: not to escape the world, but to momentarily overwrite its rules. She was a passenger on the sheer audacity of her own longing. She was flying on pure, unadulterated belief.

Reach the stars

When Elara opened her eyes, she was back in the dim room, the Oculus cold against her palm. But something had fundamentally shifted. The oppressive gray outside the window no longer felt like a barrier; it felt like a canvas waiting for its master stroke.

The Doctrine of Internal Ascent had promised that the journey was not about finding the stars, but about making them relevant. Elara knew the true challenge was not bridging the light years, but bridging the gap between her internal vision and Veridian’s external skepticism.

The next evening, she gathered every scrap of reflective material, every lens, every mirror she possessed. Using the Oculus as the primary focusing element, she built a complex, fractal projector on the rooftop, aiming it directly into the thickest layer of the smog.

She didn't use electricity or mechanical power. She focused the strength of her accumulated dreams.

She closed her eyes again, and instead of taking flight, she channeled the memory of the cosmos�"the velvet blackness, the shocking gold of supernova remnants, the deep red pulse of dying giants�"and forced the energy of that memory through the Oculus.

She was reaching the stars not by rising, but by pulling them down, using her mind as a celestial grappling hook.

A single, vibrant streak of magenta sliced through the gray. Then followed a spray of gold, a scattershot of emerald dust. The smog, thick and particulate, acted not as an obscurer, but as a colossal, atmospheric projector screen. Elara was painting the sky with the ink of her fantasy.

She stood on the spire, her hair whipping in the sudden breeze generated by the heat differential. She was not a cartographer anymore; she was a creator, a stellar architect. She had reached the stars by making the space above her head worthy of them.

And what you see will be

Below, in the measured streets of Veridian, the world stopped.

For the first time in generations, people looked up and saw color that didn't come from a neon sign. They saw swirling, impossible patterns of light: the spiral arm of the Milky Way rendered in shimmering, fractal detail upon the smog ceiling.

Skeptics hurried out with instruments, expecting a meteorological anomaly, a complex laser display, or a pollutant reversal. But the lights were too organic, too vast, too deeply reflective of something ancient and true. They moved with the silent, majestic indifference of actual celestial bodies.

The children, who had never known a night sky, pointed and gasped, naming the new colors. The hard edges of Veridian softened under the spectral light.

And Elara, watching from above, understood the final instruction of the doctrine.

The stars were real, but they were also a manifestation of her intent. The fantasy she flew had become the framework of reality. The grayness of Veridian had not been overcome by science or technology, but by the sheer, stubborn will of a single, powerful dream.

She smiled, feeling the vast, echoing silence of the cosmos finally settle over the rattling gears of the city.

What they saw�"what everyone in Veridian now saw�"was not just light on gas. It was the proof that the universe bends to the determined heart. The new sky was boundless, mysterious, and full of infinite promise.

It was because she had dreamt it, flown it, and reached for it.

And what they saw, ultimately, was themselves reflected in the glorious, newly illuminated dark.