Once upon a time there was an outlaw. She was also a Queen and a Goddess. She served the free peoples of the world and worked to keep them free. But the humans she later dreamed into Pixieland couldn't get along with the creatures there from the beginning. Defending the world she made also made her quite a few enemies, and when it cost her the crown, she began bounty hunting to conceal her identity. She had many adventures and became a folk hero. And then she woke up. Good morning. This is my story. I was just a kid in the waking world. Focused on learning or creating. It was music, art, and creative imagination that were my friends. I was a tomboy, a nerd, and a bookworm. The kind of kid who loved bugs, dinosaurs, nature, and science. I was allowed down the street to attend the corner church for their week long Summer evening VBS event. But I didn't fit in that well. Too tomboy for the other girls, too not-a-boy for the other outdoorsy kids, too sheltered to talk about current media with the other nerdy kids. Classic undiagnosed 90's kid social navigation. Am I right? I could, however, talk music. This was often where I connected with other people. My love of language, sound, styles, and so on only grew as I did. With a head full of beats and a delayed circadian rhythm, every night was just me with the radio of my mind. Mostly a chaotic ADHD-spliced soundboard with original arrangement. But when I was tired and ready to sleep, I'd make my own tune. Like keys to a lock that changed slightly every night. du-i-tu-du ta la la la du-i-tu-du-i-tu-du-i-tu-du Tra ra la la la, Du du du di, du, tu-du-i-tu-du-i-tu du-i-tu-du ta la la la, tra ra la la la, Mmm, mm Hmhm Hmm She out smarted and out maneuvered her enemies, like the ones she was currently outrunning. Fleeing along the coastal road to reach her forest hideaway, she saw a bright flash overhead. Something suddenly shifted. There was a thunderous crack and a ripping sound! The pod tore into her atmosphere. The streaking blue flames wrapped around it as it crashed. Something was off, not wrong, but something novel, unrecognizable. From the pod wreckage, dust swirling, flames now orange, the smoke in thick billowing plumes, stepped a boy. She felt him before she saw him. What? Another presence, but how? Who was he? What was he, an alien? He wasn't like anyone else in Pixieland. Something wrong, almost uncanny. How could she feel him? His presence had a weight to it, she felt him like a pressure change, and he felt safe. By appearance she assumed they were probably close to the same age, after all he wasn't much taller than her. It was impossible to say why at that moment, but everything about him was so strange. When the two of them first spoke, their speech sounded distorted. Like meaning bridging a gap that voices could not. Like a force-field between them that had to be overcome. They had to try at communication. It took a while but they had worked it out. From his point of view it all made perfect sense. He was simply a dreamer from Japan, who naturally had a vision from a beetle in his yard so he listened for an SOS and when he heard the sound of a song, he followed it, which led him from a space palace to Pixieland. He had followed her song, music always playing the connective tissue. But wait. That would mean he wasn't made of that place, that he had entered it. He had entered her dream. Reliable, goofy, cool, a little wiser like a big brother and …too good to be true. No one can truly see inside any other, right? Besides, the idea of someone seeing inside her dream felt like an intruder to her mind; this was an interior space, her dream, the world of her muse and art. But there he was. He was standing on soil made of her soul. Seeing by the light of her intellect. Breathing the air of her psyche. Looking into the eyes of her heart, glimpsing the inside. He was completely alien to her. Her heart pounded. She pointed to the night sky and said, “So if you are a prince from beyond the stars, even as queen we're equals here.” That was the moment that the boy, a proud other-worldly prince, became her friend. For years onward they dreamed in duet, and he grew into her teammate, protector, hero, and oniisan. My eyes opened. When I woke up, I felt almost homesick, or like I'd just lost something I could not define. I felt like I had something true snatched away. It was devastatingly real, but I knew better, after all, it's just a dream. du-i-tu-du du-i-tu-du-i-tu-tu-du, du-i-tu-duo, no, no, ma-ma-ma maybe he was, wa-la-la-la wa-wa was he was Was he was he real? He felt, he could feel, I felt him, was the dream real, or du-di-du did he just feel like he felt real, Tra ra-la-la-la Du du du di, du Hmm
