• I have seen the dreamers die.

    At the hands of a harsh reality, many a mind has succumbed to the darkness and bleak unimaginative state that is Real Life to those who long ago had forsaken their gods.

    Logic has become the Adversary, and he sends out his riders to sew seeds of disillusionments in the fertile fields of the child’s dreams.

    Before one who dreams there is set a puzzle box called Life. The dreamer works ceaselessly to open the box, filled with hope that what they find within will have been worth the time, as it is with dreams. Every piece is slid back and forth carefully, and as they decipher more of the puzzle, they lose more of the pieces.

    With the first piece locked into place, there are lost the gods of dreams. When the puzzle is completed, there will be no wonder of the powers that created the dreams. The onyx palaces will be empty once more, and no light shall shine from the wastelands in the far north.

    With the second piece goes the wonder of celestial things. No longer does the moon hold a strange fascination--for why would a simple rock have ever been that interesting in the first place? Gone are the moon-dwellers. Gone are the men with the wide, wide smiles. Then again, the dreamer’s puzzle-tainted mind wonders, were they ever there at all?

    With the third piece of the puzzle, there go the pleasant things of years past. Childhood is just a faded memory once again. The wonder and excitement is gone. All innocence is brutally beaten and locked away to become bitter and full of hatred of the dreams it once loved.

    And so it continues, until the dreamer reaches the last piece. And the last piece, as it is locked into place, sends a silent reminder to the dreamer that all dreamers die and they are but an inch from death themselves,

    And so they despair. They tear open the puzzle box’s chambers and weep at the emptiness they find within. The scholars and the scientists dry their tears and say ‘Come with us, and we will show you a beauty greater than those dreams of yours that have abandoned you.’ The broken dreamer goes, but finds no delight in anything he sees.

    The world no longer delights him. He yearns for that which he has lost, and he sleeps his life away trying to regain the innocence he once had. (When he finds it again, he does not want what it has become.)

    When it seems all hope has deserted him, the dreamer gives one last cry--a desperate prayer to the gods he has forsaken--a cry that is heard from the onyx halls to the crawling void of the abyss, and he begins to go back to the childhood he lost so long ago. He takes the key given him by Those Who Came Before and unlocks a realm of dreams unimagined by any but himself.

    And he dies.

    Do not weep for the dreamer. Do not be sad for him. He has gone to be the everlasting king of a land that never dies. Visit him in your own dreams, instead. Remember his life, and sing praises to the gods of the dreams. Dance on the mountaintops, and let your voices carry to the high Unknown peak where the gods watch their world with contented and drowsy eyes.

    Though the dreamer dies, never stop dreaming.