This was not as nice a thing as it might at first sound. In his dreams, he was a thing. Like the holy grail or the golden fleece. He was an object of some sacred quest, a hostage for the hopeful, trapped in a silver ball on an ivory pedestal, watched over by a wild white owl. Sometimes it kept it's yellow gaze fixed upon him, watching him watch it from his crystal prison; other times the owl simply stood sentinel, gazing out over a sprawling construct: a labyrinth made of sparkling sand and dreams discarded. He thought, these times, he might escape, but the owl always caught him.
You are the most important thing in the world, it told him, for without you, she would not be here, and as long as I have you, she will not leave.
And a laugh like warm evenings and violin strings would haunt him until he woke.
And then, when he turned thirteen and Sarah went away to graduate school, he stopped dreaming all together.
He would only connect the loss of his dreams to Sarah's leaving years later, when the adolescent surety of being the center of the waking world had faded somewhat and he was getting close to seventeen years old. For gradually, he had begun to suspect that he wasn't the center of anything, anywhere, and his own life did not really belong to him. He put all of this in the letter to Sarah, away at Meredith College, studying journalism and trade writing and practical things like that, after she decided not to come home for Christmas her final year.
"I feel so peripheral," he wrote, "like I'm on the edge of everyone's vision. Mom said that everyone feels like that at my age, and that even you went through it when I was a baby. But when she said it, she didn't look at me. I tried to get her to meet my eyes, and I swear to god that she couldn't. I think the last time somebody looked directly at me ws the last time you were here for a visit, Sarah. I still haven't had a single dream since you moved away. Though I only ever had the one dream in the first place; the one I told you about..."
He waited and waited for a response. It would be another month nearly, the next time the moon went dark, before he got one.