Disclaimer: The Sandman and the character "Morpheus" are the property of DC Comics and Neil Gaiman. I use these properties without permission for free entertainment purposes only.
Thanks go out to VulcanElf and Mengde for giving this story a thorough once-over.
---
Lub Hli Npau Suav
By Kaj-Nrig
---
He points at the moon.
Look at how big it is, he squeals. It's probably a full moon, huh?
Don't point at the moon, chides Mother. If you do, it will come down and slice your ear in your sleep.
He does not believe her, but he stops nonetheless.
---
That night, he dreams. Or he thinks that he dreams. Which, he later reflects, means the same thing.
He sits under a blanket of black dotted with flecks the color of pearl. He feels under him the soft texture of his bed, but upon glancing, he sees only a field of grass. A wind sweeps through the field in a wave, exposing each blade for the briefest of moments to the pale starlight. The breeze flows over him, and though they say that you never feel the wind in dreams, his skin forms gooseflesh and he shivers. Moments later, he can feel the soft pressure of the warm blankets he covered himself with before going to sleep, and he is warm again in this empty starlit prairie that is his bed.
Suddenly, he knows he is not alone. He looks around, sees nobody, but is still wary, for whenever you feel you are not alone in a dream – whether you are dreaming or not – you should trust that feeling. The obsidian sky casts its light on him, and he realizes that there is a moon; perhaps there has always been a moon, and only now has he realized it has been watching him.
The moon and the sky appear to him to shrink, or maybe he grows – when in dreams, if in dreams, one can never be sure – and soon he is standing next to the both of them.
Some say there is a face on the moon. In his dream, or his thoughts of a dream, the moon looks at him with a stern, emotionless expression; the inky black sky is its shroud and hair, the most distant stars its eyes. It is pale beyond death, yet he knows that it is not dead. At least not in any mortal understanding of the word. He wonders briefly if this person—this sky—this being is simply a figment of his imagination, a creation of his mind, or if he – for it looks like a man of high rank, though how he knows this he is not sure – is a visitor from a place outside his consciousness (and the ramifications of that possibility frighten him).
I am both.
The boy starts, but he soon finds that he was not surprised at all. Is this a dream? he asks.
Do you not know when you are dreaming?
I do… usually. I think most people do. But sometimes I wake up and I have new memories, but I don't know where they come from. Is that what a dream is?
The dark, pale man is silent. Perhaps, he says after a time.
Then what are you?
I go by many names. Some call me Dream.
So this is a dream.
Perhaps.
What does that mean?
Perhaps this is a dream. Perhaps this is reality. That is irrelevant. You will still wake up, and you will still wonder if this was all a dream.
He thinks on this. He wonders whether it matters if this is a dream or not. If it is one, does that mean it never happened?
That is the purpose of this dream, little one.
He looks back at the man, confused, but he sees he is only looking up at the pale moon framed by the slate-black sky. There are no longer any stars. Perhaps there were never any to begin with.
It must continue, Dreamer.
With those words, the dream (if it is a dream) continues. Two figures appear within the slightly shaded craters of the large moon, a man and a woman, and they descend toward him. The light from the moon – or is the light from Dream? – strikes the blade of a small knife in the woman's hand, as if to foretell coming events, and he is mesmerized and terrified of it before he recognizes the faces of the two descendants.
They are Mother and Father.
Don't point at the moon, Mother speaks, though this time her voice is different, multi-faceted, as if the Dream King is a part of her. If you do…
They reach him, though he tries to flee, and hold his body still, and for just a moment, he wakes up and feels their weight on him and the warmth of the bed and the cool wind blowing past him and the grass crushing between his fingers and the texture of the blanket.
He feels the moon at the back of his ear, and then there is a small pressure and a pain and
He wakes up abruptly. He does not understand where he is. He struggles against a knife that doesn't exist. He kicks at parents who are not there. The grass between his fingers slips away like so many fine particles of dust, and the wind flutters out the bedroom door as he opens his eyes.
He looks up in his bed, sees the darkened ceiling, the circular light bulb in the middle of the room, and he wonders if he imagined they were the sky and the moon. Had he been dreaming?
There was a moment when he woke up. Or perhaps he only thought he woke up. He is no longer sure, just as he was unsure if he dreamed.
It suddenly occurs to him to check his ear, and he presses his fingers to the back of his right ear. They come away wet with blood.
One thing he can be sure of is that he has been cut behind the ear. The boy yells for help.
---
As he grows older, he often returns to that night. As he lies in a new bed in a new home, he thinks back to the dream, or perhaps the thought of a dream, and to waking... or perhaps the thought of waking.
Was he hurt by the moon, and Mother's superstition come true? Was he hurt by Mother and Father, for them to prove a point?
It is no matter. He no longer points at the moon.
The wound he suffered has long since healed—he feels for it—in fact, there is no trace of it at all.
He finds himself wondering yet again, there in the inky darkness of his new room, illuminated solely by the light filtered through pale white shutters, if it was all just a dream. Perhaps he only dreamed he woke up to a bloody ear.
The night grows longer and he closes his eyes to sleep.
When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget.
He does not open his eyes to look for the King of Dreams, though he heard him quite nearby. He lies in bed, and he feels the sheets that tickle him like blades of grass, feels the warmth of the blankets give him gooseflesh. He does not differentiate between the waking and the sleeping.
Perhaps it is all just a dream.
-END-
Notes:
Lub Hli Npau Suav – Literally meaning "The Moon Dream" in Hmong, it can also translate to "The Imagined Moon," "The Moon of Dreams," "The Moon's Dream," "The Moon is Dreaming," or "The Dreaming Moon."