A Dream Come True

1. Prologue

Prologue

The last thing Keisha Henry could remember was being in a very long, very tedious study session for tomorrow’s mythology test. She had never fallen asleep in a study group before, but she must have this time because she was alone and surrounded by fog so thick she couldn’t see a thing through it. She had to be dreaming.

The fog didn’t bother her—except that it was cold, so cold she shivered. She couldn’t remember ever having a dream before in which she could feel something that intensely. For that matter, she couldn’t remember knowing she was dreaming while she was still asleep.

Wandering in the fog was boring at first but rapidly became unnerving. Keisha knew dreams were supposed to be shaped by the subconscious mind, and as incoherent as they seemed, they often had some psychological purpose. What could her subconscious possibly be trying to tell her with a bleak and unchanging landscape?

She hoped it wasn’t a suggestion that her life was going nowhere. There were days when she felt like that, times when she wondered if all the honors and AP classes, all the extracurricular activities, all the efforts to create a perfect transcript so she could get into the perfect college would really pay off. One of her sister’s friends had done everything right and still not gotten into the school of her choice. Another had gotten into Harvard and then been unhappy there.

Keisha tried not to obsess over the future, but there were days when she wondered whether she was making progress or just wandering in a figurative fog—much like the dream fog that now surrounded her.

Just when she thought she could no longer stand the monotony, she saw a flash of brownish red in the fog. That had to be the hair of Patrick O’Riley, one of the guys in the study group.

“Patrick!” she called. He was far from being her favorite person. Actually, he was pretty close to being her least favorite—but at this point, she would have hung out with her worst enemy in preference to being alone.

“Keisha?” he asked as he blundered in her direction. He had a big smile on his face when he finally emerged.

“It is you. I was beginning to think I was alone here. Where are we?”

Keisha was tempted to point out their surroundings were just something her subconscious dredged up, but what would be the point of telling a character in her dream that?

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything quite this unvarying before. Meeting you is the first break in the monotony I’ve had in what seems like hours.”

“Think the rest of the study group is here?” asked Patrick, looking around and squinting at the fog as if he would find a way to see through it.

“If you and I are, it’s a good bet they are, too,” replied Keisha. Since the subconscious often used recent memories as raw material, she wouldn’t be surprised to see more of the people she had been with when she fell asleep.

Sure enough, one by one her study buddies came staggering out of the fog: Yong Choi, Yasmin Sassani, Mateo Reyes, Fatima Hadad, and Thanos Logios.

At first, they were overjoyed to see each other, but that feeling only lasted until they remembered they still had no idea where they were or how they had gotten there.

“This has to be a dream,” muttered Yong, staring into the swirling fog.

Keisha was surprised again. She’d never before had a character in a dream allude to the fact that it was a dream. Perhaps getting very little sleep over several days was having more of an impact on her than she cared to admit.

“I’ve never had such a dream that felt so real,” said Fatima in her usual quiet voice.

“Real, maybe, but not realistic,” Mateo pointed out. “Endless fog? Where in the real world would you find something like that?”

“There’s no light source,” added Yasmin. “I mean, obviously there’s light, but where’s it coming from? It’s…it’s as if the fog itself is glowing.”

Then a long, mournful howl made all of them jump, even the usually stoic Yong. Keisha shivered again, but this time not from the cold.

Clearly, they were not alone.

They did not have to wonder too long what was sharing this foggy wilderness with them, because an enormous black wolf leaped out of the fog, fangs bared, eyes flashing. Everyone had the same reflex: turn and run. However, what were the odds any of them could outrun a wolf? Probably not much better than the odds of beating a wolf in a fight. Perhaps they could gang up on the wolf—but what if there were more wolves hiding in the fog?

“Phobetor!” shouted a stern voice from somewhere nearby. “Leave them alone!”

The wolf growled in the general direction from which the voice had come, but then, much to the students’ surprise, it turned and trotted away.

“That was…anticlimactic,” said Patrick. Keisha figured none of the guys were going to admit that they had been just as scared as the girls.

“Hello!” called Mateo. “Who’s out there?” Aside from a distant echo of his own voice, he got no answer.

“Great! We don’t have to worry about the wolf, just about a disembodied voice,” said Yong.

“I know where we are,” announced Thanos.

“Well,” prompted Yasmin. “Don’t keep us in suspense.”

“This is the land of dreams—Demos Oneiroi the Greeks called it—in the Underworld,” Thanos said, as if he were describing the weather.

“The what?” asked Patrick. “You mean, like the Greek mythological Underworld? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Because there are so many much more rational explanations for a never-ending fog bank populated by enormous wolves?” asked Mateo, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“It’s a dream, genius!” snapped Patrick. “Just like Yong said. Isn’t that obvious?”

Yong looked a little surprised. He and Patrick didn’t normally get along, let alone agree with each other.

“How can we all be having the same dream, though?” asked Yasmin. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“I’m dreaming, and the rest of you are just characters in my dream,” replied Patrick, echoing what Keisha had been thinking only minutes before. Hearing him say it made her question her original assumption, though. If all these people were conjured up by her subconscious, how could they act so exactly as they did in real life? She’d never had a dream experience with so much real-world detail.

“I’m not in your dream,” said Yasmin.

“You have been before,” said Patrick, flashing her his most mischievous grin. “You weren’t wearing quite as much, though.”

Fatima looked disgusted, and Mateo smacked Patrick in the arm. “Don’t be such a pig, man! Anyway, this is no time for flirting.”

“I wouldn’t call it flirting,” muttered Yasmin, still glaring at Patrick.

“Sorry,” said Patrick, raising his hands, though he didn’t sound that sorry. “I was just joking.”

“Getting back to the real question,” said Keisha loudly enough to get their attention, “something weird is happening. I’m not saying we’re really in the Underworld—”

“I just meant we were dreaming about being there, not that we were there,” Thanos said quickly.

Keisha shook her head impatiently. “Yeah, I knew that’s what you meant. So could we all be sharing a dream of the Underworld? Most scientists would say no, we couldn’t share the same dream, but there are a small number of cases in which mutual dreaming may have occurred. Before right now I would have said it was impossible, but it’s the explanation that best fits the facts.”

“How is such a thing possible?” asked Yong.

“I don’t know,” Keisha replied, playing with her hair as she spoke. “I’ve never liked the evidence for extrasensory perception, but hypothetically that might be the answer. We were all really close together when we dozed off. We were sitting around a table, right? And we were all thinking about the same thing. If a telepathic connection is possible at all, the conditions would have been good for it.”

Patrick snorted. “Seriously?”

“Perhaps a mutual dream would also be a more vivid one, because it’s generated by the minds of several people, not just one,” suggested Yong.

“Who cares? If this is a dream, I just want to wake up,” said Fatima. She looked a little panicked and sounded as if she were about to hyperventilate.

“In ancient times people believed that dreams were a message from the gods—” started Thanos.

“So now the Greek gods are real?” asked Patrick, looking as if he was readying another joke.

Thanos looked at him with obvious annoyance. “Of course not. But maybe someone who does exist is trying to tell us something.”

“That we should actually have read the material?” asked Mateo. He seemed to be trying hard not to laugh, but to Keisha it wasn’t funny. She had been irritated that only three of them had done all the reading.

She looked carefully at Thanos, who, whatever else could be said about him, had done the assigned reading—and considerably more. From his contributions to the study group, she could tell he had read everything about ancient Greece he could get his hands on, including many of the ancient Greek texts from which the myths came, though she had only realized how knowledgeable he was during the group meetings. Nobody else in the group had really known him that well before, either. All she really knew about him was that he was very good at math. Frankly, he had ended up in the group mostly because he was an exchange student from Greece, and some of the others had the stereotypic idea that he must, therefore, know about Greek mythology. Actually, Patrick had thought Greeks still worshiped the ancient gods, but Keisha tried hard not to think about that—it made her grind her teeth too much.

“Thanos, why do you think we’re here?” she asked finally.

“I wish I knew,” he replied. “If we’re here for a reason, though, we should find out what it is, right?”

“What makes you think this is the Underworld?” asked Yong. “I don’t remember anything in the book about the Underworld being filled with fog.”

“The descriptions in ancient texts vary,” Thanos replied, “and the Underworld wasn’t described as being necessarily the same throughout. That the land of dreams could be all foggy makes a certain amount of sense. What got me thinking this was the Demos Oneiroi, though, is that Phobetor is the name of the god of nightmares. He often assumes the form of animals—and the voice called the wolf Phobetor.”

“Under that theory, whose voice did we hear?” asked Yong.

“Morpheus, the god of dreams,” answered Thanos as if it was obvious. “He’d be the one in charge here.”

“I don’t remember that part at all,” said Fatima, sounding less panicked than before but still a little worried. Dream or no dream, the test was still tomorrow, and the idea of sleeping through their review time seemed to be getting on her nerves.

“Morpheus and Phobetor were two of the children of Hypnos, god of sleep,” Thanos explained. “There were others as well, called Oneiroi, who together were responsible for all dreams. They entered the mortal world through two gates. False dreams entered through the gate of ivory, while true ones, particularly those inspired by the gods, entered through the gate of horn.”

“I’m reminded of how much I need to review,” said Fatima. “I really need to wake up.” She still spoke softly, but much more emphatically than usual.

“I’ve been trying to wake up for several minutes,” said Yong. “I just can’t. I don’t think it’s that easy. If it were, being charged by the wolf would have caused at least some of us to wake up.”

“We need to figure out why we’re here,” said Thanos with a certainty that baffled Keisha. How could he possibly know that?

“We need to understand what whoever put us here wants us to know,” he continued. “Then we’ll wake up.”

“How do we do that?” asked Yasmin, waving her hand at the fog. “There’s nothing here. How do we learn anything from this dismal place?”

As is she had conjured it up, a black swirl formed in the fog, becoming larger and larger until it was an enormous doorway. No, not exactly a doorway. Yong investigated a little and discovered there was some kind of barrier, smooth as glass, that prevented anyone from walking through.

It was a window! But a window looking out on what?

Thanos, still Mr. Certainty, pointed at the enormous window, through which they could now see only darkness, but with something moving through it, like an image barely glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye.

“There. We will find the answers there.”