Dreams
Sweet Dreams
Dreams
Dreams: Lyra
“I’m standing on the edge of a walkway. There’s a road in front of me. It’s full of large roaring metal creatures that run by me at speeds only Rainbow Dash could ever reach. The buildings around me are so tall… and they’re all uniform in shape and color. The skies are blocked by these buildings and the sky that I can see are all grey and dull. It’s so depressing to see this…”
“Tell me more!”
Lyra sighed. The teal unicorn was sitting in the Ponyville Library, also the home of Princess Celestia’s personal student, Twilight Sparkle.
For a few months now, Lyra had been having some dreams that always seemed to be centered around two-legged creatures and their strange dull world. After a particular dream that caused Lyra to wake up screaming, Lyra seeked out Twilight who was ever so excited to have something new to research.
“I look around and there are these strange two-legged creatures walking around and talking. They don’t always talk to each other; sometimes they’re talking on these little metal things that make noises back at them. They all look different… some tall, some short, some fat, some skinny, some with long manes, some with short manes, some even have no manes…”
A thud interrupted Lyra’s memories as Twilight tossed a book onto the ground. The purple unicorn smiled and turned back to the shelf. “Sorry! Don’t mind me.”
“Well… then I always see myself… a reflection, you know? And I look like them… except… I look like me. I have my mane and my eyes… but I’m shaped like them and I have no fur like them… and my horn is always missing!”
Twilight gasps, sending another book dropping to the floor. “You have no magic in these dreams then?”
Lyra shakes her head. “No… not like I have it in reality that is… Like… I can still move objects and stuff but with my front hooves not a horn…”
“Hands.”
Lyra blinked. “What?”
“Hands. They’re called hands.” Twilight was looking intently into a book that she was levitating before her. “I think I found something similar to what you’re describing.”
Lyra snatched the book from Twilight’s magic with her own magic. The book was open to a chapter called Humans. An illustration of creatures looking just like the ones Lyra had seen in her dream were displayed at the bottom of the page.
“Hands, feet, hair, arms, legs… Wow this is so weird!”
Twilight took the book back from Lyra and resumed reading the page. “Humans live on a planet called Earth in the third dimension.” Twilight looked over the book at the dazed looking Lyra. “You’re actually dreaming about creatures that are a whole other dimension away from us. They really exist!”
“Does that mean that all the stuff that happens in the dreams is true too?” Lyra asked. The unicorn looked nervous.
The purple unicorn closed the book and set it on a nearby table. “I have no idea. What was that dream that woke you up the other day?”
Lyra sat on the floor and eyed the book. “It was scary. I was that human form again and I was running from something. I don’t know what it was but I was terrified. When I looked behind me, all the buildings were being destroyed by some strange blue fire. Other humans were running all around me trying to get away from whatever was there… I ended up tripping on a broken tree limb and falling to the ground. I could feel the heat from the fire and it scared me so much that I woke up. It was so realistic… I thought it was really happening the whole time…”
Twilight had been taking notes while I was talking. She rolled up the scroll and looked at me with that usual scholarly look on her face. “I have to write a letter to Celestia about this right away! If any of it is really happening, then something could be very wrong with the universe.”
The teal unicorn eyed the book again. “Hey, can I borrow that? I kinda want to read more about these creatures.”
Twilight had moved over to the other side of the room and was furiously scribbling onto a scroll. “Sure. Go ahead.”
Lyra picked up the book with magic and tiptoed out of the library. Twilight was known to get very absorbed in her letters to the Princess.
Outside, Ponyville was just as bright and clear as any other day. The local ponies were going about setting up for Nightmare Night which was only in a few days. The smell of apples and pumpkins filled the air from the Apple Acres stand. Applejack was dutifully standing with the barrels of apples and the small box of pumpkins as she did every year. Applebloom bounced around her and Lyra laughed. The Apple family was well known around Ponyville.
Down the road a ways, the faint scent of cinnamon and warm vanilla sugar wafted from Sugarcube Corner. Mr. and Mrs. Cake must have been baking all the autumn goodies today. Lyra sniffed the air, picking out the baked good smells again. The unicorn smiled and headed down the road toward Sugarcube Corner. A cream colored pony with a bouncy pink and blue mane trotted up to Lyra. “Hiya Lyra!”
Lyra turned and hid the book by her side. “Hi BonBon.” BonBon was Lyra’s roommate. Technically, they shared a house. Unfortunately, BonBon had been woken up more than once by Lyra crying out about nightly dreams.
BonBon smiled. “Headed to Sugarcube Corner? The Cakes made a whole bunch of new desserts. Everypony is going down to get free samples!”
This brought a grin to Lyra’s face. Free samples at Sugarcube Corner were rare. “Sounds delicious!” In her excitement, Lyra lost the grip on the book. The book fell with a thud into the dirt road.
BonBon glanced curiously at it. “Lyra? Why did that book just fall out of your side?”
“Uh.. well uh…”
BonBon galloped around to the other side of Lyra and read off the title. “Other Worlds and Species. Seriously Lyra?”
Lyra picked up the book quickly. “What? I just wanted to know what those things were… Twilight actually was very helpful.”
The cream earth pony just sighed and shook her head. “Well now you know. Come on… let’s go get some samples from Mr. and Mrs. Cake before they’re all gone.”
Dreams: Lira
“Everything is bright and colorful.. There’s no dirty cars anywhere or big dark buildings… The sky is always clear and blue… It’s such a refreshing change from the stuff here.”
A girl sat across from Lira scribbling into a notebook. Tara was a strange girl, raised in an old fashioned household and obsessed with reading. Lira was a daydreamer. But her dreams recently had started to interfere with her work and sleep. Lira thought maybe Tara knew how to deal with it from information in all the books the girl read.
“So, it’s like a fantasy land.”
Lira nodded. “A fantasy land filled with multicolored talking, flying, magical ponies.”
At that, the violet haired girl started to laugh. “Your studies are being distracted by talking horses?!”
Lira flipped her teal and white hair. “Don’t laugh! It’s true. You have no idea how scary it is when you’re a talking teal unicorn in a dream that you think is real.”
Tara wiped a tear from the corner of her violet eyes and cleared her throat. “That sounds like a horse of a different color!” She snickered. “I’m sorry, Lira. It’s just this whole dream thing sounds more like a trip than anything else.”
Lira was tapping her fingertips against her arms. “Are you done?” Tara nodded. “Okay, you had wanted to hear about the dream that keeps waking me up.”
Tara turned the page of her notebook and clicked her pen. “Go ahead.”
The golden eyed girl leaned against the windowsill. “I’m running from something, but I’m not used to have four feet so I trip… When I look behind me, all the things I've been seeing: the wagons, the houses, the trees… they’re all being torn up and burned by some kind of blue swirling fire. I scream and wake up.”
Instead of the laughter Lira expected to see Tara holding back, the other girl looked rather concerned. She scribbled more into her notebook. “Are you positive the fire was blue?”
Lira nodded, confused by Tara’s change of attitude. Tara hopped off the bottom bunk bed she was sitting on and pulled open a large drawer in her desk. The drawer was stuffed full of old worn looking books.
“My grandmother always told me about the rebirth of the universe.” Tara pulled out books and appeared to be searching for a specific one. “Apparently, all the forces of the universe…” She flipped open a book and handed it to me. “...will use the power of the cosmos to rebuild the universe in order to create new life systems and galaxies.”
The page Lira found herself looking at said exactly as Tara recited. What was even more strange, was the picture at the bottom of the page of a planet engulfed in blue flames.
“So… what’s this mean?”
Tara snatched the book back and stuffed the books back into the drawer. “Well, it means nothing of course because it’s just old folklore. But if any of it was true,” Tara shrugged, “you could have just prophesied the end of the world.”
An uneasy feeling set into Lira. Her golden eyes flicked around uncertainly. Although there was absolutely no evidence that any of her dreams were more than an overactive imagination, because come on… muticolored magical talking ponies?... something about the dreams was just too realistic and convincing to dismiss as a just a nightmare.
“Thanks Tara.” Lira smiled uneasily and opened the dorm door. “I just needed to talk to someone. I feel better now.”
Tara grinned and stood to close the door behind the teal haired girl. “Just remember Lira… end of the world!” She laughed and shut the door.
Lira stood in the hallway for a short time. Tara was right. Everything was just a nightmare. None of it could possibly ever be real. The teal haired girl snorted at her own ridiculousness and walked three feet to her own dorm door.
Inside, she could hear her roommate, Bonny, humming away. Lira opened the door and nearly walked into a pile of bonbon wrappers.
“Bonny!”
Bonny stopped humming and sat up. “What?” She was a heavier girl with slightly curled pink and blue hair. The girl blinked two giant green-blue eyes down at Lira from the top bunk.
“You went and littered the room with wrappers again…” Lira giggled as Bonny tossed a bonbon down to her. “...You can’t keep me at bay with bribes.”
“I’ll clean it up! Promise!” Bonny’s head disappeared as she laid back down. Lira smiled and unwrapped the candy. “Did Tara have anything useful to tell you from all her psychology books and stuff?”
Lira popped the candy into her mouth and sat down on the lower bunk. “Well… not really. She read me some old folklore stuff but otherwise I’m just having an overactive imagination.”
“Well, your imagination wakes up the entire building with your screams so… anything useful?”
Lira shifted uncomfortably under her roommate’s bunk. It was true, Lira would wake up screaming so loudly that the staff from the next building over would come to check on her. “The only thing that could possibly be is that I’m having like prophetic dreams or something.”
Bonny started snickering. “You? Prophetic? For what? The end of the world?” Lira didn’t even answer. “Oh come on Lira. You’re having nightmares. That’s all. Maybe it’s something you’re eating. Or too much schoolwork.”
In the dusk light, Lira sat still on her bed. “Yeah… that’s it…” Something still wasn’t sitting easily with her though. The night was falling, and as she laid down to go to sleep Lira knew she would be in a whole different world. And she would be awoken by dreams of that world’s death.