//------------------------------//
// Miss Sand-Mare, Give Me A Dream 
// Story: Scoopful Of Dream 
// by Isseus 
//------------------------------//

It took a moment for the mare to pry Ash off of her neck. She looked almost ready to scold the little filly, but Ash's wide, gleaming eyes and even wider smile made her just shake her head. "Now, Ash, was it?"

"U-huh!" Ash said.

"My name's Dream Drop. All my friends call me Dee-Dee though."

"So, uhh, can I call you Dee-Dee too?" Ash asked carefully.

Dream Drop tousled Ash's mane. "Of course." Growing a bit more serious, she let her hoof slide to Ash's shoulder. "Now, Ash, we are going to go into a place where most ponies don't get to visit. It's not a dangerous place as such, but you should stick close to me so you don't get lost, okay?"

Ash nodded, trying very poorly to hide her excitement behind a facade of seriousness.

"Okay, now, we need to use one of your sleeping friends to actually get to the Dreaming," Dream Drop said as she pulled another pouch from her vest, this one the colour of gold. She pulled one of Ash's forehooves underneath it and poured a tiny pile of black dust onto it. "Just throw that on the colt you tried to wake up before, and we'll get going."

Ash looked at the pile of dust on her hoof. It felt like a cool bed with fresh, clean sheets, right before it started to get warm from somepony's body heat underneath a warm blanket. As she looked closer, there were tiny bright specs in the dust, like tiny stars in the distance. She looked at Dream Drop, who gave her an encouraging nod, and threw the dust on the colt. The air in front of them shimmered and seemed to somehow turn sideways, becoming a round portal into deeper darkness than that of the bedroom they were in. Without hesitation, she practically jumped in.

What she landed in she couldn't really see, but it made a soft 'thwump' sound as she landed. Behind her, Dream Drop entered too, throwing some of the same dust on the portal to close it. She pulled out a small lantern from one of the larger pouches on her vest. She blew a tiny breath on it, and they were soon bathed in a warm, golden light. Now that Ash could see better around her, she realised she was standing on a dirt road in a dark meadow. As she looked up, she could see the most brilliant display of stars above her, almost taking her breath away.

"Pretty, isn't it?" Dream Drop asked.

"Yeah!" Ash said as she tried to crane her head around to take in the whole night sky. "There's a lot more stars than I've ever seen!"

"This is the first level of the Dreaming. A lot of ponies hang out around here before they fall asleep."

Now that Ash looked more carefully around her, she could make out a lot of dark shapes lying on the ground on the soft grass around her. Some of them were snoring restfully, but others yet fitted in their sleep or grunted while trying to find a more comfortable position. "Can they hear us?" Ash asked in a whisper.

"Not as long as we stay on the road," Dream Drop said.

Ash realised she was right on the edge of the road as she'd been looking closer at one of the sleepers. "Oh, oops," she said as she backed up.

"Don't worry about it. Ponies usually just remember tiny glimpses of this place before they fall completely asleep. It's a sort of waiting room. This is where ponies come after we use dream dust on them."

"Huh," Ash said. She scratched her forehead with a hoof. "I just usually think I'm sinking into my mattress when I'm falling asleep."

"We're close by to that place. Wanna go see?" Dream Drop asked as she fastened the lantern to the front of her vest. She pointed at a fork in the road ahead. "It's called the Dream Sea."

"Sure!" Ash said. As they walked along the path, Ash kept turning around to whichever way she could, until she almost bumped into Dream Drop. "Uh, sorry!"

"Don't worry about it. I remember being here for the first time too and it was really exciting," Dream Drop said. Her fangs gleamed in the darkness with her smile. For a moment, Ash was reminded of those nightmare faces she and some of the other foals had pulled with a light underneath their chins to try and scare each other on Nightmare Night. Untli Mrs. Shallot had taken their lamp and told them off for being wasteful, anyway. A tiny shiver ran down her back, and she couldn't help but giggle.

"We're here," Dream Drop said. In front of them the dirt road ended abruptly, and a large body of water opened in front of them as far as Ash's eyes could see. There were a few small skiffs tied to a short wooden jetty. Dream Drop motioned for Ash to climb aboard as she untied the rope mooring the skiff. As they pushed off, Dream Drop took up a place at the aft, steering the skiff  with a single oar, while Ash stood at the fore. As they quietly glided over the mirror-still water, Ash could see ponies all over floating lazily around everywhere, giving deep satisfied sighs as they slowly went under. Ash knew that seeing ponies drown should have felt creepy, but she remembered how she herself felt as she sunk into slumber that she could only smile. 

One of the ponies next to them, a grown-up stallion judging from his size, was groaning and shaking his hooves above him. As Ash leaned closer, she could make out tiny bubbles rising from the deep, and as they hit the surface, she could hear distant whispers. "You can't afford it," one said. "You spent too much on it," another said. Similar bubbles kept appearing and popping around him. Ash couldn't help herself, and whispered straight into the stallions ear "It's okay, you can think about it in the morning." As she watched, the stallion gave a long sigh and smiled slightly, muttering "...the morning. Yeah," as he relaxed.

She turned to look at Dream Drop behind her. Ash really couldn't read the sand-mare's expression. "Did I do something wrong?" she asked.

Dream Drop tilted her a bit to the side. "You're a very kind little filly, Ash."

Ash could feel her cheeks grow warm from the compliment. "I just, well, I know how nasty it feels not to be able to fall asleep when you can't stop thinking about things, so I guess I just didn't want him to feel like that." She looked around the floating ponies. "A lot of them have those bubbles around them."

"Yes. Here they show up as bubbles, or tiny fish tickling their hooves, or as a wind carrying words from somewhere. Back in the meadow they might be uncomfortable rocks under their backs or bugs buzzing in their ear."

"Can't we do anything for them?" Ash asked.

Dream Drop shook her head. "They all have to find their own solutions to their thoughts. We can't fix their problems for them."

"So I shouldn't have said anything to him?" Ash asked, feeling her chest grow cold. The last thing she wanted to do was disappoint her new friend.

"You did what you thought was right and only wanted to help. That means a lot." Dream Drop's fangs glinted in the night as she smiled.

Ash looked around her, at all the floating ponies in deep thought. Suddenly she spied movement at the edge of vision. A clammy, slimy tentacle wrapped itself around a floating mare's barrel, followed by several more grabbing her from below, and before Ash's eyes, the mare was pulled under the surface. "W-what was that?" she asked.

"Well, like I said, ponies need to find their own ways to fall asleep. That mare probably used a sleeping medicine to fall asleep."

Ash felt shivers run down her back. "It looked really creepy."

Dream Drop shrugged. "It's a solution. You get to fall asleep, but the quality of your sleep will probably suffer from it."

"Well I'll never use something like that!" Ash exclaimed. The thought of those clammy tentacles still wouldn't leave her alone. 

"You never know," Dream Drop said. "Maybe some day you'll be so ill or maybe you get hurt in an accident so bad you just can't sleep."

Ash gave that a thought. "I guess so," she finally said. After a moment she continued. "Usually I just sleep a lot when I'm ill."

"Best medicine for a fever there is," Dream Drop said. "There's even a special type of sand-mares just for that."

"What, really?"

Dream Drop nodded. "There's a lot of different things us sand-mares do. For example, I'm a Duster, as in I go around making sure ponies get a chance to fall asleep on time."

"So you were doing that when I found you?"

Dream Drop looked to the side, and Ash could almost see her blush a bit. "I was waiting for you to come back to your bed." She deflated a bit. "I wanted to make sure I got everypony because last week I missed somepony on my round and boss chewed me out for it real bad."

Ash could only nod in sympathy, very used to being scolded for carelessness herself.

"I mean, how could I know they were having a sleepover and there was an extra colt there."

"So that colt didn't get to sleep at all that night?" Ash asked.

"Well, he probably thought it was just his nerves from sleeping at somepony else's house, and one of my co-workers dusted him off later, but I should have been more careful."

"So how do you even know how many ponies you need to, um..."

"Dust?"

"Yeah, that.

"I don't really know how it works. Basically, I get this scroll at the start of my shift and it has a list of addresses and the number of ponies there. I just thought they'd made a mistake with that house or something."

"I never thought sand-mares were that important," Ash said. "I mean, umm..." she stopped abruptly.

"You weren't sure we even exist in the first place?" Dream Drop completed her sentence.

Ash looked down at her hooves. "Sorry."

Dream Drop laughed a bit. "No problem. It's easier to do our job without everypony trying to catch us sneaking in their bedrooms. And some ponies might get really angry about their privacy and stuff."

Ash looked back up at Dream Dust. "I didn't even think of that," she said. "You go into a lot of ponies' homes, so you have to see all kinds of stuff."

Dream Drop nodded. "But before you ask, I can't tell you anything about what I see. I have to keep it a secret."

Ash's imagination started running around with the idea of what kinds of things sand-mares would actually see in ponies' houses, but she was soon interrupted as their skiff jolted to a stop.

"We're here," Dream Drop said. They'd arrived to another little jetty, and she was swiftly tying the skiff up to a post. 

Ash climbed off the skiff and followed Dream Drop to a small, dark house on the beach. It looked like a tiny cabin, maybe big enough for a little family of ponies to spend a few days during the Summer. For a moment, Ash wondered what it would be like to do something like that, but was again interrupted as Dream Drop opened the door. Warm light and the chatter of a few ponies carried outside.