The universe is governed by Light. It is divided into seven dimensions, each with unique spectrums and laws of physics. There is a thin veil between the second and third dimensions that has been breached several times through history. We perceive creatures of the second dimension as “drawn”—cartoons, if you will. Portals between our worlds are created by “excited spectrums,” or electrified visible light. This is most often accomplished when rainbows are struck by lightning.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I started watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I had no idea that the animated ponies I found myself adoring were real, as were all their fantastic adventures. I certainly wished they were real, but that they truly, actually existed never crossed my mind. And I definitely didn’t think it was possible for a rainbow to be struck by lightning. After all, I knew rainbows were not substantial, but rather a visual phenomenon caused by a prismatic separation of the seven wavelengths of visible light.
I’m no scientist, though. Whenever I saw a rainbow, all I thought of was my second favorite pegasus. I had to learn about the wave properties of light during my second semester of college, the same period I discovered the magic of MLP. I was never a closet brony: I put a picture of Fluttershy on my iPhone lock screen, my Facebook Timeline header showed the ponies defeating Night Mare Moon, and I told everyone I met to watch at least the first two episodes. I was delighted by the show’s originality, morality, hilarity, and lovability of the characters. I learned from Twilight’s letters, related with Rarity’s vanity, danced with Pinkie Pie’s parties, squealed at Fluttershy’s outbursts, basked in Rainbow Dash’s awesomeness, and adored Applejack’s accent. I had always hated Southern speak, but Applejack somehow made it tolerable—even likable.
I was a better man from watching and loving Friendship is Magic. I knew that, and no amount of snickers or guffaws could shake my obsession. I watched the two available seasons in a matter of days, immersing myself in the incredible online community as much as possible. Those wonderful ponies changed my life during my freshman year, but I had no idea how far that change would extend.
It all started when I read “My Little Dashie,” to date my favorite FiM fanfic. It brought tears to my eyes and hope to my heart. Love and friendship was everywhere: we just had to be open to the possibilities and find it.
I Googled the story, looking for written reactions of bronies who shared my emotions. And that’s when I found him. He called himself Doctor Dash, and he was convinced “My Little Dashie” was a true story. That seemed ridiculous to me at the time I read his blog. The story spanned over fifteen years, ending in about 2025. It being 2012, the “true story” hypothesis was just plain ultra-brony silliness.
Before I left his blog, however, I decided to scan over his bio. Turned out he lived on a little farm less than two hours south of my college. As soon as Finals were over—I got B’s in most of my classes, as expected—I decided to pay “Doctor Dash” a visit. After all, I was a new brony, and meeting someone as dedicated as him would probably be fun and beneficial for me.
The house could be aptly described as “in the middle of nowhere.” Doctor Dash had certainly distanced himself from civilization. As I approached the tilted shack in the middle of an enormous field of dirt, I noticed a large, well-maintained garden of various fruits and vegetables growing beside it. Did Doctor Dash grow his own food out here? I started to question my visit.
Fate, it seems, rules through the entire universe. It is an inter-dimensional force that acts on all intelligent creatures, people and ponies alike. As I drove cluelessly down that narrow dirt road, dark clouds rolled into the clear blue sky, hiding the glorious sun. Suddenly, the upper window of the Doctor’s shack flew open and a football-sized diamond attached to a silvery balloon jumped into the open air, rocketing toward the rumbling clouds overhead.
Surprised and interested, I parked my car on the road, still a hundred yards from the house, and stepped into the dirt field. I stared up into the sky, following the flying crystal’s path. A light rain started to darken the earth as I walked farther from my car, absentmindedly staying beneath the balloon. Before long it vanished from sight, rising so close to the looming storm cloud I couldn’t find it.
“Hey!” I heard a distant shout and turned in the direction of the shack. A figure was leaning out the opened upper window, waving his arms frantically. “Hey! Get out of here!”
Now I know that’s what he said. At the time it sounded like a greeting of some sort. I thought the enthusiastic waving was welcoming, and I waved back innocently.
The lightning struck my uplifted hand. It didn’t hurt, which immediately surprised me. I was sort of frozen in place, but I had enough mobility to tilt my head back.
A stream of almost fluid lightning was suspended high in the sky. Apparently it had hit the prism because the bolt split into seven colored streaks of electricity midair. Those seven bolts were wriggling like tent ropes in a windstorm, stemming from the overhead diamond and spreading out over the field chaotically as if staked to the dirt.
The yellow bolt had connected with me, and I watched in confused terror as the other streaks snaked closer. As the spectrum closed in around me, each bolt’s color grew brighter; when they came together into a single stream, I was being painlessly electrocuted by a brilliant rainbow. And then, just as suddenly as it had struck, it exploded in a burst of blinding white, and the world around me disappeared.
* * *
Darkness. The purple scar of the lightning’s flash danced inside my eyes, whipping back and forth across the blackness in front of me. I blinked several times, trying to get rid of the spot.
“What the heck just happened?” I mumbled to myself.
“Aah! It talks!” a high-pitched voice squealed. I heard the unmistakable clop of hooves on wood.
I was somehow sitting on the ground against a wall. Instinctively, I reached down and touched the surface by my shoe. It felt like a smooth, hardwood floor, though I felt some soft crumbs as well. As I realized that, I also took note of the sweet aromas drifting through the dark: frosting, freshly baked goods, and… flowers. Not flour, flowers. Fragrant, petaled flowers.
“Excuse me,” I said to the owner of the squeaky voice, “where am I?”
“What are you?” it asked, followed by more hoof noises.
“Is there a horse in here?” I asked nervously. I didn’t like the idea of being with a horse in the dark. It could squish me.
“I’m not a horse!” the voice said indignantly, followed by an intentional, loud clop. “I’m a pony! Now please tell me, what are you?”
I froze. “A… pony?” Suddenly it all clicked. I knew that voice. “Pinkie Pie!?”
She gasped loudly. “How do you know my name?”
I laughed gleefully and leapt to my feet. “Pinkie Pie! Quick, turn on the light, I want to see you!”
“What do you mean? The light is on!” I heard a weird wobbly sound, as if her lip was quivering. “WHAT IN THE NAME OF CELESTIA IS GOING ON?”
Before I could speak, I heard a door slam open to my right. The force of it knocked me back to the ground, and before she spoke I knew the newcomer’s name.
“What happened, Pinkie?” asked an adorable Southern belle.
“Applejack!” I shouted, smiling uncontrollably. I wished so badly I could see them, and began to fear the lightning had blinded me permanently.
“Whoa nelly! What is that thing?”
“I don’t know! It won’t tell me! One second it wasn’t there, and then my whole body started to wiggle and I knew another doozy was coming, and then everything turned white, and then all these little flashy sparks flew all over the room, and then this big curly rainbow loopty-looped around the floor, and then it WAS there! And it knows our names!!”
“Girls, please!” I said, holding a hand out in their direction. “I’m not scary or dangerous, I promise. My name is David. I’m a human being. I don’t know how I got here, but for some reason I can’t see anything.” I gasped, realizing a possible solution. “One of you go get Twilight. I bet she has a spell to fix my eyes!”
“He knows Twilight, too!?” Pinkie Pie screamed.
“Go on and get her, Pinkie,” Applejack commanded. “I’ll make sure he don’t go nowhere.”
Pinkie’s quick hoofsteps rushed out the door and faded into the distance. The muffled sound of a nervous crowd replaced it; I could only imagine a group of intrigued ponies gathering outside Sugarcube Corner.
“Oh, I can’t believe this is happening,” I breathed to myself, partly with joy and partly with sorrow. Could Doctor Dash have been right? Could I have been transported to Equestria? Was I really lucky enough to have landed in Ponyville? WHY COULDN’T I SEE?
Another pony pushed through the crowd and hurried into the sweet shop. “Pinkie Pie, what happened?” she asked loudly. I gasped delightedly, recognizing the barely-British tambour that belonged to Ponyville’s fabulous fashionista.
“Pinkie Pie ain’t here, Rarity,” Applejack answered. “She went to get Twi—”
“Oh my goodness! What is that thing?”
“We don’t right know yet. Hopefully Twilight has a book or two on uncommonly thick creatures.”
“I’m not thick!” I retorted, and Rarity gasped dramatically.
“It can speak!”
“But it can’t see,” Applejack added. “Not very surprisin’, given its eyes are so teeny.”
I laughed at that one. While their eyes seemed ridiculously large and adorable to me, my own pair must have seemed impossibly small.
“Perhaps we should call on Fluttershy,” Rarity suggested to her friend. “She knows about all sorts of unusual animals.”
“Maybe it’s a… scaleless, wingless dragon,” said Applejack.
“Without a snout or a tail? I don’t think so.”
“I told you, I’m a human being,” I said.
“Did you come from the Everfree Forest?” asked Rarity.
“No, I came from Earth.”
“Earth?” Applejack clarified. “As in… Earth ponies?”
“Sort of. It’s a planet. I don’t know how far it is from here.”
I started laughing again, almost maniacally. I couldn’t even listen to myself! There I was, chatting with an animated pony about the speculative distance between Earth and Equestria. It was only then that I started to doubt myself. Was I dreaming? Had the strange lightning put me in a coma? It seemed more likely than actually transporting into the world of a kid’s TV show. Then again, I had never had a dream where I was blind before…
“We’re here!” shouted Pinkie Pie, galloping through the front door at full speed. “See, Twilight? There it is! Huh, I guess it’s not quite as hideous as I was describing… actually, it’s kind of cute!”
“Oh my gosh! Is that a hairless bear?” came Twilight’s unmistakable voice.
“Perhaps it’s one of those dreadful diamond dogs in disguise!” Rarity whined.
Twilight’s unmistakable voice? Wouldn't that be Tara Strong’s unmistakable voice?
“It couldn’t be, its eyes are too small,” Applejack reminded.
Why did all of these ponies sound like they did in the cartoon? They were all played by voice actors… it wasn’t possible! None of it was possible!
“What’s happening to its face?” Twilight asked.
“I think it’s getting angry!” Pinkie supposed. “Or scared! Or… is it sad?”
It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. My joy was short-lived. These invisible ponies were nothing but figments of my overexcited imagination. I wasn’t too surprised my dreams were pony-centered, seeing that I had been watching Friendship is Magic during every spare moment over the previous few weeks. But now my excitement crumbled into disappointment, and I just wanted to wake up and leave that torturously wonderful scene.
“Girls, look! It’s crying!”
I didn’t mean to start crying, but sometimes you just can’t help it. Being so close to the ultimate dream-come-true just to realize it was only a regular-dream was too devastating to bear. I curled up into a ball against the wall I couldn’t see and sobbed, waiting to wake up and see what damage the lightning had done.
“Help it, Twilight!” Pinkie cried. “Help it see!”
“I… I don’t…” The studious pony sighed. “I’ll try.”
The sound of magic filled the air. I could feel its tingle immediately inside my head. Twilight made a little grunting noise as she concentrated, trying to restore my sight. A flicker of color passed through my vision before she stopped the spell with a tired sigh.
“No, keep going! You were so close!” I encouraged. If I was going to dream about my little ponies, I might as well be able to see them.
“Your eyes are working fine,” she tried to explain. “It’s just… your mind is all wrong.”
“What do you mean?” I asked frantically. “How do you know that?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Your eyes are trying very hard to see, but there’s something cloudy in there. Something it doesn’t understand.”
I groaned angrily, slamming my fists on the hardwood floor by my hips. “This is unfair! I’m gonna wake up any second without even seeing you!”
“Wake up?” Pinkie asked. “You’re not asleep, silly!”
“Yes I am. I’m asleep and all of you are just parts of my dream. Any moment now I’m going to wake up in a hospital bed and all of you will disappear.”
“Hospital bed?” Twilight asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The last thing I remember is being struck by rainbow-colored lightning,” I explained. “It must have knocked me out.”
“That’s what I saw!” Pinkie exclaimed, accompanied by a strange boing as she jumped up and down. “I saw rainbow lightning all over the room, and then you just appeared there!”
“Sounds like that lightning didn’t put you to sleep,” Applejack spoke up. “It must have brought you here somehow.”
“To Sugarcube Corner? Of all the places in Equestria, why would a magic bolt of lightning land me in Sugarcube Corner?”
The ponies were quiet with shock for a moment. Finally, Twilight asked, “How do you know where you are?”
“Because Pinkie Pie was in here and I can smell the cupcakes.”
“But… how do you know about Equestria? And Pinkie Pie, for that matter?”
“Oh, I know all about this place,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “It’s pretty popular where I come from.”
“Popular?” Twilight seemed flabbergasted. “What in Equestria are you talking about?”
I sighed and dropped my face into my tucked up knees. “It’s no use trying to explain. I’ll wake up any second now.”
“Would you stop saying that? This is no dream. You’re not going to wake up,” Twilight scolded, stepping closer to me. I suddenly became nervous, trying to scoot away from her.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to try everything I can to clear your mind so you can see we’re all real and explain where you come from and exactly how you know about me and my friends.” She spoke with such authority and command that I stayed perfectly still, afraid of the consequences of refusing.
“Do you promise to explain if I find a spell to repair your sight?”
I nodded quickly, already starting to believe it was real after all. How could something in my dream be that clear and commanding?
“Good,” Twilight continued. “Then please come with us to the library.”