The Legend of Lefty

A warm breeze rustled Lefty's hair as he floated down the empty streets of Ash Tab. The town was serene and peaceful; utterly quiet except for the soft whistling of the wind as it blew past the stone buildings he knew so well. He struggled to keep his breathing under control, trying to remain calm despite his trembling arms. It was as if excitement and fear were a pair of ferocious wolves growling in the corner of his mind, threatening to thrash him the moment he made a sudden move. And so Lefty did his best to keep cool and mentally tiptoe past them, knowing that if he lost focus for even a second… he would wake up from his dream again.

Because of course he was dreaming. You should know this by now. Lefty certainly did. So much time had passed since he last saw his home town that the illusion no longer fooled him. As soon as he felt the soft crunch of sand under his feet and the dry merciless heat above, he knew that he was asleep. And as that realization blossomed within him, a smile grew on his face in proportion to the rapid beating of his heart. This was his chance. He had waited so long for another one, and he didn’t intend to mess it up this time.

So he walked directly towards his home, focusing on that goal so that he could ignore the anxieties growling within him. Slowly they began to fade away, and as they did his steps became quicker, the dreamer growing more confident as his world stabilized. Finally, he could allow his thoughts to drift. He needed to remember. The words of his book; the one that explained in detail exactly what he was supposed to be doing, now that he was lucidly dreaming.

This… was not an easy task. Recalling complex knowledge while asleep demands a kind of mental acrobatics that few can pull off well. You see, the more the dreamer thinks about the waking world, the more they reinforce the fact that they are dreaming… which causes the dream to become unstable. One must believe in the world of the dream to keep it from crumbling… which is pretty hard to do when you’re trying to remember a real world book all about the illusory nature of dreams.

Lefty tried his best. He needed the knowledge of the book without any of the surrounding context, so he focused on the words themselves, trying to paint them on the canvas of his mind without thinking of the book they were in. It took a kind of serene focus. When he last read the book,what the cover looked like, where he had gotten it from, what the other chapters said; all of that had to be ignored. Just the words. Letter by letter.

He tried to form them in his mind’s eye, assembling the sentences without a page underneath them… but as he concentrated the buildings in his periphery began to bend and melt. He glimpsed it happening out of the corner of his eye, and it took all his willpower to resist the urge to turn and look. He knew that if he acknowledged the falseness of the dream, that it would break the world, and he would wake up once again. So he took a deep breath, and let the idea float away like a leaf on the wind, focusing instead on the yellow brick buildings closest to him. They were real. He was in Ash Tab. He didn’t need the words. The words were unimportant. He was just returning to his old home so he could lay down and relax. He repeated these thoughts in his head over and over, until the word stabilized once again.

He almost convinced himself they were true. It wasn’t until he grabbed the door handle and opened it, that he was reminded of his real goal, and all at once it came back to him, the knowledge flashing into his mind with no effort on his part. Knowledge without focus. As if he had just come up with the idea himself. He remembered now what he was supposed to do: he had to find the doorway to his workshop.

As with any craft, practicing sleep magic requires the proper tools and a place to use them. Just as a chef needs a kitchen, and a blacksmith needs their forge, a dreamer needs a workshop in which they can build and experiment. Unlike every other artisan, however, sleep mages can't simply buy a workshop. Nor can they rent one, or train in the workshop of another. Each dreamer must obtain their own personal workshop within their dreams.

This can be accomplished in one of three ways.

Fabrication is the simplest method. All the dreamer has to do is simply will the workshop into existence, creating it from the ether of their dreamscape with little more than a thought. Unfortunately for Lefty, this is far easier said than done. Only natural born sleep mages, who exert complete control over their dreams, have what it takes to create structures from thin air. Lefty was certain he was not in this category. His dreams were too grounded in reality for things to simply appear. Even trying might have woken him up so… he didn’t try.

Conversion is the second method, and the most commonly used. Here the dreamer essentially builds a workshop within the confines of their dream, converting existing structures and materials into everything they need. This is significantly more work than simply fabricating one, but it's something nearly all lucid dreamers can do, which is why most opt for this route. There were only two downsides to the conversion method. First, it can potentially take quite a bit of time to build a functioning workshop, resulting in the dreamer waking up before they can actually do anything. And second, it required that the would-be sleep mage have a solid grasp of real world logic and engineering. They need to learn to build structures while awake, so that they can use those skills in their dreams. Lefty, of course, had neither the patience nor the skills for this… so conversion was also rejected without attempt.

This just left the third and final method: Discovery. Discovering a workshop is as simple as it sounds. For some people, a workshop already exists somewhere within their dreams; they just have to find it. While this certainly sounds like the easiest method of the three, and sometimes it is, it suffers from one major drawback… it’s incredibly inconsistent… to the point that it’s almost random.

Some people find preexisting workshops in some of their dreams… but it's far from guaranteed. Even if one does exist, it could be anywhere. A dreamer could potentially spend all night searching for their workshop and never actually find it. And even if they do find it, tomorrow’s dream will undoubtedly be different, requiring a brand new search each and every night. The only way this method can be replicated reliably… is if you had the same dream every time…

Assuming you do, and assuming that your recurring dream has a workshop to begin with… then you might be able to practice sleep magic using this method. Such situations are exceptionally rare, however.

All of this knowledge came flooding back to Lefty as he walked into his old familiar home and frowned in disappointment. It was exactly the same as he remembered it. True, he had been there in his dreams before, but he had hoped that learning about sleep magic might change something; that his mind would go easy on him and turn the most comfortable place he could think of into his workshop. Like most people, however, Lefty found that his mind was not cooperative. The former sand miner found himself staring at the same familiar adobe walls and wooden furniture that had sat there for years. From the adjoining room his comfortable hammock called to him, tempting him once more to just lay down and relax… but he pushed those thoughts aside. He had to learn sleep magic. It was all that he wanted, and time was limited. If his home wasn't his workshop, then he would look elsewhere.

Lefty turned away from the quiet solitude of his humble abode, and looked at the countless houses that lined the street in both directions. Each pale brick frame held an unopened door. He would check every last one if he had to.

He started with his parent's home. It was the place he had been raised in after all, and it was also just across the street. He opened the door and found the inside to be the same as when he left; minus his parents and his younger sister of course. Without a second glance he turned his back on the familiar structure and walked to the next house over. It belonged to his longtime neighbors, Claude and Marcus. He had gone over there hundreds of times for one reason or another, but opening the door he found that it too was just he remembered it. So was Amica's house next to theirs, and Octavian's beyond that. He went from the neighbors, to the neighbor's neighbors, to the neighbor's neighbor's neighbors. From Felix's tiny shack tucked against the wall, to Justinian's forge, to the massive eight room sprawl that housed the Vita family and their many, many children. Everywhere it was the same story, unchanged from when he had left.

As he traveled from house to house, a terrible thought began to creep into Lefty's mind, growing more and more dreadful with each unsuccessful door. He tried to ignore the thought and move faster. His quick walk turned into a jog and then into an outright run as the young man began to fling open doors with ever increasing desperation. Try as he might though, he couldn't outrun the creeping feeling that, perhaps, there was no workshop waiting for him.

His book had talked of dreams being strange and surreal places. They were supposed to be full of random nonsense. Things that boarded on the indescribable!... But his dreams had none of that. His mind had the ability to create literally anything… and it had done is replicate his hometown. A wolf was growling within him again. This time it was doubt. What if he had no imagination? What if he was incapable of original thoughts? What if his mind was so inflexible, that it was unable to put anything new in the houses. Then there would be no workshop.

Lefty came to a stop, breathing hard as sweat dripped off his brow. It was getting hotter. Brighter too. The sun seemed to be drawing closer. Deep down he knew it was the light of morning, creeping in to devour his dream. He looked up and down the street. He had checked only a small fraction of the doors in town. There was no way he could get the rest before he woke up. He needed to do this logically. He needed to make a plan. Clearly his mind had re-created Ash Tab as he knew it. So If he wanted to find something new, then he would need to look in a building that he didn’t know; one whose contents were still a mystery to him.

He looked over at the nearest unopened building. It was the water depot. He had been there plenty of times. The inside would be just as he remembered. He skipped over it to the next building: Loral's one-room house. She had repaired his shoe once. He had stood in her doorway and watched her tack the sole back in place. He knew the interior; next.

He continued on like this, scanning from building to building, naming who lived there and trying to remember if he had seen inside, but he quickly realized it was no use. His town was small and its buildings smaller. Everyone knew everyone. With growing despair Lefty realized he had visited every single house and structure in Ash-Tab at least once. He knew the place like the back of his hand… and it held no secrets from him... well… except...

His eyes went wide. He broke out into a run once more, heading for the center of town.

There was one structure he had never been inside, a single building that remained a mystery to him. It was tiny; barely a building at all really. More like a shed. It stood next to the consul's residence, where the two elected leaders of Ash-Tab and their families lived during their year-long term. He had stayed in the residence twice; once when his mother was elected as consul, and again when his father took the role years later. And both times he had been prevented from entering the shed. It was guarded day and night, just like the wall around town, and only the consuls were allowed inside. He had been told as a kid that the building was not for children; that it contained something very important; that one day it would be his duty to enter that sacred building… And that had been enough to kill his interest. He had seen his parents doing their duty as consuls first hand. It was nothing but boring paperwork and tedious meetings. Important for sure, and certainly not for children, but utterly lacking in allure.He had assumed the shed was the same, and promptly forgot about it.

Now his lack of curiosity would pay off. The town was empty. There were no guards to stop him. If any door here contained his workshop, if indeed he had a workshop at all, it would be there, in the building he had never entered.

Lefty came to a stop in front of the little structure, staring at its sturdy double doors. It had gotten hotter. His hair was wet with sweat. And he was breathing heavily from his mad sprint around town… at least until he remembered that this was a dream, and he shouldn't be tired at all because he hadn't actually been running.

This was a terrible thought to have. His fatigue disappeared in an instant. But as if to protest this unrealistic turn of events, the world itself began to grow fuzzy and lose focus. The heat from the sun suddenly ratcheted up, making the air ripple and distort around him. The light increased as well, growing so bright that Lefty had to squint his eyes to see in front of him. His face tightened. His heart beat rapidly. Inside him the wolves were howling. He could feel the waking world rushing in on him.

This was it. He had to open the doors now before the dream faded away. He reached for the wooden handles, but it was like he was moving in slow motion. He strained against the thick heat of the air. All the other buildings were melting. His feet burst into flames, melting the sandy ground into glass, but he didn’t care. He felt no pain. No reason to pretend this was real anymore. He grabbed one handle in each hand. His flesh sizzled and melted but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting past these doors. He groaned and leaned back, throwing all his weight into opening the shed. For a second he thought he saw something yellow… and then a voice shouted out from behind him.

“Hey! What are you doing!”

Lefty shot up in a panic. His arms flailed wildly, colliding with the canvas of his small tent, bringing down the whole structure on top of him.

Half a moment later he emerged from the pile of burlap and ropes that had been his tent. His dark hair messy and matted to his head. His bare chest was glistening with sweat. He looked around in confusion, his mouth hanging open as his eyes darted around. The world of his dream was still fresh in his mind and for a few seconds he didn’t remember exactly where he was.

Where he was, exactly, was in the middle of the wide wooden road which connected The Capital to Lake Allende. He and Ol Blu had been traveling on it for more than a week now, and were far into Deepun territory. At that particular moment, they were passing through a thick uninhabited swamp, several hours out from the last town. The plank road carved straight through the wilderness, its surface raised up just a couple of hands over the eternally wet marshlands. It alone was both flat and dry, and so the pair had made camp right there in the road, not expecting to run into anyone. Given that someone was currently shouting at them, it's safe to say their expectations were proven wrong.

The voice Lefty had heard through his dream belonged to a rather grumpy looking deepun, one of the hairless green ones with perpetually glistening skin. Clearly a merchant of some kind, he sat atop a large wagon being drawn by a pair of pack hamsters. He looked down on the mess in the road with a heavy frown, clearly upset at the obstruction blocking his way.

By this point, Lefty had long since learned that deepuns were nothing to fear, and that Titus was completely full of spit. Most of their run-ins had been completely uneventful, the diminutive folk simply giving friendly waves as they passed by. A few of them had actually been helpful. Three days into their journey another deepun merchant had noticed Lefty sweating profusely as they passed each other on the road, and had stopped to give him a pair of loose breezy shorts, which he was currently wearing. Five days after that, as the pair passed through a small town on the outskirts of the swamp, a furry old deepun woman, seeing them swarmed with insects, had gifted them a couple of small yellowish candles. Their light was minimal and the scent they gave off was bitter, but it kept the bugs at bay, which Ol Blu in particular was very thankful for, considering his lack of hands. The annoyed merchant in front of them now was by far the most threatening deepun they had encountered; and to be fair, he had every reason to be upset.

“Lefty!” shouted Ol Blu from his perch in a nearby tree, “Stop standing there and get everything out of his way!”

Lefty jumped at the shout, shaking the last vestiges of sleep from his mind as he quickly got to work gathering up the remains of his tent and packing it onto the back of his squirrel. The kicken turned to the merchant, and apologized profusely, the deepun grumbling under his breath as he reluctantly accepted the apology.

“It's fine, it's fine. Not a big deal.” He grumbled out, before adding, “Although I don't know why you're camping here, you know the dam is only a couple hours away right?”

“The Master Dam?!” Ol Blu asked as he fluttered down from his spot in the tree. “Are we really that close?” He said excitedly.

“Master Dam?” Said the deepun as his hamsters began pulling his cart along the now cleared road. “They tore that thing down years ago.”

Lefty and Blu were stunned. For a moment they just stood there slack jawed.

“What?! Torn down!?” Ol Blu shouted after the wagon, but it had begun to pick up speed. The deepun shouted something over his shoulder, but it was lost in the sound of creaking wood and hamster feet.

“Wait! What do you mean?! Hey! Sir! Sir!” The kicken fluttered after the wagon as fast as he could on his stubby little wings, but it was no use. The merchant either didn't hear them over the sound of wheels on planks, or was in far too much of a hurry to slow down. He sped off into the distance, leaving the pair of adventurers standing dumbfounded in the middle of the road.