As an elder among the sylphs of my area, it is my task to weave the dreams of those vexing dreamers who do not behave in our world as they properly should. These are dreamers who have come to recognize the dream from within it.

I have recently spent a number of nights weaving dreams for just such a man. His misbehavior was brought about by a sylph who gravely violated a multitude of laws and has been punished accordingly. The sylph was a deep disappointment to me, disregarding all that we teach in pursuit of personal satisfaction. It is my hope that the dark dreams she is now bound to weave will make clear to all the error of such actions.

The dreamer is a more complicated matter. The same laws that guide sylphs protect dreamers from such punishments, however infuriating their actions might be. His behavior is more so than most, persisting with entirely inappropriate interactions for a dreamer — he has gone so far as to seek out a specific sylph by name.

This is not how things were meant to be.

The gap between the waking world and the place of dreams is meant to keep the denizens of one side from ever crossing to the other. The barrier itself attests to this — a thing formed of fear without reason. The waking mind occasionally encounters it as a person drifts into sleep. These harrowing experiences have been called Kanashibari by some and night terrors by others. Dread drives all but those with the strongest will and firmest conviction back to waking.

As it should be.

The waking mind can, however, creep in through the hole left by the dream self, using its connection as a conduit of sorts. Humans who have learned of this often use numbers, and their way of slipping through the fingers of a dreamer, as a means of finding the link.

We sylphs are by nature creatures of imagination and art, the toll for which is that, with few exceptions, we are extraordinarily poor when it comes to numbers and the written word. When a dreamer tries to dial a telephone in a dream but cannot seem to string the digits together properly, assuredly there is a young sylph frantically straining harder still to make sense of those alien numbers.

So it is that some humans have developed the ritual of checking a digital watch repeatedly; when in a dream, its numbers make little sense from one glance to the next. Few might imagine the reason, but the conflict of what should be and what is serves as a clue.

I am unusual among sylphs in my command of numbers, and so it falls on me to keep such dreamers complacent.

Tonight’s dreamer, however, is a particularly troublesome sort who has taught himself to recognize the dream through some other method not yet clear to me. I have been trying various means to placate him and guide him back into an appropriate sleep, to little avail thus far.

Still, time and persistence will prevail, and then he will dream normally once more.

As it should be.