Once I read a story of someone falling asleep under a tree who slept for a hundred years, like Sleeping Beauty. Could the same have befallen li’l sister and me?
If so, what I’ve never been able to figure out is where that left us. This man under the tree and Sleeping Beauty in her tower, they both stayed in the physical world, but we stepped through this crack in the wall and seem to have vanished from the face of the earth ever since.
Aunt has been going over the house for months, every inch of it, the basement in particular; in the garden she’s been down on her knees without finding the slightest trace of us. Did we enter the domain of the Mistress of Dreams physically? How could that be? The tissue that dreams are made of consists of different yarns than beings of flesh and blood.
The police called in by my father made a serious effort, too, but they only came up with questions. In the end they decided we must have left the house one way or another and been taken by a stranger, which wasn’t wide of the mark by much.
Aunt, however, wouldn’t hear of it. She was absolutely sure the frontdoor had still been locked when she returned, as we had had no key. She was right. How was she to know we had left by the basement, instead.
That gloomy basement! There must have been something uncanny with it. It was too deep to be true, or so I think with hindsight. Maybe, it was in the pitch-dark that we walked into a dream, unwittingly, and in that dream we met the Mistress who made us dream that we passed through the wall into her garden of dreams.
In that case, our bodies must be still in the basement, somewhere, in a part aunt and the police, for some reason, had no access to. There we’re lying asleep only to wake up after a hundred years, just like Sleeping Beauty.
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