Awa and the Dreamrealm Read online

  “Well, there is someone – she’s kind of like a fairy.”

  “A fairy?” Dr Spancer’s eyes widened.

  “Uhh, not really, she doesn’t have wings.”

  “And what does she do?” Dr Spancer asked.

  “Well, I saw her in my room once” I said, and explained how I had met Veila.

  “And that was the only time you’ve seen her?”

  “While I was awake,” I said, trying not to make it sound too confusing. I didn’t really know how to explain any of this to anyone, but it did feel good to talk about it – like the pressure of keeping it to myself was being released.

  “You think you were really awake?” the doctor raised her eyebrows and frowned.

  “Yes – but I see her in my dreams, too.”

  “How often?” Dr Spancer glanced up from her notepad giving me that look – the same one my parents both had when I talked to them about anything weird.

  “Every night, almost,” …except for when I get stuck in the random dreams, or when she isn’t around.

  Dr Spancer raised her eyebrows. The fluorescent ceiling light glinted off her spectacles and silvery hair.

  “What do you think she is? A fairy… but not a fairy?”

  “She’s a dreamcharmer.”

  Something seemed to stir in Dr Spancer’s eyes. “Déjà vu,” she muttered to herself.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said, loosening her collar and pulling at the sleeves of her peach coloured cardigan.

  “Awa, I’m going to teach you some breathing techniques, to manage the anxiety at school, but these dreams…” her voice trailed off. “I’m concerned that they are scaring you, and that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.”

  I just looked at the doctor; it was clear she hadn’t really listened to me at all. I kept my mouth shut and vowed to keep it that way.

  “I will talk to your parents about prescribing you some pills to help with the dreams.”

  No, I will NOT be taking them.

  I kept my mouth shut and looked at the floor.

  I waited outside while my parents talked to the doctor. I looked at the old children’s books (too young for me) and the old magazines (too old), and scuffed my feet on the carpet and chewed my nails until the door opened a crack and Mum started to walk through.

  I heard the doctor’s voice drifting out: “Again, there’s probably nothing to worry about… many children have imaginary friends at her age.”

  My heart sank. So that was all – imaginary – well… I’ll never bother talking to adults ever again.

  Before we left the clinic Doctor Spancer gave my parents a prescription for pills that might help the dreams go away.

  “I’m not going to take them,” I insisted as we walked out towards Mum’s car.

  “Just give them a try,” Dad said.

  Mum looked at me; her eyes were sad. “She said the pills might help with your anxiety too, love.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, stomping my feet as I walked. “I’m not taking those stupid pills”

  “Honey, please… they might help.”

  “Mum – I’m not going to take them, and you can’t make me.”

  “I’m not going to make you take them,” Mum said, looking at Dad, who just stared down at the ground. “But you know that medicine can help sometimes.”

  “Sure, Mum,” I said. “I know medicine can help some people, and that’s fine – that’s good for them, but it’s not what I want.”

  I want my dreams – I need them... I need to get back to that magical place where everything is light and beautiful.

  I was tired after talking to the doctor, but I was looking forward to the sleepover.

  Ella lived in the suburbs, about ten minutes’ drive from town. Mum parked the car outside a modern-looking house.

  “I’m coming inside to meet the parents first,” she insisted.

  “Fine,” I said, and got out of the car.

  Ella’s dad answered the door. He was skinny and balding with glasses and looked nothing like Ella.

  “Awa!”

  Ella hugged me. She showed me around while our parents talked.

  “Your house is so big,” I said, thinking of our small apartment. “And fancy!”

  “It has to be big because there are five of us here,” Ella said. She showed me the TV room where her two older brothers were watching cartoons.

  “Hi,” I said. They barely looked at me, one of them grunted.

  “Teenagers!” Ella said. “Anyway, we are going to order pizza and watch movies up in my room, and eat ice cream!”

  “Sounds great,” I said, and it was.

  We watched movies on Ella’s bed. The walls of her room were painted yellow, and she had an enormous teddy-bear collection, which she seemed a bit embarrassed of. I liked the soft toys, and I was a little bit jealous that Ella’s room – and whole house – was so big. She didn’t seem to notice. She just kept talking about Evan and how much she liked him.

  “Why don’t you just call him?” I said. “Tell him how you feel. It will be better than thinking about it so much.”

  “What if he doesn’t feel the same way though,” Ella said.

  “At least you’ll know,” I said, “which is usually better than not knowing.”

  Ella sighed. “Okay, I’ll call him after dinner.”

  When the pizza arrived, I asked Ella if they had any hot sauce in the house. They happened to have my favourite kind. Ella’s eyes widened as I poured it over my slice of cheese pizza.

  “How the heck can you eat that?” She asked.

  “It’s a thing me and my dad do,” I told her. “He got me used to hot sauce when I was a baby because he was worried he would have to eat bland food, and he can’t handle that because his mum was such a good cook.”

  “A spicy cook?” Ella said, and laughed.

  “Yeah, I guess… she was Chinese.”

  “What part of China did your dad’s family come from?” Ella asked.

  “The weird thing is, I don’t even know. Dad doesn’t talk about his family much. His Mum’s family has been in New Zealand for generations though – since the gold rush – so that’s more than a hundred years, I think. His dad was Scottish. He came over to New Zealand after the Second World War. Dad told me his parents were market gardeners, but they died when he was a teenager.”

  That was it – everything I knew about Dad’s family in a few sentences.

  “Makes sense,” Ella said. “Are you going to pour hot sauce over your ice cream too?”

  “I’ve never tried that,” I said.

  “I dare you!” said Ella.

  So when it came time to eat ice cream, I poured hot sauce over one spoonful, just to see the look on Ella’s face. I took a bite of the cold-hot dessert and watched her gulp.

  “It’s actually pretty good!” I said and poured more over the rest of my bowl.

  “Oh my gosh!” Ella said.

  After we had eaten, Ella got up the courage to call Evan, even though he just lived across the street.

  “Do you want me to leave the room?” I asked.

  “No! stay!” Ella said. “I need the moral support.”

  “Okay…”

  I sat awkwardly on the end of her bed while she started the conversation.

  “Hey, Evan. What are you up to? Nothing much? Oh, I’m just here with Awa, yeah, we just had pizza and ice cream – you will not believe what Awa did, she had hot sauce on her ice cream! I know! She said it was really good! What’s that?... Oh, you can tell me. Oh…”

  I saw Ella’s face fall.

  “Oh, really? Wow… Okay. I don’t know if you should tell her. I better go now. See ya.”

  Ella threw her phone down on the bed and collapsed beside me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Did you tell him?” I could see she was crying.

  “I didn’t get a chance,” Ella said. “He
told me he likes you!”

  Awkward.

  I didn’t know what to say. Ella was so upset, and I didn’t know how to make it better.

  “I’ll write him a letter,” I said. “I’ll explain that I don’t feel that way about him.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Ella said, wiping her eyes.

  “Isn’t it better that he knows?” I asked.

  “It might hurt his feelings,” she said.

  I looked at Ella. “I can tell you care a lot about him, but this is just weird for me.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but are you sure, you don’t like him back? He’s pretty cute.”

  I yawned and thought about Evan with his messy black hair; he looked a bit like a younger version of my dad, which wasn’t really appealing. “Yep, pretty sure.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” Ella said. “Hey, it’s getting quite late. We should probably get some sleep.”

  We set up our blankets and pillows on Ella’s big bed and got ready to go to sleep.

  I listened to Ella snoring softly beside me and felt glad to have such a nice friend, especially when everything else in my life was so crazy.

  I was afraid of doing something embarrassing like talking in my sleep, but I was also excited to see Veila again and to see if I could go back to the Grove.

  I am water, earth, sun and sky…

  I finished the charm, hoping I got all the words right, but nothing seemed to happen. I tried again and again…

  Nothing.

  Eventually, I drifted off to sleep anyway and had strange, blurry dreams about the old house again.

  Chapter Eleven

  I was disappointed and tired the next morning… why didn’t the charm work? Did I get the words wrong? What if I can never make it back there?

  I didn’t talk to Ella much because I was lost in my own thoughts, but after I got home, I did what I said I would do; I wrote a note to Evan, telling him that I only liked him as a friend and nothing more. I put it into my school bag. It seemed innocent enough. I had no idea how much trouble that little piece of paper was going to cause me.

  Mum kept asking me how I was feeling after talking to Dr Spancer, but I didn’t want to talk about it.

  I was still tired from not getting much sleep the night before and I was excited about the possibility of more amazing dreams, so I decided to have a nap. I tried to repeat the charm Veila had given me again, but instead of arriving in the Grove, I was in front of the old house again.

  I heard the hissing of the snake and began to run through the forest–faster and faster. The snake was quicker than me. I could feel its breath on the back of my neck, sense its jaw opening wide. I screamed – waking myself up.

  The charm didn’t work.

  Maybe I was just too tired to dream well, with everything going on in my waking life.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Ella and Evan, and about Melody, and about Dr Spancer. I really wanted to get back to the meadow and the Grove and to talk to Veila again, but I was also still freaked out by the nightmare about the snake chasing me. I kept the light on even though Mum nagged me to turn it off.

  I tried repeating the charm, over and over, but I was still awake.

  “I am water, earth, sun, and sky…”

  I felt stupid.

  I got up to go to the bathroom. The apartment was lighter than usual. I went to the window to see a full moon rising in the sky. Moonlight was flooding in.

  Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep.

  I went back to my room to lie down.

  I held my hands up in the moonlight and looked at my index fingernail. I could almost see a faint glimmer, but maybe it was just my imagination.

  Eventually, I relaxed and drifted off. I was walking down a path… the path towards the Grove.

  Yes!

  I got to the circle of trees.

  Wow.

  It was even more beautiful than last time… and different somehow.

  The stream looked wider than before; the plants looked even more lush and vibrant, and…

  I looked down at a small shrub, kawakawa?

  “But how could it be here?” I wondered, aloud.

  “You must have brought it here,” Veila’s voice said. “What does it mean to you?”

  “This grows in Nannie’s garden in Kāwhia,” I said. The plant reminded me of her and my great-aunt Rosetta, and of how much I missed them. They always drank tea from the kawakawa leaves that she said cured just about everything.

  “So it’s ancestral,” Veila said. “Interesting…”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It could be a warning,” Veila said, “…or it could be some other kind of message.”

  “How can I tell?”

  “Warnings will fade quickly,” Veila said, “because the danger will become obvious”

  Danger, I wondered, what kind of danger could I be in?

  “But…” Veila continued “other kinds of messages from the ancestors tend to last a lot longer.”

  “Do you mean the ancestors are actually out there somewhere, and they’re talking to me through this plant?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Veila.

  I looked up to see her, hovering above the pond, and suddenly remembered my earlier frustrations. “I’ve been trying to get back here, but your charm didn’t work!”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” Veila asked, coming closer to me.

  “But I tried it lots of times, and…”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy,” Veila said, splashing through the water, sending prisms of rainbow light around the Grove.

  “No, but you said…”

  “Did you do the breathing thing?” she asked.

  “What breathing… oh…” That’s right; there was something else, something before the words. “I forgot.”

  “That’s the most important part,” Veila said, splashing me and giggling.

  I wiped the refreshing drops away.

  “I was too busy focusing on trying to remember the words,” I said.

  “You humans are always doing that, as far as I can tell.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “Thinking too much,” she said, “…worrying too much to pay attention.”

  “But I was paying attention,” I said.

  “Not to the most important part.”

  “So that’s the most important part?” I asked. “Breathing?!”

  “You have to be centred,” Veila said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Centred as in… focused in the present… centred in yourself.”

  “I thought it was a bad thing to be self-centred.” I laughed, and the sound seemed to echo in colourful patterns across the trees surrounding the Grove.

  “That’s very odd,” Veila said. “What else is supposed to be at the centre of you?”

  “Other people, I guess, or more important things like saving the planet.”

  “But how…” Veila said, “can you really do anything if you are not centred in yourself?”

  “I… I don’t know,” I said, my shoulders slumping. I was sick of arguing and ready to listen.

  I practiced the breathing, slowly… counting to four as I breathed in, and then to six as I breathed out.

  After a while I opened my eyes and looked around. Veila was sitting on a boulder, watching me, curiously.

  “Breathing is boring!” I said.

  “Exactly!” said Veila.

  “What?”

  “You need to bore your thinking-brain into going to sleep so that you can really be present,” she replied. “and you also need to make sure you are in the dark.”

  “What?” I said. “Do you mean I need to sleep with the light off?”

  “Of course,” Veila said. “You need to spend time in the dark – in the void. That is where all new things come from.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, crossing my arms.

  “The
charm will work better in the dark,” Veila said. “So if you want to come back here, you better follow my instructions.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I said. It didn’t really make sense, but it was worth a try to get back to this amazing place.

  I lay in the soft grass, surrounded by bright orange and blue wildflowers that smelled like caramel and looked up at the purple, swirling sky.

  I sighed, it felt so good just to be there, after the past few days of stress.

  “It’s so beautiful here,” I said. “I think… right now, this is the best part of my life.”

  “Really?” Veila sounded curious.

  “Everything else is kind of a mess,” I said. “But it sounds pretty sad, doesn’t it, that my dreams are better than my real life?”

  “You still keep thinking they aren’t real life?” Veila asked.

  “This can’t be real,” I said. “It’s too good… it’s impossible.”

  I woke up to the sound of rain. I lay in bed wondering…did saying it was impossible take me out of the dream?

  Do I have to believe in it, for it to be real… or would that just make me insane?

  Chapter Twelve

  It was a really boring long weekend, and I was also dreading going back to school and having to face Evan. I wondered if I could just avoid him altogether. Mum and Dad had both been trying to talk to me about Dr Spancer. I hated that they thought something was wrong with me. Dad called, and I told him I was busy even though I wasn’t. I just wanted to get away from both my parents and away from my life – at least from my waking life.

  I tried the charm again that night. This time I followed Veila’s instructions. I relaxed properly. I turned off the light and faced my own dark bedroom. My mind raced with fears of monsters, snakes, demons, but I got into bed and focused on my breathing.

  I counted to slow my breaths the way Veila had shown me – four on the in-breath, six on the out-breath. It was quite relaxing. I decided I was ready to try the charm.

  I am water, earth, sun, and sky…

  I was in the Grove. I could tell by the uplifting feeling and the swishing sound of the stream. This time the air smelled like vanilla in the warm sun. The kawakawa shrub still glistened in front of me – so maybe it wasn’t a warning, but some kind of message. What does it mean?