By: Alicia Chen

This is the story of the fairy of dreams.

Margaret was at home doing math problems. She hated math problems. So, she decided to think about something unrelated to math problems. But all she could think of was watching anime and drawing.

After an agonizingly long time, she finished all the assignments she had, both from school and from her parents. She ran upstairs and found all the supplies she needed to make a dreamcatcher. Margaret knew that dreamcatchers couldn’t really “catch” dreams. Who didn’t?

At night when Margaret was drifting into sleep, she heard a little jingling sound next to her bed. She simply thought, “It must be my imagination…” and with that she fell asleep.

She had a dream about falling off a cliff, into the sea, and then getting eaten by a shark. Certainly a very pleasant dream. But Margaret had a weird feeling this morning that didn’t come from the dream. Only then did she notice her dreamcatcher fell to the ground. But as she touched the dreamcatcher, she felt everything spin and she shut her eyes tight.

When Margaret opened her eyes again, she noticed that she was standing on the edge of a cliff. She just about had a heart attack. She muttered to herself, “What the flying fluffernuggets am I doing, standing on the edge of a CLIFF, above SHARK INFESTED WATERS?” Then the realization hit her, she was back in the falling off a cliff and getting eaten by a shark in her dream.

Just as she was slowly piecing things together, she slipped and fell off the cliff. She was too terrified to even scream. As she fell into the water, she saw the jaws of a shark, the sides lined with razor sharp teeth. She shut her eyes. Margaret thought that she was dead. So she risked opening one eye to see what heaven looked like. Instead, she was back in her room. She realized what had happened to her. She revisited a dream! And she did it only by thinking about it.

Margaret was incredibly, extremely happy. she was getting ready to celebrate, but just then her mother came in the room with a skeptical expression. “Margaret, hurry up and get dressed. Or else you’ll be late for school, and you can feel free to explain that to your teacher,” her mother said. Margaret gave a sigh of exasperation and dragged herself to the closet.

When Margaret when to school, she immediately ran over to her friend Jane.

“Jane! JANE! You will NOT believe what I’m about to tell you!”

“What happened Margaret? You rarely get this excited unless you find an awesome new anime to watch.”

“It’s NOT anime.”

“Well then spill the tea. What is it?”

“So I made a dreamcatcher, and it actually caught one of by dreams and sent me into the dream!”

“Margaret, did you eat something weird? Everybody knows that dreamcatchers don’t actually catch dreams. Oh! We need to get to class! Margaret, come on!”

When Margaret got home, she was terribly disappointed. Her best friend, the person that trusted her words that most, didn’t believe her. If Jane didn’t believe her, then nobody would.

So, Margaret just kept the dreamcatcher as her own little secret. She got married, had children, got a job, and lived a perfectly normal life despite her secret. But many years later, when Margaret often went by “Grammie Margaret” and was moving on creaking bones, she suddenly realized that she really, REALLY didn’t want to leave her precious dreamcatcher behind on earth when she went to wherever dead people go.

And when Margaret died, like so many other people, she stayed and became a fairy, the one that rules over people’s dreams. Margaret really thought for a moment that she would become the fairy of boring math problems. She was one of the rare people that got turned into fairies peacefully and had not been assassinated.

And that’s why sometimes you have odd dreams that really aren’t related to you at all.