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Important Warning: this gets a bit creepy. If you're easily creeped out, you should probably skip reading. The whole story only gets up to PG-13 unless you've got a very graphic imagination.
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Everyone dreams. It is as much a part of being alive as eating and breathing and sleeping. To sleep, perchance to dream. Believe in your dreams, the traditional wisdom says, follow them – for in your dreams you will find what it is you are destined to become.

Every place on Gram has its own traditions about dreams. In Nischa, for example, village shamans go on dream quests to heal the sick and bring enlightenment to those who seek it, as well as guiding each child in the coming-of-age ceremony, when they lie and dream of the path they will follow as adults. In Shih-Weh, a dream is held to be a demand or a warning from the ancestor-gods, and learned men earn a tidy living teasing out the message for its recipient. In Balgusdram, dream diaries are kept and dreams analyzed, like the puzzling blueprints for a curious new machine, in hopes that understanding the parts will bring understanding of the whole. In the Three Courts – Maillon, Paseña and Drakeshire – dreams are treated as an expression of a person’s deepest, most intimate secrets, to be teased apart and plumbed for mysterious and salacious tidbits; the sharing of dreams is typically only practiced between lovers.

But in Telwen e Tir, where the elves live, and in the deep places where events long past are still remembered, everyone knows that dreams are dangerous, a path to a place best left undisturbed and unawakened. If you find yourself in a dream, best to pretend not to know it, and only to listen and watch; your survival may depend on it. When the shadows speak to you, the elves say, any reply is a welcome.

In the village of LePlat, in Maillon, a young boy named Jean was dreaming of the whale again. It was always the same dream, and he hated it. His father had returned from working on the sea when Jean was just learning to speak and walk, a laughing giant with dark skin and golden hair, bringing all the mythos of a father who he had only ever heard of, as well as strange gifts from other lands and stories of the great beasts of the oceans. Jean had been particularly impressed by the tales of the whales, which his father said would sometimes swim in groups around a ship, blowing and calling to one another, before suddenly diving, all at once, leaving the sea empty but for the telltale churn of foam where a giant tail had slapped the water’s surface in its descent. He had once paced the ploughed fields to show Jean how long a whale was, though Jean was still not sure his father was not exaggerating – surely nothing alive could be that big! And then, one night when he was supposed to be asleep, little Jean had crept down from the loft to hear the tales his father shared with the older men, and he had listened carefully to the grim tales of the cruelty of the sea and its denizens: boats crushed and all hands lost, men falling overboard into waiting sharp-toothed mouths, fierce storms where those who lost their handhold were never seen again, and those who kept hold were lucky if they ever saw their homes again. That was when the nightmares had started.

The whale would come to Jean in his dreams, and be friendly, and swim with him on its back, glorying in the wind and the sun and the cries of the seagulls. And then, suddenly and without warning, it would dive down, deep down beyond the reach of the light dancing on the water’s surface, and Jean would scream soundlessly in its slipstream, calling to his friend to remind him that he couldn’t breathe underwater. And then the hands of the dead would appear, bloated and pale and falling to pieces, pulling him deeper and deeper as he struggled, until everything went dark. That was when Jean would wake, screaming and panting and drenched in sweat, and his mother would hold him close and sing to him. Try as he might, he never managed to wake up before the whale dived, though he tried often enough. Tonight was the same; here he was, arms flung wide atop the massive whale, laughing up at the sky as the whale called to him with its low moans. He couldn’t help but enjoy this part, even with the twisting feeling of dread in his stomach that the worst was about to happen.

Then something new happened; mermen appeared around him. Jean knew they must be mermen, for they looked like little children with fish tails and fish eyes and gills along their necks. In his astonishment, Jean forgot to be afraid. He called out to the creatures, and they swam and leapt around him as, with a sinking feeling, Jean realized the whale was taking a deep breath. Fruitlessly, he tried to leap off of the whale as usual, but the pull of the whale as it parted the water beneath it pulled him down too. Jean screamed in the rushing foam of the whale’s slipstream, but it could not hear him. And there were the little mermen still, following him in the water, watching him curiously as he tumbled and tried to swim for the water’s surface. They hovered around him like an interested audience, seeming to taste the water around him as he flailed in increasing panic. Jean reached out to them, but they only swam a bit further out of reach and continued to watch him. And there, as always, were the clammy dead men’s hands, soggy ragged flesh and bone, reaching up from the depths to pull him down to share their watery resting place.

Everything went dark – but only for a moment. In a surreal underwater halflight, Jean looked around him and saw all the furniture of home, floating in the middle of the water with him. The heavy wooden furniture dropped quickly beyond sight, the dead men’s hands parting to let it pass, but Jean’s mother and father both floated, eerily calm, beside him for a moment. There was a moment of frozen bile-drenched terror for Jean as his parents awoke, staring around them wild-eyed, straining for a breath that would not come. The hands of the drowned men dragged his still-struggling parents down into the darkness as lights popped behind the eyes of the terrified child. With cold certainty, Jean knew that this was no longer a dream, and that there would be no waking and no one to comfort him. As he felt the dead men seize his ankles and his consciousness flickered into darkness, the last thing Jean saw was the little mermen following him down, watching him drown as they grinned with mouths full of razor-sharp teeth.

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I've gotten a lot farther on this one than any other attempt, and I'm trying to keep it going until it's a real honest-to-god book. If you like this, please check out the rest of what I've got to date on my deviantArt page. I appreciate critical commentary as long as it's constructive (ie, not "it sucks", but "it could be better if...").

Very cool, I wasn't sure what to expect going into this. I liked the descriptions of how all the different cultures treated dreams as an introduction, very effectived ^_^.

Wow, that is really good!!! I loved it. It was really interesting with the part of how other cultures view dreams. I know how Jean feels with this kind of dream. I hate it when the same dream keeps coming back and it always ends badly, but you just can't wake up until the end. I like how I can compare it to my own life even though it's fantasy. Keep it up!!!