Dream Children

[steepholm]

I dreamed last night that I'd just finished a YA novel, my first for several years, and was rather pleased with the result. The denouement was that the POV character, a teenaged boy who had been through quite a lot of dangerous adventures and thought he had successfully completed them, discovered in the last few pages that everything that had happened up until now had been orchestrated by, and was for the benefit of, his younger sister, who was in the middle of a far larger adventure of which the book's events were only a fragment.

The book's final lines, which are all I remember:

"You mean, all this time I've been part of a sideshow?"
"Yes," she replied coolly, "but if I were you I wouldn't dwell on it."

Thus I awoke, and realized that I hadn't written that book at all, though perhaps I had lived it. Then I drifted back to sleep, and as I did so I remembered another unpublished novel that I really had written quite recently. Then I woke again and realized that that one wasn't real either. Sigh...