I was woken up this morn­ing by a knock at my door, which I found some­what sur­pris­ing since I went to bed in a tent. I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t still asleep, but the sub­ur­ban semi-detached-ness of my sur­round­ings failed to trans­form itself back into damp can­vas. Awake, then, pre­sum­ably — but did that pinch­ing thing ever really work, any­way? I mean, you feel much worse things in a lot of night­mares with­out wak­ing up.

“Still, never mind,” I thought through my men­tal caffeine-deficiency haze and through the folds of the dress­ing gown that was cur­rently refus­ing to play nice with my drowsy limbs. “Should see who’s at the door.”

The two peo­ple at the door were tall, beau­ti­ful and entirely androg­y­nous. Since they them­selves took up most of the porch, they had to stretch their shin­ing wings back­wards across the front garden.

They intro­duced them­selves as Gabriel and Raphael, and asked if I’d thought about let­ting the light of Jehova into my life.

I said that I was Serin, and sorry, but I thought that Jesus was just fictional.

“And you are oth­er­wise?” Gabriel asked, and I was forced to con­cede that no, I was fic­tional too.

Raphael said that was okay, because angels weren’t real either, and they asked if I wanted to talk about it.

I invited them in and made a pot of cof­fee — thick, strong, Columbian stuff. While push­ing down the cafetiere’s plunger, it dawned on me that I didn’t know what Colum­bia was, but that it prob­a­bly didn’t mat­ter. Prob­a­bly just another fic­tion tak­ing up space in my ever-decreasing memory.

I said as much to the angels, and Gabriel fixed me with a long, hard stare from his per­fect eyes.

“Colum­bia,” he said, “is a large South Amer­i­can country.”

“So is it real?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“Eh?”

Raphael chose to answer now, his melo­di­ous voice chim­ing per­fectly with Gabriel’s. “There is some­thing you need to under­stand, Serin, and quickly. You are not fic­tion. You are real. We are real. It is all this,” he ges­tured at the rest of the comfortably-appointed living-room, “that is not real.”

“So this really is a dream!” I responded hap­pily. “I knew it!”

“Not quite,” came Gabriel’s answer. “Almost the oppo­site, in fact. There are rather a lot of peo­ple who believe that this world is real and that the one in which you were only yes­ter­day is but a dream.”

“So I’ve just woken up after dream­ing the rest of my life? What are you try­ing to say? How come I remem­ber every­thing so vividly? How come I know what cof­fee is but not what Colum­bia is? What’s really going on!?”

“What is ‘going on’? Well, you will have to wait a while for the answer to that. There is, how­ever, one thing we can tell you, one thing we can teach you, and that is this. The most impor­tant fact for you to realise is that nei­ther of these worlds is real.”

“Nei­ther? What do you mean? Are all my mem­o­ries a dream, or… or what?”

“Your mem­o­ries, dear Serin, are as real as you are. Very real indeed. Your com­pan­ions, they are real also. But they can do many fan­tas­tic things, cor­rect? While you can not.”

“I… I can do some magic,” I replied hesitantly.

“Pas­sive magic, Serin. You do magic, but you do not change any­thing. Your friends, some of them at least, are the kind of peo­ple who carve their ini­tials in the fab­ric of the world just by their very exis­tence. Would not you like to be as they are? To forge your own way, your own life?”

I sighed, and sank deeper into the sofa. There was no way of avoid­ing it, they seemed to know every­thing about me, even the feel­ings that I’d kept locked so far down in my mind that no-one knew them — some­times even I for­got about them. “Yes,” I con­ceded. “Yes, I would.”

Raphael and Gabriel stood, and put down their cof­fee cups. “Then we will show you the way,” Raphael said.

The three of us stood out­side in the gar­den, look­ing at a tiny plant that was grow­ing in an oth­er­wise empty patch of ground. The dew was cold and tingly on my bare feet, and the breeze was slowly start­ing to chill the rest of my body — still with only a dress­ing gown to keep me warm — as well.

Raphael indi­cated the small island of green in the brown sea of earth with an empty-handed ges­ture. “What is this?”

“It’s a sapling,” I replied. I was caught a lit­tle off-guard — I was expect­ing some kind of cos­mic truth to be unveiled, not a patro­n­is­ing biol­ogy les­son. “Oak. By the looks of it, this’ll be its sec­ond Spring. What’s your point here?”

I imme­di­ately regret­ted being so abrupt when speak­ing to an angel, but the remark appeared to go unno­ticed. It was not answered.

“So what would you say, for exam­ple, if I did this?” Raphael asked, and ges­tured once more to the… to the tree.

“But… but, that’s not a tree, that wasn’t a tree, it should be just a sapling, what did you… oh. Oh, it is just a sapling.”

I sup­pose I should have expected that angels would have that kind of power, but it still caught me off guard. “Was that… an illu­sion?” I asked guardedly.

“No, Serin. I turned that tiny sapling into a giant oak. And you turned it back.”

“Me? How could I…? I don’t have power like that!”

“You do, Serin. Every­body does. It is your absolute, total belief that there should be a sapling and not a tree over there that re-wrote the world around you. Every day of everyone’s lives, every­one is doing this in tiny and sub­tle ways. The only trick is to acknowl­edge that there is no absolute, real world, just the worlds inside our heads.”

Gabriel picked up where Raphael left off. “It is like the lucid dreams that you have. You can do any­thing. The only dif­fer­ence, the thing that you will come to realise, is that the world you expe­ri­ence — the world you thought of as real — is just another dream. They are just worlds inside the heads of peo­ple. You can, absolutely and with­out limit, do any­thing you want to do.”

It was hard to let words like that sink in, but even­tu­ally they started to do that. I began to realise, began to see, that this world around me was not what I wanted it to be. Why was I here, stand­ing in a dress­ing gown, out­side, on a cold mid-March morn­ing, still won­der­ing about the exis­tence of some place called ‘Colum­bia’ while being lec­tured at by angels?

“This gown is weird,” I thought, and thought, and thought, and con­cen­trated, and willed with every frag­ment of my mind, and opened my eyes. I was wear­ing the thick woollen dress that I was much more com­fort­able in.

It became eas­ier with every change I made. My thick hob-nail boots shielded my feet from the freez­ing dew, and my scarf pro­tected my face from the wind, and my hat sat heav­ily on my bil­low­ing hair. The wall at the end of the gar­den resolved itself into a line of trees and, as I turned, the house that felt like mine turned back into a car­a­van and a clus­ter of tents around a smoul­der­ing fire.

I turned back to Gabriel and Raphael, who looked smaller and some­how frayed at the edges. A bub­ble of con­fu­sion floated to the sur­face of my mind. Did I even believe in angels, anyway?

“No,” Gabriel replied to the thought I hadn’t voiced, and the two of them faded into tiny points of light that dis­si­pated on the dawn zephyrs.

A bleary-eyed face poked out of a tent to her right. “Why is it that I can smell cof­fee?” it asked in as coher­ent Eng­lish as its owner could man­age at that time of the morning.

I grinned and passed him the cof­fee cup that I still held in my hand. “Try some. Where’s Columbia?”

“Colum­bia?” Tsuki replied. “Dunno. Ask Kyren?”

“Good plan.”

Things were back to nor­mal again, after what can’t have been that long. It felt like an age, though. An age in which I changed a lot.

“Maybe not quite back to nor­mal,” I mut­tered to myself as I smiled and my thoughts turned into real­ity and another cup of cof­fee appeared in my hand. Kyren would be need­ing it.

“Who’s not quite nor­mal?” came a deep voice from behind me. I span abruptly, and ended up look­ing right at Kyren’s hap­pily smil­ing face. My heart felt like it had skipped a beat, and I hastily gulped down a mouth­ful of air before calm­ing myself and grin­ning back at him and hand­ing him the coffee.

“Does it taste… real?” I asked him as he took a sip.

“Real? My dear, you have just offered me a cup of cof­fee that exists only because you wanted it to. There is a sparkle in your eyes today, the sparkle of a woman who has dis­cov­ered, at last, her own real­ity. And if it’s real for you, it’s real for me.”

I smiled, and laughed. Finally, I under­stood, and oth­ers under­stood me. And, of course, I got to see his smile again.