Little Jane Brown was a dreamer. She spent her leisure time building sprawling new worlds, and populating them with characters and creatures of which no normal child could ever conceive. 

To the adults in Jane’s life, whom you would think would encourage such a quality in a child, this was an affliction of which she would need to rid herself, if she were to lead a full and productive life. You see, the world in which Jane lived was identical to our world in every respect but one: imagination was a disease. 

No one wanted to befriend or marry or employ a dreamer; not unless they wanted to be infected themselves.When Jane was six, her exasperated mother, Mary, sat her down for yet another talking-to after the school nurse sent Jane home sick for the third time that month. 

‘She brought in a dandelion seed for show and tell,’ snarled the nurse from behind her protective mask.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Mary Brown.

‘She said it was a…’ 

Nurse Smith’s eyes began to water, and Jane and her mother both thought they heard the faintest gagging sound work its way out of Nurse Smith’s mouth.

‘A fairy,’ Nurse Smith managed. ‘We can’t have a repeat of the butterfly incident, Mrs Brown, we just can’t.’

The incident to which the now shaking nurse was referring took place on the first day of the school year. The teacher, who was also named Smith, (there were only three sir names in this world – Brown, Jones, or Smith), had given each child a large sheet of drawing paper and a pair of scissors, and had asked them to draw a picture of their house and cut it out.

Jane didn’t want to draw her house, because it was the same as everybody else’s house – small, grey, and box-like. Jane drew a butterfly instead. She cut it out and showed it to the girl sitting next to her, who created her own butterfly, and showed it to the child sitting across from her.

Within half an hour, there were nineteen paper butterflies in the classroom, laying flat on their creator’s desks. Jane could not have that. She stood up on her chair and held up her butterfly.

‘Fly, my pretty, I hereby set you free. Fly, fly, FLY!’

Within seconds, the other children were all standing on their desks, flapping their hands about and shouting Fly, fly, FLY! By the end of the day, all of the children were in quarantine, and the teacher was laying on her couch, smoking her twelfth cigarette with a trembling hand.

‘If you don’t stop this imagination nonsense, you’ll end up in a Home for sick children, where there’ll be nothing to do but sit in a chair and eat gruel.’

Mary Brown knew she had failed in her attempt at scaring her daughter straight when she went into Jane’s room the next day and found Jane’s composition book filled with stories about a masked hero who rescues children from prison and creates an army of Painters, who go around creating new worlds with nothing but a paintbrush and a bottomless bucket of any-colour paint.

Mary tore the stories to pieces and dragged Jane to see a specialist. Doctor George Jones was a child psychiatrist whose record stood for itself – letters of thanks from the parents of his former patients lined the walls of his office.

‘This young man here,’ said Doctor Jones, pointing to a picture of a rather greyish bus driver, ‘is Frank Smith. He was a lollygagger who drew winged horses when he came to me. Now he drives back and forth, taking his fellow citizens to and from work all day. You can see the contentment in his eyes.’

‘Marvellous!’ said Mary. ‘Do you think my Jane can be helped?’

Doctor Jones handed Mary a tissue.

‘Every child can be helped, Mrs Brown, using my patented aversion-capture therapy.’

‘Aversion-capture?’

‘Yes, and I think we should start it right now.’

Doctor Jones went over to a large cabinet, opened a door, and pulled out a box. He brought it over to an empty desk in the corner of the room and put it down.

‘Jane, dear, come over here and sit down. I have a project for you.’

Jane obeyed, after her mother nudged her. Once she was seated, the doctor opened the box and lay the contents on the desk. Jane looked at the glue and the pieces of cane and imagined building a pterodactyl nest, where she could raise a winged creature that would fly her away to a better place, then she thought about The Home and clamped her hand over her kept her mouth to keep it shut.

‘Now,’ said Doctor Jones, ‘I don’t want you stop imagining. On the contrary! Whenever you imagine something, I want you to take two pieces of cane and glue them together, like this…’

Doctor Jones performed the action, and nodded at Jane, who did the same.

‘Good girl. Remember, you must do this every time an imaginative thought pops into your head, alright?’

Jane nodded, and glued two more sticks of cane together.

‘Well, fine! If you keep this up, you’ll have a lovely ball to sit on your windowsill. Won’t that be nice?’

Jane nodded, glued together two more sticks. The pterodactyl was fading back into extinction.

Doctor Jones sent Jane and her mother home with three boxes full of the tools needed for Jane’s Project, the resultant products of which the doctor called Dream Seeds.

‘Why do you call them that?’ Mary asked.

‘Because a seed cannot germinate if it’s left in a hot window to dry.’

By the time Jane turned twelve, every windowsill in the house was lined with dream seeds in varying states of decay. She hadn’t entertained a loose, unhinged thought since she was ten, and when she had grown into the practical, sensible woman her mother wanted her to be, she got the attention of an equally level-headed young man who asked her to marry him.

One Saturday morning, she and her mother were sewing the grey suits her bridesmaids would wear when it occurred to Jane that the ensembles could benefit from some hand-made daisies stitched onto the lapels. She ran to her room, feigning a headache, and pulled out the last dream seed kit she had left. 

She began gluing two of the cane sticks together, then looked at her window and thought of John Jones-Smith, her fiance. Taking her mother’s advice, Jane hadn’t told John about her Illness, for fear he should worry about her passing it on to their children. 

Mary said she would throw them all out before the engagement dinner, but John worked for the department of sanitation, and Jane didn’t want one of his co-workers stumbling onto the evidence of her childhood affliction. She supposed she could burn them, but with all that kindling, there might be a bonfire. There was only one thing to do.

At nine p.m, when everyone in town had been asleep for half an hour, Jane took her dream seeds outside and buried them in every spare patch of dirt she could find. When her mother asked them where they were, Jane would simply tell her she got up early and took them directly to the dump. She set her alarm for five a.m, to be sure she was up first.

When Mary woke her with a scream at four thirty, Jane knew something was wrong – Mary followed a strict schedule when it came to bathroom visits, and it was at least an hour and a half before her first urination was due.

Jane ran to her parent’s room and opened the door – there was no danger of her walking in on something, because her mother and father’s Relations followed a schedule as well. What she saw pressed up against the window took her back to her first visit to Doctor Jones.

A pink and green striped pterodactyl was screeching for its Mummy. It alone would’ve been cause for concern, but it wasn’t alone. Fairies, talking buses, singing frogs, and sundry other loony creations were cavorting about in the Brown’s front yard, and beyond, if their neighbour’s screams were anything to go by.

Jane ran outside with her mother and father at her heel and took in the chaos. Giant sunflowers swayed back and forth in Jim and Ann Smith’s front garden, gossiping gayly about what wonderful weather it was for the time of year. 

They pronounced Mr Smith to be terribly rude when he tried unsuccessfully to chop them down, but each held out a leafy stem a moment later and introduced themselves, and Mr Smith was soon thoroughly charmed. 

In Bill and Anne Brown’s yard two doors down, the Brown’s twin daughters, Jane and Ann, were riding a pink elephant, whose tall, spindly trainer led it around by clapping whenever it was in danger of crashing into anything. 

Peter and Mary Smith’s house at the end of the block was livelier still, what with the rainbow trailing down from the roof, which the Smith’s three children were using as a slide, and the tea party at which Mr and Mrs Smith were served pink tea by one Darius Defini Dillwater Dentalfloss the third.

Jane knew his name because she had created him, then cast him into a knotty prison, when she was seven years old. Every creature that now dotted the dull landscape in which she was raised was once a dream she had left on a windowsill to rot.

‘My god,’ said Mary, ‘what have you done?’

She pointed to a trail of dream seeds that were littering the yard. A green sprout stuck out of the top of each of them that looked as though the plants had been yanked free of once fully grown.

‘You’ve caused this…this…’

‘Dreamland!’ exclaimed Anne-Marie Jones from next door. ‘My mother threatened to put me in The Home when I was a girl, made me see that dreadful Doctor Jones, but now here it is, in MY street!’

But this wasn’t Anne-Marie’s Dreamland, it was Fourth Street, Greyville, and it was being overrun by beings that Jane had planted there. Mary Brown sat down on the ground and sobbed. Jim Brown, who had never had any strong opinions one way or the other about anything, sat down next to his wife and took her hand.

‘Our Jane made a Dreamland; and made everyone in the street happy; that’s nothing to cry about.’

‘Oh no? And what happens when all of Doctor Jones’es other patients work out what happened? Just how big do you think this street is?’

Jane ran next door, and found Anne-Marie Jones standing in the middle of her parent’s lawn, with her arms full of dream seeds. Anne-Marie’s problems were numerous, and far more serious than a simple predilection for dreaming. Jane had to think, quickly.

‘Which dream made you the happiest?’ she blurted out.

‘All of them.’

‘Okay, but which one made you smile whenever you thought about it, no matter where you were or what you were doing?’

Anne-Marie gave Jane just such a smile now.

‘The blue knight. I dreamed him up when I was thirteen. I dreamed he would come charging in and rescue me, and take me for a ride on his purple steed for days at a time, until we reached his golden castle, and we’d live there forever, slaying evil doctors and rescuing children from a fate worse than death – sameness.’

‘Do you know which dream seed he’s trapped in?’

‘This one,’Anne-Marie said, and reached into her pocket and pulled it out.

‘I have an idea,’ said Jane. ‘Why don’t you plant that seed, but let me give the other ones to people who don’t even know what it’s like to dream?’

Anne-Marie gave Jane the seeds, and Jane ran back home and put them in the large green satchel that hung from her Pterodactyl’s. saddle. She spent the next two hours driving through town, collecting dream seeds and putting them in the trunk of her car. 

When the sun had gone down, Jane had amassed a collection of nine hundred and seventy two dream seeds, and she pulled in to her parent’s driveway just in time to see John Jones-Smith arrive for their engagement dinner with his parents in tow. All of them appeared frazzled and panicked beyond the telling of it.

‘Thank goodness, a normal person!’ John said, and gave Jane a kiss on the cheek. ‘You have no idea the things we’ve seen today. I don’t think poor Mother can take much more. One of your mother’s boiled dinners should calm her right down.’

But when Jane and the Jones-Smiths opened the front door, they were overwhelmed by an aroma that didn’t smell at all like slow-boiled chicken and soft-boiled potatoes and string beans, and a look at the guests that were sitting around the table told Mrs Jones-Smith that she had stepped out of a mad world into an asylum.

Darius Dentalfloss was carving up the biggest cooked beast any of them had ever seen and plopping the slices onto plates next to gleaming vegetables, wedges of (they could only assume)odd-looking  cheeses, and slivers of pie covered in a divine-smelling gravy.

‘Don’t forget to leave room for the cocoa-nana-buttercream-upside-down cake!’ Darius chirped.

When he turned to see what everyone else was looking at, and saw the Jones-Smiths standing in the kitchen doorway looking utterly gobsmacked, he stood up at his full height and welcomed them.

‘I say, you must be the Smith-Joneses, or Jones-Smith-Browns, or what have you. Darius Defini Dillwater Dentalfloss The Third. Charmed to meet you!’

Darius held out his hand, but neither Mr Jones-Smith nor Mrs Jones-Smith nor John Jones-Smith took it.

‘I thought you said they were normal,’ snarled Mr Jones-Smith to his son.

‘They were,’ said John, ‘until now.’

‘It’s that dreadful dreamer-bug, they’ve been infected, too,’ said Mrs Jones-Smith, wide-eyed.

Mary Brown pushed back her chair and stood up.

‘Imagination isn’t infectious, my dear woman, or you would have caught it by now. You’re still welcome to join us for dinner. The food is just exquisite.’

‘Oh, pshaw!’ said Darius, blushing.

The Jones-Smiths clung to one another and backed away slowly.

‘John,’ said Mrs Jones-Smith, far more loudly than she’d intended, ‘let’s get out of here…NOW.’

John looked at the feast laid out before him and pointed.

‘Which meat is that?’

‘Goose, from the Green Gallapogus Mountains. It isn’t boiled, mind you – the best way to bring out the woody, buttery flavour of Gallapogus Goose is to roast it over charcoal for seven hours, then sit it in a vat of bitter grape jam for another two. Try some?’

Darius held out a slice of meat and John, after a split seconds deliberation, took it and put it in his mouth. He closed his eyes and savoured every bite until his mother slapped him upside the head.

‘Well?’

John finally swallowed, opened his eyes, and grinned.

‘It’s spectacular.’ 

The Jones-Smiths each took a place at the table, and enjoyed the first meal of their lives that hadn’t been rescued, grey and sodden from a soup pot of unsalted water. After an evening of games and jaunty conversation, the Jones-Smiths were positively glowing, and with the gift of a dream seed of their very own, Mr and Mrs Jones-Smith went home virtually walking on air. 

As for John Jones-Smith, he found that he was actually excited at the prospect of marriage to such a dreamy, creative girl, but he knew she would not be marrying him yet.

‘I need to fix things first. Once my mission’s over, I’ll see you at the town hall. I’ll be the one in the red top hat and hoop dress down the front.’

Jane kissed her parents and her fiance goodnight, loaded up her Pterodactyl’s saddle bag with all of the other dreamseeds she had collected and set off on her quest to brighten the world, one city at a time. 

She visited many countries, collecting new dream seeds as well as distributing old ones, before she finally returned home.

Freya, Vivienne, and Lark Jones-Smith, respectively, grew up to create their own spectacular worlds, which they populated with even more spectacular creatures. 

They never knew what it was like not to dream..