In my dream, I’m five again. My imaginary friend, Mister Smiley Demon, still visits me and plays with me. I feel safe when he smiles, but just like the first time I met him, the two horns coming out of his head and his red eyes scare me. He notices and changes in front of me, makes a big deal out of it to entertain me. I giggle as his horns disappear and flowers replace them, then stars, then pink hair.
My parents are watching us, as they always did. Mister Smiley Demon and I are playing in their garden. They’re watching from the patio, and I feel their suspicious stares at him burn into my back. I make it a point to laugh a little harder. See, Mom and Dad? He’s not hurting me.
And then, in the way of dreams, I’m my current age of thirty-three, and Mister Smiley Demon looks scared. He says something, but I can’t hear him even though I’m right there. I think he’s asking for help. I don’t know how I know; dreams don’t explain themselves. Then, I wake up with the heavy feeling that this was somehow more than just a normal dream.
The dream was confusing the first time I had it about a week ago, but now I’m positively stumped. I’ve had recurring dreams before, but they are usually few and far between, not every night for a whole week.
I sit up in my bed and rub my eyes. Do I miss him? I haven’t thought of Mister Smiley Demon in years. I mean, I have, but just little things here and there. Twenty-eight years of wondering what he’s up to now, if his mind ever wanders to me when he does the dishes, if imaginary friends do the dishes at all …
Mostly, I’ve wondered what I did wrong.
I take a deep breath in and slowly exhale to let the dream, the pain, go. It’s been so long. I’ve moved on. Mister Smiley Demon probably stopped playing with me because I didn’t need him anymore. That’s how imaginary friends work, isn’t it?
Except, I was still lonely then—lonelier than before he showed up, actually, since little five-year-old me felt very abandoned after he left. I went through two phases of trying to learn everything I could about imaginary friends in the faint hope of figuring out why he left, but, well…
The first phase was shortly after he left me. I was a heart-broken kid without answers and remembered the looks my parents gave him all too well, so I didn’t feel like I could ask them. I didn’t have the knowledge or the research skills my parents did, so I didn’t find anything in my picture books or in A Witch Child’s Compendium —frankly, I could barely pronounce ‘compendium’.
The second phase was much later, in my mid-twenties. I just had this sudden itch, I guess, like I needed to reconnect with Mister Smiley Demon. My research skills were much better by then, but I still didn’t find anything. Figures, I suppose. Imaginary friends are, well, imaginary. Although, my parents clearly saw him, too, so he didn’t live in my head alone.
The point is, I’ve tried looking into it before and found nothing. I suppose in the general hierarchy of us Veiled, they would rank pretty low. We sorcerers rank higher than our ‘homemade cousins’, as my parents call people who practice simple magic and can’t actually throw fire around, but we’re still not exactly top of the chain. Not that we really have a chain…
I sigh and slowly stretch all my limbs and muscles. This dream won’t let me go, and I don’t know what to do about it. If someone’s written the book on imaginary friends in the last eight years, no one’s told me, and I haven’t come across it by accident.
But I can’t just forget it, either.
Mister Smiley Demon looked so scared in my dream. I was salty over him just leaving without a word, but that doesn’t mean I want him to suffer. Brief as our time together was, he made my childhood brighter. If he’s still out there and didn’t vanish because he stopped playing with me, there has to be a way to contact him. I do the only thing I can think of - I unfold my meditation cloth in my small ritual room and sit in the center. I light some incense, close my eyes, take a deep breath…
And everything stills. My mind soars and expands. Back when I was a teenager, I wanted to learn how to meditate because I wanted to be a hedge witch and thought it was required, but I still meditate almost daily for that immediate sense of relaxation and peace. As soon as I find this feeling and surrender to it, the outside world no longer matters. It’s just me and the void—and, hopefully, answers.
I picture Mister Smiley Demon in as much detail as I can remember: his two black horns, his red eyes, the way he smiled at me when he made me laugh. How he didn’t look much older than me.
Where are you? I silently ask.
Names are a strong sympathetic link. His would make this much easier, but I doubt I have it. I call him Mister Smiley Demon, but that probably isn’t the name he was born with. Unless me needing a friend and naming him is what created him? I know so little.
I keep floating in my peaceful void, but there’s not even one niggle of something happening. So, I try again.
“Where are you?” I ask out loud this time. Names have power, but all words have power, too.
My mind expands again, tugs me up and to the right. I let it take me wherever it needs to.
Then, an image begins to form. It’s blurred and distorts, but it feels like him.
“Lori.”
His voice, just as I remember it…but older, broken and pained and—
“Help me.”
The desperation in his voice throws me out of my meditation. My eyes fly open, and I gasp. That was…more intense than meditations usually are. An icy shiver comes over me, and I hug myself. Could I have astral travelled for a moment?
It can’t matter right now. What does matter is that this was definitely Mister Smiley Demon, and he needs my help.
And I have no idea how to give it.