Prologue

Allison was always the odd kid. Other children scooted away when she sat down, giggling behind their hands. Teachers noticed but kept their distance, watching her as if she were an unanswered question no one wanted to solve. The gap between her and the others widened with every year, and her world grew quieter and lonelier.

Whispers followed her between classes, with students trading stories about how she covered her ears during fire drills while everyone else marched calmly to the ballfield without making a scene. They noticed how she filled her notebooks with sketches or paragraphs instead of joining kickball at recess. They laughed when she said she could hear the fluorescent lights and that they made her head hurt, even though no one else heard a thing.

Try as she might, she remained the square peg in a world with no square-shaped holes.

Growing up, bullying was a constant. Each classroom became another arena for cruelty. Her small group of friends formed a fiercely loyal circle, her only safe harbor. To Allison, the rest of the world was a gauntlet. She was shoved from bus exits instead of being helped down during fire drills, scraping her knees on rough asphalt, and had notebooks ripped from her hands as students taunted her with their own cruel version of keep away.

In seventh grade, a boy snatched a story she was writing during homeroom, mocked her words as he read it aloud, and tore the pages apart. That sound of the paper ripping was louder in her mind than any laughter. The memory haunted her. She learned to fear it like a chasing demon, then taught herself to harden so it couldn’t hurt her anymore.

In the eighties and nineties—a different time—teachers watched but barely cared. Sometimes they answered cruelty with a soulless shrug and the phrase, “Kids will be kids.” No one took it seriously. Soon, Allison stopped hoping anyone would.

She shrank, becoming as small as a breath. She learned avoidance and mastered silence. She took unseen routes, ate lunch in hidden corners, and hid in bathroom stalls with rusty locks. Her silence calcified inside her, heavy and cold, until it became her only shield.

As she grew older, her wounds burrowed deeper, festering until they split her from the inside out. The agony of attempting a normal social childhood hardened into depression and social anxiety. At the thought of being perceived, fear burned in her chest and stole her breath. She longed to be invisible. If she could have chosen it, she would have.

The doctors had their labels ready: bipolar II disorder and social anxiety. Allison collected diagnoses like other people collect stamps. Each one became an official entry in her medical records, following her for a lifetime. They were supposed to explain her, but they never quite did. Instead, she was called unstable, a walking time bomb, moody, even disturbed, sometimes by her own family.

Even a therapist once called her a walking contradiction because she fit neatly into a box until she didn’t—until one trait or another refused to match the clean little checklist on their clipboard. He even told her to spend less time with her dog, as if that were the magic cure for everything that ailed her.

So she did what the labels and doctors told her. She took the medications, attended the therapy sessions, and learned to avoid anything that made her anxious, wary, or afraid. She got very good at it. So good, sometimes, that she forgot there was a world to avoid. For years, that was how she moved through her life.

Her twenties and thirties were a blurry mess of false starts and hard landings.

She remembered her mid-twenties relationship: a man who told her she was “too much” and “not enough” in the same breath. He picked fights to upset her, then claimed it “motivated” him to do chores.

She tried so hard to hold jobs that never fit. Retail made her temples throb beneath the harsh lights. Open offices felt like being trapped inside a noisy body. Eventually, it became a joke among her friends, though Allison never found it very funny. Even early freelance gigs paid just enough to survive, but never enough to breathe.

She moved more than once. Each new city was supposed to be a fresh start, a clean slate: Richmond, Baltimore, a few places in between best left forgotten. Every time, she packed her boxes and told herself this time would be different.

This time, Gettysburg stuck.

She found a small condo on what her realtor called a quiet street. The shared walls here weren’t as thick as she’d been told. The backyard was shared, and her deck had direct access, but the neighbors were initially lovely and kind. It was a nice place. She really loved it.

She moved in with her companion, Mouse, a sleek gray cat with golden eyes. He had anchored her through the worst of it. Mouse claimed the windowsill, the spot behind Allison’s knees on the sofa, and her heart. Allison happily claimed whatever was left.

It was the smallest life she had ever lived, and for a while, it was enough.

But like every season in Allison’s life, change was coming. After years of settling into the smallest version of herself, trying not to take up too much space or make too much noise, she felt change coming again.

The turning point came in her early thirties, during what should have been a routine therapy appointment.

At thirty-three, Allison changed doctors after her old one retired. The new doctor was patient and observant, her reading glasses always perched on her forehead. She reviewed Allison’s history: medications that never helped, therapy notes stretching back years, the same patterns repeating no matter how many coping strategies Allison tried.

Then, almost casually, as if suggesting a new multivitamin, the doctor asked, “Have you ever considered being evaluated for autism and ADHD?” Allison blinked. “Autism?” She had wondered about it before. She had researched it, circled the possibility, and held it up to the light. But it never quite fit.

She thought she knew autism. She’d seen Autistic children and adults in the wild. She didn’t share their habits, behaviors, or ways of moving through the world. Growing up, she always felt a step apart, a quiet difference she wore beneath her skin. So it couldn’t possibly be the same thing. Her logical brain decided that much. Clean. Airtight.

Still, the question churned within her brain for days.

So she did what she always did with difficult things: researched it to death. She read scientific studies, memoirs, and blog posts by women diagnosed late in life. She watched videos by autistic creators describing their inner worlds with a specificity that made her chest ache. She recognized the sensory overwhelm, the masking, the exhaustion of performing normality in a world not built for her. She saw in others the way her special interests burned like wildfires. And she learned about burnouts that swallowed whole weeks, leaving only exhaustion and malaise behind.

Piece by piece, the picture assembled itself. It looked exactly like her, and after weeks of research, the official diagnosis arrived on a random Tuesday afternoon. Autism and ADHD.

Allison sat on the couch with her medical records, medical journals, and textbooks she borrowed from the library, numb and breathless. It was true. It had to be—her past, her life now—finally making complete sense. With one confirmation, decades of confusion, shame, and self-blame fell away. Suddenly, everything made sense: every bully, every misfit job, every relationship that had crumbled because she was “too much.” The labels she had carried before had been little more than bandages over invisible wounds.

The things that had made her a target were, as she was about to find out, the same things that made her extraordinary.

With a new understanding of herself, Allison burned brightly for a few years after the diagnosis. She threw herself into her passions with a new ferocity. Writing had always been the constant—the thread she clung to in the darkest stretches. Now, she understood why those passions drew her.

She’d been a storyteller since before she could spell, filling notebooks with tales of unbelievable places and creatures that spoke in riddles. Now, with the diagnosis as a lens, she saw her creative mind for what it was: not a flaw to manage, but a gift to hone. And so, she went back to school. Philosophy and English. Professors with real passion inspired her. The disciplines taught her how to think, not what to think. They showed her how to put it on the page so she could finally connect with other people through her words.

She wrote. She painted in acrylics, gouache, watercolor, and digital media. She lost herself in knitting, crocheting, and spinning. She tried voice acting for audiobooks, lending her voice to others’ stories and quietly building her own. The fire inside her burned bright and hungry. But even as she thrived, something unexpected lay ahead; after that period of growth, a new problem arrived without warning. Beneath the momentum and hard-won peace, quiet unease began to stir. Allison felt flashes of fatigue that didn’t make sense—a creeping depletion she couldn’t name. Unbeknownst to her, she was inching toward a struggle that would soon test her in ways she had never prepared for.

Autistic burnout slammed into her like a sledgehammer finding a loose chunk of concrete. It was a complete collapse—a loss of all the compensation she’d built over a lifetime. Running a machine at double capacity for decades, only to watch every gear fail, was the closest comparison. She lost her ability to write as her skills regressed. Some days, she even lost the desire to want anything.

And then, Mouse died. It was sudden and quick. Grief took her down and ground any thought of recovery to a halt.

A month or so had passed, and Allison was like a boat on the ocean without a course—bobbing with the waves but going nowhere. Something was missing, and she knew it came in the body of a furry companion. She had always had a cat or a dog by her side. To be without one made her feel incomplete—lost.

She’d gotten Pebble not long after that revelation—a sweet, talkative cat with a gray tabby coat and a purr like a small engine. Pebble had a gift for finding the exact spot on the couch where a sunbeam fell and staying there, utterly still, as if she’d made a private agreement with the light.

A year later, she adopted a 1-year-old Lhasa Apso named Spud. He was a white, scruffy boy who loved snuggles, would velcro himself to Allison if he could, and took nearly endless walks around Culp’s Hill until he became too old to do so. He also became Pebble’s best friend as much as Allison was to her.

Now, Pebble, after nearly 16 years, was dying.

It was slow, the way these things often are with cats. Her legs weakened gradually. Her appetite faded. Then her playfulness did. Finally, as the last of her strength gave out and her inability to make it to her litter box became apparent, Allison’s house became a hospice ward of one.

Her nerves were raw and frayed. The days were organized around medications, assisted potty trips, getting in every single cuddle left, and the terrible arithmetic of quality of life.

She tried to talk about it. She called family members who were too busy. She reached out to friends, even neighbors who couldn’t care less about what Pebble meant to her. She hadn’t been to a large family gathering in over twenty years. There was no safety net. No soft place to land.

So she turned to the one thing that had never failed her, even when everything else had. She turned to the page.

The words came back gradually, like circulation returning to a limb that had fallen asleep. At first, she wrote only for herself. These were raw journal entries, unfiltered pages of anticipatory grief, full-on mourning, fury and fear, and the loneliness of watching someone you love slip away in increments. She wrote about grief. About learning to live without. About the strange, guilty relief of imagining a future where the worst had already happened and she was still standing.

And then, because bills didn’t care about her grief and landlords didn’t accept journal entries as rent, she began writing for money again. She landed back in freelance work. The kind of writing that paid but didn’t feed her soul—or so she thought.

But something shifted. As she wrote her way through the grief, she stumbled upon something she hadn’t felt in years: her flow state. It was a rare, luminous state where her words came faster than thought, where hours collapsed into minutes, where the rest of the world grew soft and quiet, and all that existed was a sentence taking shape beneath her fingers. She’d known this feeling before, long ago, before the burnout swallowed it. She’d even named it, back when she first discovered it.

She called it the place in her mind where stories lived before they were written. The space between waking and dreaming, where ideas shimmered just out of reach, where characters spoke in voices she hadn’t invented, where entire worlds assembled themselves from the raw material of memory, longing, and wonder. She’d always thought of it as a metaphor—a writer’s shorthand for the creative unconscious. She even gave her flow state a poetic name as if it were a real place: Dreamspace. 

For Allison, Dreamspace was not just a state of creative focus. It was a refuge she could slip into when the world felt too harsh or when her loneliness became unbearable. Inside Dreamspace, she felt whole and liberated, unburdened by her differences and able to shape her inner world into anything she wished. It was a sanctuary where her imagination was limitless and where she felt a rare sense of belonging, even if only within herself.

It had always been there for her, a make-believe place where her thoughts could fly freely. It was just an imaginary land.

Boy, was she wrong.

Dreamspace was real. It had always been real. And it had been waiting for her, across years of silence and grief and forgetting, to come back.

It was full of old and sometimes familiar magic, and new friends who would help her reconnect with an ancient lineage of creators and dreamers she never knew she belonged to. That part of the story hasn’t started yet.

But it’s about to.