The hills bathed in a golden-red glow, an orange hue seeped into the white flowers that reached up to Aileen’s knees and the sky turned a mix of dark blue and pink. But Aileen’s eyes, wide with wonder, saw only the bright red disk that slowly moved towards the horizon.

She had no name for what she saw.

It was magnificent. Warm. Brilliant in its light that blinded her with its intensity. She couldn’t tear her eyes from it.

The disk disappeared behind the hills, the spell dissolved. She looked up into the darkening sky that still held an echo of the bright colors.

That’s when she spotted a white dot. And another. They seemed to pop up without any order, like seeds that someone threw into the air.

She didn’t have a name for them either.

In her world, there were no bright dots in the night sky. Nor was there a golden disk that hurt the eyes and warmed the skin.

In her world the sky was empty. If you disregarded the clouds, of course.

With no particular destination in mind, she started to walk again. It didn’t matter where her feet took her, her only goal was to soak up as much of this world as she could by morning. She might never return here after all. Rarely the places she visited in her dreams repeated themselves.

There must be so many other worlds…

If she only could talk freely about them. As it stood, only her two best friends would ever hear about her newest adventure. She’d have to keep quiet in front of everyone else, pretending her dreams didn’t exist, acting as if the other worlds were just figments of imagination of the old storytellers.

But maybe one day the belief in the other worlds would be allowed again. Then she would not have to creep into hidden corners with only the few she could trust to share what she could see.

What she knew to be true.