[ WP ] When born , the first gift we receive is a blank book which records our dreams . Although it is considered a violation to read another 's dreams , you open your young child 's dreambook , expecting to see nonsense . Instead you find a gorgeously written novel . You begin selling your child 's dreams .

Surely, every parent has dove beneath their child's bed for a sock's missing pair and unearthed their diary instead. And surely, every parent confronted with this situation has taken a peek inside. Is it so criminal? As long as the child lives under the same roof, they are an extension of the parent; their lives are ours, just as we made ours theirs. That is how I found myself reading Miranda's dream journal. I wanted a chance to partake in my daughter's most intimate thoughts, to see how she saw and feel how she felt. I wanted to touch her dreams and trace them back to my own influence on her. I wanted to lay Miranda on the table and dissect her word by word. 
 
 Her dreams were more than ever expected. The visions ran from page to page, jumping, skipping, and twirling with Miranda's own vivacity. They were living embodiments of the dreams themselves; their images practically shimmered inches from the ink. The words flowed effortlessly; they put my own writing to shame, waltzing circles around my prose and knocking it off its stilts. They filled the blanks in my crumpled manuscripts and wiped the smudges from the margins, adhering to the vision roaring in my soul that my pen had been unable to manufacture. Finally, I had realized my creation. 
 
 The novel was a modest success—every second, a magnum opus is published, after all. It was enough to thrust my name into the limelight. Now, I needed to ride the momentum and continue publishing. Miranda's next work was still incomplete, so I elected to release it in online installments. My following grew, as did my envy: my own dreams had always spawned messes on the pages, unintelligible, unpublishable nightmares. These days, however, they were turning into images of wealth and fame. Visions of an easy life. 
 
 Miranda's dreams began to slow down. They still continued, but at less regular intervals. On certain days, the journal would update with one sentence, and I'm not talking about one of those word trains joined by a mass of commas and semicolons. My readers drummed their keyboards impatiently, asking for the date of the next chapter, and I could n't even answer; all I could do was preface every update with an apology for tardiness. At times, I'd wonder if it was a subconscious act of defiance: did her dreams know they were being prised by a million eyes? 
 
 The gaps stretched to weeks, and I had to figure something out. `` My inner muse is demanding more pay,'' I joked. 
 
 `` Then pay her more and give her more hours,'' a reader replied. 
 
 So I started drugging her—Miranda, that is. I slipped tiny pills into her food and watched as her head sunk against the couch arm and the ink began to flow. I took her out of school every day under the pretense of a `` sleep study.'' The novel resumed its pace from there, but it was different now: the prose had lost its vibrance; it hobbled as Miranda did in her brief moments of wakefulness. The words collided into each other and trudged off in their own separate ways. The color had faded from Miranda's dreams: it was n't black or white; it was just gone. The characters were no longer men, women, children, adult, teachers, or doctors; they were only people, people who did things, sometimes in ways. The world had remained intact, but that was all that could be said. 
 
 I began to regret what I had done. I stopped administering the pills: the readers could afford to wait for perfection. As it turned out, this wait would extend indefinitely: even after I undid my actions, Miranda's dreams never regained their usual color. Shortly after, her dreams stopped altogether. Fatigue puppetered her body day-by-day, and her face acquired the pallor of a dying woman. The daughter who had dreamed my first novel was gone, forever lost but within the pages of my own journal.
