"In this land—before my time and before my father's time—there was a queen who earned her place beside her king by enchanting him with mirages. Every night, for three and a third years, she told him a story and, each night, he became more entranced by her tongue. Her stories were filled with fantasy, each more elaborate than the last, and in the telling, each story shaped the world a little more.

"The king, bound so long by the allure of her tales, became so infirm that he could not walk or ride a horse. He had to be carried every morning from his bed to his balcony, from his balcony to his throne, and from his throne back to his bed. His body—unused, unwanted, unrealized—became like dry shale, and every day as his servants carried him from room to room, a little more of him flaked off to mingle with the persistent dust that crept in from the desert.

"The queen-to-be's intentions were not evil. She simply sought to preserve her own life and, if the gift of her tongue was enough to stay the king from having her beheaded, then is it not another mirage to see her intent as ill?

"Her stories, though they slew the king over time, forestalled a great many savageries that the king might have done against his people. Is her phantasmal rewriting of history nothing more than an act of kindness, a careful re-creation wherein the blood and despair and hate of the age were replaced with acts of moral courage, feats of bravery, and sacrifices made for love. Did her mirage of a purer world not transform this very land of desert and sky?

"And yet, the dreamer must close himself off from the sanctuary offered by the mirage. While it may be created by the tongue of another, it finds its strength in the weak material. It is false gold, this body, and it is too easily distempered by phantasmagoria. This, then, is the first sacrificial stage. The dreamer must relinquish his passion for the mirage. In order to truly pass through the thresholds and become part of the unreal, the dreamer must first deny the influence of the unreal."

(From Safiq Al-Kahir's Book of Dreams)