Dreams are strange beasts. An amalgamation of sights, sounds, and feelings that your mind throws together and attempts to interpret, a dream can leave a lasting impression, or it can leave the merest hint of a memory that is soon gone forever.

As a child, I would sometimes have dreams that ended in falling from a great height. Whether it was from heading over a cliff, or being pushed out an airplane, or being thrown up into the air by an animal or car crash, the dreams tended to end just before I hit the ground. They were always frightening. I think “panic” is the right word to use to describe my state immediately upon waking, although back then I don’t think I really knew the proper term for it.

As I grew older, I found that, once in a while, I was aware I was dreaming. I’d get a moment or two to influence the course of events before either forgetting it was a dream and losing control, or just simply waking up. Occasionally this lucidity would coincide with falling (or being about to fall) and I’d somehow convince my dream to let me fly instead.

I grew older still, and I grew better at dream control along the way. More and more falling dreams would convert to flying, until I became able to fly without having to have the awareness that I was dreaming. The fall would convert by itself to flight, and life was good. I stopped waking up in panic mode and, instead, would sleep right through the dream with perhaps a pleasant memory of a voyage over treetops, or through a cityscape.

Recently, however, I have begun to experience the occasional fall again, accompanied by the sudden panicky burst into wakefulness, and I have Brandon Sanderson to thank for that. Sanderson is a science fiction / fantasy author who invented a universe in which people can consume metals in order to do magic. And I do mean consume: the metal must be inside the stomach in order to have an effect.

One of the metals (steel) gives the ability to push other metals away simply by thinking about it. A limited form of telekinesis, if you will. By “burning” the ingested steel, a person can fly if the metal being “pushed” in this fashion happens to be on the ground. Instead of the metal being pushed away, something akin to Newton’s third law kicks in, and the burner (known as a “misting” for reasons beyond the scope of this post) is flung upwards into the sky. Carefully controlled, a misting can fly through the air, pushing this way or that against metal on the ground, until his or her supply of steel is exhausted.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up one night from a fall, only to realise my silly brain had decided that I would not fly because I had run out of steel to burn. Not every flying dream ends this way, although each time one does I get a little more annoyed. I really must work out how to convince my dream-self to carry a small vial of steel shavings to consume at a moment’s notice.

It’s not often that an author can leave such an impression that his or her world follows me into my dreams, but Sanderson managed it. Well done, sir.