Legend has it that in a remote town in the southeast lived an old woman who fed on dreams.
She was ugly and stooped, and she made a habit of stealing dreams from the mountains below. Especially the daydreams of young people and the nightmares of children.
She liked to pry into the desires and greed of the young, then meddle in their affairs. Yet she was also like a local deity, guarding the children's dreamlike fairy tales year after year.
She did both good and evil.
She fed on the young people's sensual fantasies, changing into different forms. She also drove fierce beasts and monsters from children's dreams, granting them good fortune and blessings, and building up her merits to prolong her own undying life.
No one had ever seen her, and no one could get close to her.
People only heard that, now and then, some young person in town would be blessed with divine luck and gain insight into the workings of fate. In just a few months, someone from an ordinary family would become a member of a wealthy household, or a newly established merchant family. Then, within a few short years, their household would fall into ruin, their fortune would collapse, and they would return to a life of poverty.
Everyone said the old woman who fed on dreams had peered into their dreams and bestowed divine guidance and good fortune upon them.
But their fate had not been auspicious enough, and their blessings too meager. And so, after rising to such heights, they fell hard and never recovered.
That is what the legend says, but it can no longer be verified, and there is nowhere left to look for answers.
As the years drifted by, the young people in town moved on to new knowledge and cast aside the old and the useless. Only the elderly and the children still yearned for those ancient tales, hoping to enter dreams and explore their truth in the old dream-filled town, among the mountain shadows and forests.
The old people often said that the laws of heaven and one's fate were already decided, and that blessings born of affinity could not be forced.
But the children said that across the distant Milky Way, immortals danced with swaying hairpins; the gods would protect them, and they looked forward to what tomorrow might bring.
All things have a spirit and follow their own order. Eventually, fate will find its way to the living world and into the dreams of those destined to receive it.
Theme: Those bound by fate will meet, no matter what
