One night Peter Goblin went calling, house by house, slipping up to the bedsides of sleeping children and whispering an invitation: come sledding on the Hill of Dreams.
They all pulled their sleds together and went down, down, down — faster and faster until they reached the valley at the bottom.
“Look,” said Peter. “This is where all the dreams come.”
The children looked, and they could see it: dreams drifting into the valley like leaves, and small quick Goblin Dream Workers catching each one and wrapping it carefully into a small package.
“Every good dream has to be saved,” Peter explained. “It might come true someday — if it’s truly for the best, and the Goblins are wise enough to know when that is.” He said this with some pride. The Dream Workers did look remarkably bright and capable.
“They tie the dreams into packages,” he continued, “and then the Goblin Visitors take them back to the children’s bedrooms and leave them there at night.”
“But we’ve never seen any packages,” said the children.
“Of course not. When you open a package and let the dreams out — a little in the corners, a little around the ceiling — they don’t look like packages anymore. They look like things slowly coming true. And that,” said Peter Goblin, “is exactly what they are.”
Then he shook his small head and said, “But enough explaining — there’s more sledding to be done!” And off they went, down the Hill of Dreams, back toward morning.
