is a one-shot My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic FanOfMostEverything.Once, in a distant grove out beyond the beyond, there was a flower, and that flower dreamed. In its dream were rivers and forests, proud beasts and talking trees, and clever little creatures much after the flower's own mind. But the flower woke, as all sleepers must, and the dream ended, as all dreams do, and was soon only a fading memory...
But the flower was not keen on this development, and soon found a way to send itself back to sleep. Staying that way may take a bit of work, but there are other dreaming plants out there, willing to share a bit of their own with a young flower to help sustain its world...
Or that's the story, at least. If nothing else, it's something to tell your foals when they ask about the pollen run.
This story contains examples of:
- Dream Apocalypse: The sleeping flower dreamed up a dream so vast and vivid that it created a whole world, one filled with truly living beings. Its eventual waking up caused it to fade away, and although it managed to send itself back to sleep quickly enough to chase it back down its inhabitants were left badly shaken. Most just tried to pretend it never happened and to forget that the time when they were simply pale and fading memories; only the breezies acknowledge what happened and try to help the flower in staying asleep and sustaining the world.
- Dream Land: The Breezies' creation myth has it that their world is the vivid, lasting dream of a very special flower, in a little grove "out beyond the beyond". It dreamed up a whole world into being, filled with noble beasts and magical forests and winding rivers — but then the flower woke up, and the dream started to fade. It managed to send itself back to sleep before the dream fully vanished, and it has since been trying to learn how to live permanently within this dream-land so that it will never fade.
- Fantastic Flora: The "very special flower" whose dream created the breezies' world is sapient, a lucid dreamer, and capable of eating — it sends itself back to sleep by stuffing itself with the pollen of other flowers.
- "Just So" Story: While the events in the story are implied to have happened, at least in some form, in-universe it is presented as a bedtime story used to explain to children why the world exists and why the breezies must go on their pollen runs.
- Head-in-the-Sand Management: When the flower awoke, the dream world that it created started to fade and vanish. Once it went back to sleep, the majority of its inhabitants tried to deal with this by just pretending that it never happened.
- Wise Tree:
- Subverted by the trees within the flower's dream. They are magical talking trees in the traditional fairytale manner, but like most of the other dream-dwellers they tried to deal with a narrowly averted Dream Apocalypse by pretending that it never happened.
- Played straight with the ancient tree out in the flower's grove, which is old and knowledgeable in the ways of dreaming and decided to teach the flower how to live permanently within its own dream.
- World Tree: The flower's attempts to maintain its dream are aided by an ancient tree that mastered the trick long ago, which also provides food from its own dream to sustain it while it learns. It's then revealed that the tree's dream is the world of the show, which the tree — the Tree of Harmony — sustains and creates through its dreaming, like the flower's dream is the breezies' pocket dimension. By implication, the dreaming flower is on its way to becoming an existence-sustaining world tree of its own.
