Q & A: Interview with Faolán

Introduction
Welcome to Dreamwalker’s Diligence, a biweekly, bite-sized fantasy serial about a magical antiques shopkeeper with a penchant for mysteries.
This is an interview with the main character and titular dreamwalker, Faolán. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions!
If you are new around these parts, here is Episode One. You can also check out The Complete Guide for episode and character lists.

Hello, dreamers!

Faolán has graciously agreed to participate in an interview, and some of you have submitted question for me to ask him. Since he is a dreamwalker, Faolán simply set up a dreamspace for us to meet in for the interview. Very practical. So pull up a chair, pour a cup of tea, and enjoy getting to know your favourite dreamwalker a bit better!

Marie: So, Faolán, are you ready to hear what the readers have to ask you?
Faolán: I am. Please go ahead.

Marie: Do you remember the first time you dreamwalked? Was it accidental or purposely?
Faolán: Dreamwalking is as natural to dreamwalkers as forming their own dream is to humans. So I’m afraid I was very young when I did it the first time and can’t recall it. But my earliest memory of visiting a human’s dream is a child who appeared to live in a warmer climate than I. The child was constructing a miniature castle of fine sand on a beach by an extraordinarily turquoise sea, but the waves kept ruining it. I asked the child why they did not just move to another spot, and they said the sand needed to be wet in order to work. So I sat down next to the child and put up a barrier around us that kept the water away and helped them. It was a very nice sandcastle.
The first time I dreamwalked on purpose was around the same time. We are all trained from a young age in order to use our abilities safely and respectfully. It was my mother who taught me initially, so it was her dream I walked into. It was not a very interesting dream in itself since my mother made it in order to guide me.

Marie: Tell us about your own dreams. Do you have any recurring ones?
Faolán: A dreamwalker’s dreams are not that different from a human’s. Except, of course, that we are aware we are dreaming, and we know that dreams are different from but still as real as the waking world. My dreams reflect me as a person in the same way that any human’s dreams reflect them. As for recurring dreams … Yes, I do sometimes. I experienced a particularly unpleasant incident some years ago, which I refused to discuss with anyone. After that, I kept finding myself dreaming not of the incident itself, but of situations that thematically resembled it. I attempted to handle it on my own, but in the end, I was assisted by another dreamwalker. I would appreciate if you didn’t bring this up with Suri or Ithnea, thank you.
On a more cheerful note, I do have a few dream spaces that I return to quite often. One of them is a lovely garden where I enjoy lying on my back in the grass while looking at the clouds drift by and listening to the whispers of the wind.

Marie: What is, in your opinion, the laziest type of nightmare to find?
Faolán: Hm … There is nothing inherently wrong with nightmares. While they can be caused by mares or, rare though it is, a human mage, most nightmares are created by the dreamer themself. They correspond to what the dreamer experiences in the waking world and treat their fears or trauma. They only pose a problem if they become too frequent or disturb the dreamer’s sleep. That said, the human mind can be lazy in the creation of nightmares. There is a number of mechanics I see employed in nightmares very often, regardless of the culture, gender, age and other circumstances of the dreamers, simply because they are base fears so ingrained in the human mind that they are easy elements to include. I suspect you will find some of the same elements in certain types of literature. So, I think you could call the kinds of nightmares that use those elementary fears without any finesse lazy.
I am not a betting man, but if I were so inclined, I would risk a fair amount of coin that you have experienced a nightmare involving falling. I would also wager that you have had a nightmare where you were unable to act, whether it had to do with running away from a fire, warning another person of danger, or getting up after falling while you were being chased. The root cause is only rarely a fall or a literal inability to act in the waking world. It is more likely to be a general fear of inadequacy or losing control, or an event in which you felt overwhelmed and scared of the consequences.

Marie: Why did you choose not to work as a dreamwalker?
Faolán: There are a few reasons. First of all, even a city the size of Lowengeport can support only so many people doing dreamwork as their sole source of income. My kin here is not a large group, but most are content to use their abilities to aid humans. This is their choice, and there is nothing wrong with it, per se. I do not regret the training I was given. However, I personally believe that reducing a whole species to one specific purpose or profession as a matter of course is an, unintended as it may be, insult.
But my choice is not purely based on these considerations. I simply do not have the patience required to take on every single human who wants a dreamwalker to tell them what their dreams mean or banish perfectly healthy nightmares. If someone truly needs a person with my particular skills, I will evaluate the case on an individual basis. I did once consider picking up the trade more permanently, but I decided to stick to my chosen path in life.

Marie: What is your favourite colour?
Faolán: I … Pardon?
Marie: What is your favourite colour?
Faolán: Well, that is a surprisingly hard question compared to the rest. I think my favourite colour is probably blue. Dark blue. I will also sometimes wear a respectable red or purple to contrast my otherwise black, grey and white wardrobe.

Marie: Do you have the power to speed up time?
Faolán: In the waking world, I do not. The amount of magical power it would take to manipulate time would be so enormous that not a single being in existence could do it. This is because time is not a local phenomenon, so it would be changing the fabric of the entire world. In dreams, I can change the perception of time. All dreamers do this, but it is a dreamwalker trait to do it deliberately. There are instances when it is quite inadvisable to do, however. And of course, there is magic that might feel as if time is moving differently in the waking world, but in reality, it is magic that manipulates a person or a very small area and not time itself.

Marie: What language do you speak, and is the language of dreamwalkers different from the languages other people in your world uses? What does it sound like, and does it have words to describe things that we don’t have words for? Are you bilingual, or multilingual, and maybe use different languages for thinking about different things?
Faolán: Eirren, the language spoken by the vast majority of people in Lowengeport, is one with which I grew up since I was born and raised in the city. As far as I can tell, it is not exactly the same as but shares grammatical and phonetic similarities with the one you call English, which conveniently, my scribe and interviewer tells me, makes it fairly easy to convey my “voice” when writing about me.
Dreamwalkers do indeed have a language with regional dialects. I was taught that as well growing up. It can be used in the waking world as well as in dreams. However, I am able to talk to anyone in dreams, provided they have a language. Should I ever walk into your dream, we would be perfectly able to communicate in a way that feels natural. But dreams also are a language of their own. It is not so much that dreamwalkers have words without equivalents in other languages as it is that we can convey meaning without language. It is more accurate for sharing emotions.
In the waking world, I speak three languages. The third one is Geranian, which functions as a sort of lingua franca in my part of the world. I can understand a bit of Derean as well, but I would not subject anyone to my attempting to speak it. When it comes to thinking, I usually do it in Eirren, but I don’t always think verbally.
All languages that I know have words that you probably don’t have — in the same way that you must have words that we don’t simply because there are concepts that are unique to a world. For instance, talking about magic seems to be a little … clunky in your language simply because you lack a nuanced terminology for it.

Marie: Thank you, Faolán. That was all the questions for today. Do you have any parting words for the readers?
Faolán: You are most welcome. I hope readers will continue to enjoy my story. However, I would like to point out that while the majority of the events my scribe shares with you are true, certain liberties have been taken in order to fit my life into a suitable narrative. Now, dream well.

Thank you for reading! If you are enjoying Dreamwalker’s Diligence, please consider sharing, commenting or liking. Next up is a a standalone short story about Faolán, which will be published on August 27th 2026.