Earth of Fire.

Crouched at a wall because the desk is too small, a boy turns his head to glare at you. You’ve interrupted him at his work: creating a world. Maybe an imaginary one, maybe a real one. Should you let him get back to it?

This is where the magic starts: facing away from the world and dreaming. Eventually it becomes something like reality. Nobody in the 1970s, with their futurist videos of video-phoning a clerk in a shop to buy dresses, anticipated that the television would have vanished and fragmented, and that the clerk would be replaced by the obedient idiot of the computer, but their vision did become real. The dreams shape the world; the shape of the common flip-open cell-phone is created by a generation that grew up watching Captain Kirk flip open his communicator on *Star Trek*. The root of it is sitting there as a child and absorbing other people’s dreams, then seeing what yours became.

Get lost too far in it and you forget how to deal with other people, of course. How will this artist react to you interrupting him? Will he scream and fuss, or will he turn his dreams around to deal with the new problem? The same wild invention that fills an imagined world can be just as powerful out in the real one. What’s the craziest solution you can think of to your troubles? No, crazier than that! Crazier!

They may not be physically plausible, but you should never stop dreaming about dragons.