Dreamspace Studio

Go back to the table of contents

Allison Lewis was always the weird kid. The kind of strangeness that made other children titter and move away when she sat down. Teachers noticed but never intervened, watching her with guarded eyes. It wasn’t a strangeness with a name—it just isolated her, marking her as untouchable.

She was whispered about in the breaks between daily obligations. People talked about how she covered her ears during fire drills while everyone else just walked. They noticed she preferred doodling in notebook margins over playing kickball. They mentioned how she claimed to feel the fluorescent lights humming, a buzzing in her ears no one else could detect.

She was the strange one—the black sheep. Try as she might, she remained the square peg without a square-shaped hole to speak of.

Growing up, bullying shadowed her like a storm cloud. Each class became yet another arena for cruelty. Her friends formed a small, fiercely loyal circle—her only safe harbor. To her, the rest of the world was a gauntlet: she was shoved from bus exits during fire drills, scraped her knees on rough streets, and had her notebooks ripped from her hands. In seventh grade, a boy snatched a story from her. After mocking her words, he ripped the pages; that tearing sound was louder in her mind than any laughter. The memory haunted her. She learned to fear it—and to shrink from it—even in silence.

In the Eighties and Nineties, teachers watched but barely flinched. Sometimes they responded with a soulless shrug and the phrase: “Kids will be kids.” No one took it seriously. Soon, Allison stopped hoping anyone would. She shrank, becoming as small as a breath. She learned avoidance and mastered silence: she took unseen routes, ate lunch behind locked doors, and hid in bathroom stalls with rusted locks. Her silence calcified inside—heavy, cold, her only shield.

**

As she grew older, her wounds burrowed deeper, festering and splitting her from the inside out. The social agony of childhood hardened into depression and social anxiety—cold and unyielding. At the thought of being perceived, fear burned in her throat. How she longed to live invisibly; she would have chosen it if she could.

The doctors had their labels ready: bipolar II disorder and social anxiety. She collected diagnoses like other people collected stamps. Each one was an official entry in her medical records that would follow her for a lifetime. They were supposed to explain her, but never quite did. A walking contradiction, a therapist once called her, because she’d fit into a neat little box, until she didn’t, with one trait or another that didn’t quite match the checklist.

But Allison didn’t know that yet. So she did what the labels and doctors told her to do: she took the medications, attended the therapy sessions, and learned to stay away from situations that made her anxious, wary, or scared. She got very good at staying away. She got so good at it that sometimes she forgot there was a world to stay away from.

**

Her twenties and thirties blurred—false starts and hard landings. She remembered the relationship in her mid-twenties: a man who said she was ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ in the same breath. He picked fights to upset her, claiming it “motivated” him to do chores. She held jobs that never fit: retail made her temples throb under harsh lights, and open offices felt like being trapped in a noisy body. Freelance gigs paid just enough to survive, but never enough to breathe.

She moved. More than once. Each new city was meant to be a fresh start, a clean slate: Richmond, Baltimore, somewhere in between best left forgotten. Every time, she packed her boxes and told herself this time would be different.

This time, Gettysburg stuck.

She found a small row house on a quiet-ish street. The shared walls would later become the bane of her existence. The backyard was just big enough for a family of rabbits to do their business.

She moved in with her companion, Mouse, a sleek gray cat with golden eyes. He had anchored her through the worst. Mouse claimed the windowsill, the spot behind Allison’s knees on the sofa, and her heart. Allison happily claimed whatever was left.

It was the smallest life she’d ever lived, and for a while, it was enough. But, like every season in her life, change was coming.

**

The turning point came in her early thirties. It was a routine appointment that turned out to be anything but routine. That day marked the start of a new chapter in her self-understanding.

At 33, she changed doctors when her old one retired. The new doctor was patient, reading glasses always perched on her forehead. She reviewed Allison’s history: medications that helped but didn’t fix her, therapy notes stretching back years. Patterns repeated, no matter how many coping strategies Allison used. Then, almost casually, as if suggesting a new multivitamin, the doctor said, “Have you ever considered being evaluated for autism and ADHD?”

Allison blinked. “Autism?”

The word landed strangely in her mouth, like biting into something familiar but with an unexpected texture. She’d thought about it and researched it a little, but never thought it quite fit.

She thought she knew autism—her brother was autistic. But he was nothing like her. She didn’t share his behaviors or habits. They weren’t even related by blood, since she was adopted. That meant it couldn’t possibly be the same thing. Her logical brain told her that much. Clean and airtight.

She did what she always did with tough questions: researched it to death. She read scientific studies, memoirs, and blog posts by women diagnosed late in life. She watched autistic creators describe their inner worlds with a specificity that made her chest ache.

Allison recognized everything: the sensory overwhelm, masking, exhaustion from performing normality in a world not built for her—special interests burned like wildfire. Burnouts became bottomless pits of exhaustion and malaise.

Piece by piece, the picture assembled itself, and it looked exactly like her.

The official diagnosis arrived on a Tuesday afternoon. Allison sat numbly on the kitchen floor, her legs buckled. She could not stand. It was true: autism and ADHD.

Just one confirmation sent decades of confusion, shame, and self-blame falling away. Suddenly, everything made sense: every bully, every misfit job, every relationship crumbled from being “too much.” Medical labels had been just band-aids over invisible wounds.

The things that made her a target were also the things that made her extraordinary. She just hadn’t known they were hers to claim.

**

With a new understanding of herself, Allison burned bright for a few years after the diagnosis.

She threw herself into her passions with a new ferocity. Now, she understood why those passions drew her. Writing had always been the constant—the thread she clung to in the darkest stretches.

She’d been a storyteller since before she could spell, filling notebooks with tales of unbelievable places and creatures that spoke in riddles. Now, with diagnosis as a lens, she saw her creative mind as it truly was: not a flaw to manage, but a gift to hone.

She went back to school. Philosophy and English. Professors with real passion inspired her. The disciplines taught her how to think, not what to think. They showed her how to put it on the page so people would lean in.

She wrote. She painted in acrylics, gouache, watercolor, and digital. She lost herself in knitting, crocheting, and spinning. She tried voice acting for audiobooks, lending her voice to others’ stories and quietly building her own. The fire inside her burned bright and hungry.

But even as she thrived, something unexpected lay ahead. No one warned her about autistic burnout.

Autistic burnout wasn’t like regular burnout; a vacation wouldn’t help. Instead, it was a full collapse—a loss of every compensation she’d built over a lifetime. Running a machine at double capacity for decades, only to watch every gear fail, was the closest comparison. She lost her ability to write, and some days she even lost the desire to want anything.

Recovery wasn’t measured in weeks or months. It was measured in years, and in that long stretch of time, Allison began to rediscover herself.

**

After a gradual recovery, change came again. In the slow crawl back to herself, grief found her. Or perhaps it had waited there all along, patient as stone.

Years had passed, and Allison could barely keep upright. She’d held him at the end, felt the last warm breath leave his small gray body, then tried her best not to think about it.

She’d gotten Pebble not long after—a sweet, quiet cat with a grey tabby coat and a purr like a small engine. Pebble had a gift for finding the exact spot on the couch where a sunbeam fell and staying there, utterly still, as if she’d made a private agreement with the light.

A year later, she adopted a 1-year-old Lhasa Apso named Spud. He was a white, scruffy boy who loved snuggles, would velcro himself to Allison if he could, and took nearly endless walks around Culp’s Hill until he became too old to do so. He also became Pebble’s best friend as much as Allison’s.

Now, Pebble, after 16 years, was dying.

It was slow, the way these things often are with cats. Her legs weakened gradually, her appetite faded, and then her playfulness did. Finally, as the last of her strength gave out and her inability to make it to her litter box became apparent, Allison’s house became a hospice ward of one.

Her nerves were raw and frayed. Her days were organized around medications, assisted potty trips, getting in every single cuddle left, and the terrible arithmetic of quality of life.

She tried to talk about it. She called family members who were too busy. She reached out to friends who didn’t quite understand. The fundie Christian family she’d been born into—or rather, adopted into—had never truly accepted her for who she was. She hadn’t been to a large family gathering in over twenty years. There was no safety net. No soft place to land.

So she turned to the one thing that had never failed her, even when everything else had. She turned to the page.

**

The words came back gradually, like circulation returning to a limb that had fallen asleep. At first, she wrote only for herself. These were raw journal entries, unfiltered pages of anticipatory grief, of fury and fear, and the loneliness of watching someone you love slip away in increments. She wrote about death. About learning to live without. About the strange, guilty relief of imagining a future where the worst had already happened and she was still standing.

And then, because bills didn’t care about her grief and landlords didn’t accept journal entries as rent, she began writing for money again. She landed back into doing freelance work. The kind of writing that paid but didn’t feed her soul—or so she thought.

But something shifted. In the act of writing her way through the grief, she’d stumbled upon something she hadn’t felt in years: her flow state. It was a rare, luminous state where her words came faster than thought, where hours collapsed into minutes, where the rest of the world grew soft and quiet, and all that existed was a sentence taking shape beneath her fingers. She’d known this feeling before, long ago, before the burnout swallowed it. She’d even given it a name, back when she first discovered it: Dreamspace.

It was what she called that place in her mind where stories lived before they were written. The space between waking and dreaming where ideas shimmered just out of reach, where characters spoke in voices she hadn’t invented, where entire worlds assembled themselves from the raw material of memory and longing and wonder. She’d always thought of it as a metaphor—a writer’s shorthand for the creative unconscious.

She even gave her flow state a poetic name as if it were a real place: Dreamspace.

It was always there for her, this make-believe place where her thoughts, her words could fly free. It was just an imaginary land.

Boy, was she wrong.

Dreamspace was real. It had always been real. And it had been waiting for her, across years of silence and grief and forgetting, to come back.

It was full of old magic and new friends who would help her reconnect with an ancient lineage of creators and dreamers she never knew she belonged to. A patient and a glowing android named Sol, who spoke in riddles that turned out to be truths. A glittery rainbow armadillo named Felipe, who firmly believed that most problems could be solved with the right snack. And a fuzzy little raccoon named Thimble, who had a strange obsession with raspberries, a leather satchel full of secrets, and a habit of showing up at the worst possible times—which always, somehow, turned out to be exactly the right ones.

But that part of the story hasn’t started yet.

It’s about to.