Camilo José Cela Conde

The child, while still a child, frequently dreamed that he was in possession of the most wonderful toy imaginable. At times it would be a train stained by time, proud, fast, powerful; on other occasions, perhaps, a bicycle which the years had not robbed of the promise of balance, the temptation of risk, the feel of the wind in his face as he launched himself downhill.
The child would awake perplexed. Looking towards his trains and his tricycle he saw in them what the dream had whispered, but in diluted version, sad, dim, without the colours which slumber had added to transform the locomotive into a rainbow and the wheels into confetti that tasted of strawberry and lemon and aniseed and mint. Perhaps for this reason the child awaited sleep to play as children play when they still are children and do not know that dreams have no flavours capable of lasting an eternity.
Thus the child, night after night, managed his miracle without even uncovering it, because children do not know how to distinguish miracles from real life. Little by little, on waking, he discovered, here and there, a new patch of colour on his toys which had previously been silent, dark, melancholic, sad, missing the sparks which, in his dreams, continued to glow. The smoke stack of his train, even during the daytime, vomited sparks in blues and creams, and puffs in violets and greens, and fumaroles in all the colours smoke can be when it does not recall that it is being dreamed. One day the boy noticed, astonished, that his toys’ new apparel did not disappear at dusk, nor at the coming dawn; that the colours, previously fine, had doubled, what am I saying, multiplied tenfold, a hundredfold or more, in terms of light and body: material, thickness, roughness, texture.
Colours with volume become a different substance entirely. Permanent dreams become something else, an aura of their presence, something that shines, which has a scent, which is palpable.
A challenge for the order of the universe.
Children who do not grow because they dream that they do not grow, and they do it by means of dreams which burst in scattered forms upon their trains and wheels, tend to die as children while, asleep, they barely notice that they themselves have in memory become tinged with colour, in the memories of those who loved them well.
But order does not always have the last word. On very rare occasions, children who are children continue to be so as adults and are able to make myriad colours become real, because they have found a device unthinkable to those who, as children, forgot their dreams in the darkest depths of the furthest cupboard.
Do not tell anyone: such children become painters (this is a secret which I should not even be whispering to you).
Perhaps you will occasionally come across such a lucky child as this, transformed into a genius vomiting from the smokestack of his private train sparks unable to remain in any definite colour.
Should this happen, avert your gaze.
There is a danger of contagion, because children, once they have been children, maintain forever the risk of dreaming.