A shadowy figure wanders through the night invading the souls of men. It is the Dream Phantom. He leaves behind nothing more than a flutter of recognition.  Each soul awakens with a feeling of loss, of what, they aren’t sure.  Something has been tampered with, this they knew. They sensed it was something valuable, irreplaceable.  Little do they know that, something has been taken, something so valuable one cannot put a price on it.

Their minds have been assaulted.  Their dreams have been stolen.  A blank now exists where once their dreams had resided.  Yet they remain unaware of what had taken place.  The Phantom is a stealer of dreams.  He has paid them a visit, and they are left with a total void where just moments before great fantasies were being played out.

The Phantom is on a quest.  His dream of marriage to the beautiful Lucinda had been stolen from him so many years ago.  He cannot accept eternal rest until he finds it.  He believes his dream has drifted through the eons of time and will eventually rest within someone’s soul.

With his bag full of dreams, the Phantom returns to his lair.  One by one he examines his take.   He stares at one in particular.  Could this be the one?  The man is dreaming of his lost love; his wife who has passed away.  The Phantom knows this was not his dream.  For him, there had been no wife.

The Phantom peers into another dream in which a woman is walking along a sandy beach clearly looking for someone she desperately wants to find.  The Phantom wonders if he is the one the woman is looking for. Could this be his Lucinda?  The woman sees the object of her search and runs to the man walking towards her.

There are tears in the Phantom’s eyes as he peers into yet another dream.  A child is crying “Daddy, Daddy.”  The Phantom’s heart begins beating faster.  Could this be his child, the child in his dream of long ago?  Looking further, what he sees causes him to shrink back in horror.  The man the child is calling out to has a weapon in his hand, ready to do harm to the child.  The Phantom has no power to alter dreams.   Sadly, he turns away from the child’s nightmare.

How many times has he repeated this ritual; a hundred times; a thousand times?  How many more years or centuries would he need to roam the earth peering into the souls of others before he finds his own dream? “I’ll keep you in my dreams,” was the promise he had made to Lucinda and he felt a need to keep that promise. 

Once more he leaves his lair to roam the souls of others, always hopeful that this would be the last time.  Little did the Phantom know he was destined to roam the souls of others forever.  What he was seeking did not exist in the realm of dreams, but in the realm of reality, for it was a memory that haunted him, a memory of an actual event.

 Luke loved the much sought-after Miss Lucinda.  They had been seeing each other for quite a while.  His dream was that they would marry and have a family.  Luke had been an apprentice at the Weekly Dispatch for ten years, and his hope had been to buy the business from the owner, Mr. Haley, who recently announced he would be retiring soon.

He had planned on escorting the lovely Lucinda to the dance. He was dressed in his best.  He had even taken a bath.  He shaved and used that sweet-smelling concoction he had been saving for the occasion. Just as Luke was leaving, he received word that Lucinda would meet him there. He was somewhat disheartened as he had hoped to propose to her on the way to the dance.

When Luke arrived, he immediately began looking for her.  He spied her across the room standing in the center of a group of people.  A handsome young man stood at her side with his arm around her waist, holding her closely with a sense of possession.  Everyone seemed so happy, giving her kisses on the cheek, and shaking the man’s hand.  Her parents were there as well, looking happier than he had ever seen them.  They too were receiving hugs and handshakes. 

With all the celebrating, Lucinda had missed Luke’s arrival.  That only added to the pain in his heart.  His dream had been stolen.  Lucinda was in love with someone else.  He kept seeing the look in her eyes as she gazed at the man.  It appeared to Luke as though they had just announced their engagement.  He couldn’t bear to hear her tell him she planned to marry another, and he loved her too much to spoil her dream.  

He got back into his buggy and headed for home.  With his heart breaking and tears streaming down his face, Luke whipped his horse into a frenzy.  Not thinking,  he took the wrong path and was now thundering down Breakneck Pass.  His wagon wheel hit a patch of loose rocks and he found himself being hurled into eternity. 

Now he finds himself a restless phantom, roaming about in the wrong realm, looking for that elusive stolen dream.  He faces an eternity of fruitlessness, a useless venture.   Luke will never know that because of his assumption, he had stolen his own dream and Lucinda’s as well.  She had loved Luke dearly.  Her dream was the same as his, that they would marry and have a family.  She never got the opportunity to tell Luke that the handsome young man standing beside her was her long-lost brother, Jess.

Jess had been eight when he wandered away from their wagon train.  He wasn’t missed until sometime the next day as he spent the night with a friend.  He had been picked up by another party heading to Oregon, while his family was on their way to California.  He was old enough to remember, but too young to go looking for them.  When he was fourteen, he began the search for his family.  It took him six years to find them and had just arrived that very day.

Lucinda waited for Luke to show up at the dance.  She was not aware he had already been there and had left.  Later, when he was found dead at the bottom of the gully, she was heartbroken.  She never married for Luke was her one true love.  Her dreams had been shattered into a million pieces and scattered throughout eternity.  Now, these many years later, she too roams about the universe, a restless soul looking for her lost love, she in the realm of reality, he in the realm of dreams.