The line between fantasy and reality is a thin one.

Many years ago, when I was a tiny pipsqueak of a child, I played make-believe all the time.  As I grew to be a little bigger, my worlds of make-believe didn't so much dwindle as become more complex and sophisticated.  By the time I was a teenager, I put dress-up behind me with childish things, but fantasy was still alive and well.  In fact, fantasy worlds and egos are a rather integral part of my person and occasionally this is expressed in overt ways - playing Cowboys and Indians with my friends in Georgia, or Puck running around clear as day, for example.  But for as real as fantasy is, it has never wandered into the realm of Reality... until one day two years and seven odd weeks (give or take a handful of days) ago when I was invited into Someones Else's world of make-believe and dress-up, and found out that it was actually a different dimension of Real Life.

When I was little, my friends and I were always going on adventures, exploring, digging to China, building things, hunting, fishing, climbing, and making discoveries -- like finding dinosaurs.  We fought these giant beasts of long ago, doing our best to outwit them with our cunning and skill - but usually we ended up running away.  You'd be amazed how terrifying a 7 year old blonde girl making t-rex or velociraptor sounds and chasing you with her fingers hooked as claws really is.

When we weren't being attacked by dinosaurs, we were conquering everything in sight.  Usually our conquests were inanimate things, like Trees and Rocks and Waterfalls.  The more dangerous it was, and the higher you could go, the better (although usually where heights were concerned I was left rather alone in my quests).

But once in a while we conquered each other too.  This probably stems from reading too much Redwall, but one of the most entertaining games we played was Slavedriver.  The bad guys would capture you and rope you all together, but then when night came and the guards were asleep, the prisoners would make their escape!  And what fun is an escape if you don't first climb onto a roof and then sneak down the other side, rope in hand? (The rope that did no good, I might add, since there was nothing to tie the other end too.) And then we'd run round and round the valley, clamor up the side of a cliff and, in a final, desperate effort to elude our pursuers, take a flying leap into the depths below!

As fun as it was, in the end somebody called you inside to shower and have dinner or go home.  But two years, seven odd weeks, and a handful of days ago, make-believe opened the door and Reality took a step inside.

Before Reality took the bold initiative of crossing that line, however, I should tell you a little bit about these Someones Else's world.  For starters, there were some hard and fast rules about gender roles that had never ever been on my radar growing up.  The men did the fighting.  All women are princesses.  The women stayed inside the palace to take care of the men - if this is boring, too bad (the Crown Prince would hear none of his sister's complaints that she, too, should be fighting, since she really didn't believe he was getting anywhere).  Women get pink, because that's a girl color, men get all the other colors, because blue and green and red and yellow are boy colors.  So they dressed me up with beads and princessy things and prepared to fight dragons. LOL (or so I thought).

And the three princes fought dragons and ogres and quite the variety of monsters.  The Crown Prince usually suffered the brunt of the beasts' attacks and very often, having defeated them, he clawed his way back into the palace, covered in manly war wounds, gushing with blood and gore, to be cared for and restored to health by the princesses.  He was very heroic, and the two younger princes never seemed to come to any harm in battle.

After a particularly fearsome dragon was defeated, and the Crown Prince was only partially recovered from his wounds, there came the threat of a new being in the realm and far too close to the castle for comfort.  The Crown Prince dutifully raced out from behind the safety of the castle walls to defend his kingdom!  He barely made it back alive.
"Did you kill the dragon?" - Me
"No! *gasp for air* It was a Giant!" - Crown Prince
"Oooh. A giant. Did you defeat the giant?" - Me
"No! It was too strong for me! *gasp* I couldn't kill it!" - Crown Prince

I read in a book once that the mercy of the world is that we don't know what's coming -- in fact, sometimes we don't know what is and we continue, for a time, in a state of blissful ignorance, unaware that disaster has struck.  This was one of those times.  Reality had crossed into the world of fantasy, and I had no idea.

And then, I heard it.

It was a laugh.  Followed by a voice.

Not the deep, resonating he-giant voice bellowing "FIE FYE FO FUM!" as we expect make-believe he-giants to do.  Instead it was the very unique timbre of a she-giant: high-pitched like something sharp and terrifying, barely cloaked in soft and treacherous overtones.  And it was very, very Real.

As soon as I realized that Reality had, in fact, not only loomed darkly in the doorway of Fantasy, but actually crossed the threshold and come inside, there was only one thing to do.  The Crown Prince, apparently unperturbed by Reality trespassing on his make-believe world, was ready to battle the Giant again -- but I was not.  Some foes are too powerful.  We had to make our escape -- the palace was infiltrated, hope was gone, climbing out the window was our only option.  So we did.

Forsaking our gems and royal garments, we disguised ourselves as peasants and fled.  Alas, evading the Giant could not go on forever!  The King came out to grill steaks for dinner and insisted that we all be present to dine with the Queen and the Giant.  And this is the problem with Reality breaching the line of defense Fantasy sets up against it: in make-believe when your parents call you in to dinner, the terrors chasing you vanish.  But when your imagination turns into Real Life, there's no telling who the dinner guest might be.