Work Text:
Look. There are dreams, and then there are dreams.
Dreams, casual, are nice. Philza's a historian, an explorer, a survivalist in the soaring storybook sense. There are gods, and snails, and he has all the riches he would ever want and wings, his real wings, on his back. All is right with the world in dreams.
But… dreams. That's different. Dreams take things from him. Hope, mostly. Sanity, maybe. His kids, once. He wakes up, though. He realizes, at some point, that they aren't real. That's the thing.
There are waypoints on his map for these dreams.
…He's just checking.