David Blaize And The Blue Door

Ever since he was four years old, and had begun to think seriously, as a boy should, David Blaize had been aware that there was a real world lying somewhere just below the ordinary old thing in which his father and mother and nurse and the rest of the fast-asleep grown-up people lived. Boys began to get drowsy, he knew, about the time that they were ten, though they might still have occasional waking moments, and soon after that they went sound asleep, and lost all chance of ever seeing the real world. If you asked grown-ups some tremendously important question, such as 'Why do the leaves fall off the trees when there is glass on the lake?' as likely as not they would begin talking in their sleep about frost and sap, just as if that had got anything to do with the real reason.