On the edge of town, there was a wishing well. It lay off the road down a short path. Greenery surrounded it on all sides so that going there, one had privacy in the wishes that were made. It was a very tranquil, quiet place. Beneath the hanging leaves lay the pool itself, a polished mirror of black glass gazing up at the sky. In the form of coins, lost beneath the glassy surface, this pool contained in it the accumulated wishes of hundreds of travelers and passersby. These dreams and wishes slept soundly beneath the surface of the still, silent water.

A boy in a threadbare jacket came sniffling and sniveling to the wishing well. He pushed his way through the green curtain to stand at the edge of the well. The quiet of the place weighed on him. Here there was no noise or bustle of the town. No adults to intrude upon him as he dreamed. He had in his pocket three small pennies. Each being a wish in tangible form. He stopped at the edge, peered into the black water hoping to see the glimmer of the coins which had been dropped in there by others. But alas, he was not so lucky. He stuck his hand in his pocket. Between his fingers he squeezes a coin. Was it worth it? All he had were three pennies. To be sure, the boy had wishes. He had dreams. Surely just one wouldn’t hurt. He stopped fidgeting and thought for a moment about what he would wish for.

Casting the coin from his hand, the boy watched the copper flash through the air and break through the surface of the water with a plop. In an instant, the copper coin was lost in the darkness of the pool. With a sigh, the boy turned away, thrusting his hands into his pockets. He shouldered his way back through the wall of leafy bushes and started trudging back down the narrow path.

Water splashed, little waves lapped against the side of the wishing well. The boy stopped, raised his head. He turned back around, wondering if perhaps something had fallen into the well. But what could have made such a noise? He was alone, wasn’t he?

The boy peered through the bushes. He saw nothing. Sheepishly, he sidled back up to the side of the pool. To his utter surprise, he saw a toy soldier floating in the water at his feet. That was strange. How had it gotten there? Strangely too, it was exactly like the toy soldier the boy had wished for: the one he had seen so many times in the window of the toy shop in the center of town. A smile began to creep across the boy’s thin face. Could it be? Could it really be? He glanced around, half expecting someone to come crashing through the underbrush and claim they had dropped the toy in the pool. But no such thing happened. He was alone, in fact. Stooping down, his eyes full of wonder, the boy took the toy soldier out of the pool.

Something cold and slimy touched his fingers. The boy yelped and fell backwards. But when he scrambled to his feet, he saw it had merely been a piece of grass floating on the surface of the water. He let out a relieved sigh. He studied the toy in his hand, marveling at it. For so long, there had been a pane of glass and a price tag between him and this fine toy soldier. But now it was in his hand. Had the pool really answered his wish? The boy looked down at the pool. And he had the strangest feeling that the pool was itself looking back at him. He could not have explained the feeling to anyone had they asked. He just felt… seen. As if the pool was a huge, open eye looking directly at him, waiting. Waiting for the next wish.

Fishing out another coin, he tossed it in the pool. This time he didn’t turn his back, but watched the black water intently. He clutched the toy soldier tightly in his hand. He didn’t have to wait long. And a good thing too, as he had stopped breathing at some point from sheer anticipation. With a loud gasp, the boy leapt back as he saw something suddenly burst up through the surface. Setting aside the toy soldier, the boy leaned over and grabbed the rectangular parcel. This time, he was sure fingers, slick and cold, brushed his hands. The boy lurched back, shuddering as he did so. The pool stared back at him, inert and expectant. Now was its turn to wait with bated breath. The boy turned his attention back to the parcel in his hands. It was a heavy thing wrapped in layers of oilskin. Opening it up he found what he had wished for: a new coat. One of the ones in the new style, worn by schoolboys from fashionable families. Shrugging off his old, threadbare coat, he put on the new one. It fit him perfectly. The boy stood up and checked his reflection in the pool. He thought he looked rather splendid in the new coat. The pool, with its silent gaze, agreed.

Now possibilities swirled through the boy’s head fast and fierce. He had one more coin left; one more wish. But as each new toy or clothing item came to mind, they were struck down. Through the mess arose a wish that burned brighter than all the rest. Taking out his final coin, the boy cast it into the well. The coin sank into the black waters. The well seemed to sigh in relief as it knew at last what the boy’s final wish was to be. The boy waited. His heart hammered in his ears. He clenched his fists, his whole body tensing as he waited to see what would arise form the wishing well. He waited. And waited. His heart began to sink. It was taking too long this time. Could the dreaming water not make this one request? Had he found the limits of this wish-granting well? But just as this thought entered his head, he noticed something in the middle of the pool. It was a lightening of color, from inky black to gray. Something was rising up slowly through the waters. The gray thing then became white. The boy leaned out over the water to get a better look. To his shock, it was a face. A face as pale white as a winding sheet. Slowly it rose closer and closer to him. It was a woman’s face, the contours and shape of which he knew all too well. The eyes opened and looked directly up at him. The boy felt a thrill shoot through him. The surface parted and the whole woman emerged into open air. She rose up to her full height. Ripples danced, white rings across the ebon surface. She was dressed in a somber black dress just as the boy had last seen her in. The boy was open-mouthed and speechless. He could not begin to wonder what power had brought her, his mother, from where he had last seen her sleeping in the earth to this watery womb which had brought her to life once more. Wonder mingled with joy as pure emotion exploded in his breast. His mother smiled at him. She reached out both arms to the boy. With a cry, he leapt into that embrace he had missed for so long. Hot tears streamed down the boy’s cheeks. He wrapped his arms tight around his mother and squeezed. His mother held him close to her. Long white fingers played through his hair.

Still with a warm smile on her waxy face, the boy’s mother clutched her son close to her as she slid backwards into the water. There was a great splash as her body broke through the glossy onyx surface. Then down they went together as the cold, dark waters enveloped them both like a black shroud. Nothing, not even death, would separate them this time.

Silence came back again to that still and tranquil place. The wishing well watched and waited with bated breath. Who would be next to cast a coin into the bottomless darkness. What wish would be borne out of the depths of that darkness on slimy, unseen fingers in exchange for a penny?

In all my pondering of the wonders of the universe I had never before imagined what my own subconscious showed me one night while I lay dreaming. I had seen already seen depicted the many types of stars, from red giants to the dullest of dwarfs. There are dead stars made of compacted neutronic metal. There are black holes, bulbous tears in spacetime which swallow light; yet for being the blackest and most lightless things, they are surrounded by thousands of radiant halos.

There are rogue worlds, planets without suns, hurtling through the interstellar voids at speeds far outpacing the flight of our own solar system through the galaxy. There are planets made entirely of swirling gasses. There are glittering planets made of crystal and diamond. There are planets whose atmospheres are bing devoured by their own suns, soon to leave the planets skyless, smoldering rocks. There are nebula clouds spread out like huge gossamer veils. They sparkle with jewel tones: ruby red, emerald, and opal.

The universe itself is a marvel. If one takes a greatly zoomed out view, seeing with the eyes of God as it were, the cosmos is like a dark and empty room through which spread threads woven of hundreds of galaxies, like cobwebs in the corner, spreading luminous strands through empty space. Between these thin strands of galaxies are vast voids, larger than the human mind can conceive, of starless, fathomless blackness. Like the darkness of pre-creation.

But in all these musings, never did my waking mind conceive what my dreaming mind beheld. As I lay dreaming one night, this is what my sleeping eyes saw. A world. A single, lonely world at the furthest edge of what we call space. A world without a sun to warm it; a world without siblings. Alone; the most isolated thing in the universe. But this utterly lonesome planet was also the most beautiful world I have ever seen. It was deep purple in color. A world of Tyrian richness; an imperial world in its natural majesty of color. Imagine the stripes and bands of cloudy Jupiter changed to the most vibrant violet and magenta hues. Even from my lofty abode high above this distant, silent world, I was enthralled by how brilliantly it stood out against the dark backdrop of the cosmic veil. It was like a marble of the brightest amethyst.

But the biggest wonder was yet to come. My vision of this wondrous scene moved, as they do in dreams, miraculously. I suddenly had the feeling as if I were peering out through the porthole of a vessel down at this strange world, which grew suddenly smaller in my vision, giving the sense of movement, though I felt no sense of moving. Then when I looked up at the thin veil of stars twinkling in the distance, there I saw a sight that made me balk in wonder even as I slept. There was a structure behind the stars. A cross-hatching as of beams or lattices. They were angled, like the mullions of old casement windows, leaving vast diamond-shaped gaps between them.

Even in the land of dreams it is possible to feel small, to be swallowed up, even for a brief moment, by awesome excitement at what you are witnessing. Dreams are a way that we may, in this lifetime, truly look upon the impossible. The lattices were massive in size, in width wider than even the most titanic of planets. I was seeing a truly cosmic structure. The lattices seemed to be behind the distant stars, standing out like shadows in the indigo recesses of star-strewn space. I could only guess at what these vast beams stretched across space could be. Because of my limited view through the hole, I could not see much of them. I had the feeling—as one gets in dreams—that they were like the bars to a cage: a spherical cage which had entrapped this vibrant planet and a number of stars. The circumference, then, of such a cage would be dozens or hundreds of lightyears across. Then this amaranthine world was like a prisoner in an astronomical Plato’s cave, cut off from the rest of the universe by beams laid down by Titan hands in eons past.

But then I thought was I seeing something deeper? Something larger? Was I, in my dream, looking at the utter edge of the universe, the ultimate end of all thing? Were these the very beams of creation, holding back the stars and their light from the nothingness on the other side? There were multiple options for what these enigmatic structures were. They might also have been the very framework or foundations of the universe itself, the glue that held stars and galaxies together. For being such simple, geometric shapes, the shadows of those mighty lattices boggled my dreaming mind. And when I woke up and remembered instantly this incredible and vivid dream, it mystified me then just as much as it had in the dream.

It was a dream which instantly stuck with me, finding a fertile resting place in my waking thoughts. I still marveled at what I had seen in my own dream. I felt as if I had peered through the curtain and spied, even if only the vague outline of it, one of the mysteries of the cosmos. And it has left me wondering if such a thing can really be. Could there be such a planet out there, one which sits at the utter edge of all that we know? One side of it faces the universe and its inhabitants of stars, including our own tiny, isolated sun. And the other side faced… what? The complete edge. The great, black wall of infinity separating what is from what isn’t. Or so I think. Maybe, maybe there is such a thing out there in the infinite fathoms of outer space.

But such are dreams, giving us glimpses of sights beyond the mundane. Allowing one asleep to instantly traverse the length of the observed universe in the span of a single night and see a sight which no other has. Such are the enticing majesty and power of dreams for those who are open to their call.

The latest stop in the midnight journey has arrived. This one in the city that never sleeps.

Find out what’s underneath New York City in this nocturnal trip to the strangest sights our country has to offer.

Read the story here.