Once upon a time, there was a little boy who was looking for something. He spent all his days turning his home topsy-turvy searching for the thing he had lost, investigating every cranny, every corner, every hiding-place in every room of his house. As soon as he awoke in the mornings, he would leap out of bed and promptly begin searching and re-searching his house. He would only stop when his mother urged him to eat meals, or to bathe, or to listen to his tutor's lessons, or to go to sleep. Immediately after these things were finished, he would rush off and search some more, always running, always looking, always surveying his surroundings in the hopes that he would recover what he had lost.
From the time the boy was very young, he had always been looking for the lost thing. Ever since he could register the world around him, ever since he could crawl and then stand on his two feet and then toddle along the hallways of his home, he had always been looking. Yet the boy could never remember what it was that he had lost.
Try as he might, he could just never remember. Every so often, in his dreams, he could faintly remember a scrap of a detail of its description, or a blurry image of a memory involving it, and he would feel the strong sensation of familiarity with it, but he could never remember what it was. Nonetheless, the boy felt all the more desperate to recover what had been lost to him.
So the boy continued to search: looking, looking, looking; clearing every bookcase, lifting every cushion, opening every closet. And at the end of each day, he was exhausted.
'Why is it so that I can never find what I am looking for?' he thought to himself as he lay in bed one evening. 'And what am I looking for, anyway? And how would I know what it was if I ever found it? What's the point in doing ANY of this??!' The boy rolled over into his pillow and wept until he fell asleep and he entered the realm of the dreaming.
The boy was in a park, full of crunchy gravel-and-dirt paths and lawns and flowers and benches. There was darkness all around him and above him, yet light shone down from a single star that seemed to float down towards the ground. Shielding his eyes, he realized that the star was approaching him, and as it came closer, he saw that it was a yellow glowing orb of light, about the size of his own head. He observed silently as it dropped to the ground in front of his feet, and it lay there, shining, seeming to hum in a way that was neither pleasing nor disturbing to him.
'Are you the thing I'm looking for?' he asked the orb.
The orb divided, and then divided again, and again, until there were a thousand tiny orbs surrounding him, all humming a different note.
Then, they began to fade.
And they were gone.
Suddenly, the boy felt terribly alone.
He began to wander the paths of the garden, wandering on and on through the twisting and overlapping paths. Soon he became frightened and began to run. On and on he ran, through the park, until he could run no longer, and he collapsed onto a bench next to a tree. 'Where do I find it? Where?!' he cried, and face in his hands, began to weep.

After a while, he heard soft voices. He wiped his tears and looked up, finding two creatures of the most peculiar sort before him. The first was an animal that could have passed for a wolf if it wasn't so small; rather, it was about the size of a housecat. The other was a creature like no other the boy had seen beyond the illustrations in books of fairytales; for it was a dragon of a sort; scaled in green mirrors, with a long, forked tongue and spikes along his head and tail. It was around the same size as the wolf-creature.
'Why do you weep?' the wolf-creature asked him. Her (for her aura and disposition was sweet and feminine) voice was soft and delicate, yet knowing, and youthful, but in a mature sort of way.
'Yes, why do you weep in such a beautiful garden as this?' asked the dragon-creature. The boy was quite sure the creature was a he, while although he possessed neither a masculine or feminine presence, but the boy rather knew upon the creature's speaking. His voice was kind and wise, and he seemed very old, possessing the knowledge of many years, although feeble he was not.
'This park is all yours, to do with it what you will,' he continued, 'why do you find pain in it? You can do whatever you wish in it.'
'But it frightens me,' sobbed the boy, 'and these paths are so confusing, I don't know where I am or where I came from or where I want to go.'
'But look around you,' spoke the wolf-creature, 'you made this. All the flowers and gardens, everything: even the paths, and the darkness; it was all of your own creation. Is this not what you want? Why would you create something that would bring you sadness?'
'I don't know, I don't know!' wept the boy. He sat there in despair for a moment, then grew silent and looked up at the creatures. 'I was looking for something,' he realized, 'something, and I don't know what it is. I've always been looking for it. I know that whatever it is, I had it once, a long long time ago, and then I lost it, and I must find it. Will you help me?' He looked at the creatures pleadingly.
'My dear boy,' smiled the dragon-creature, 'only you can find what you are searching for. For you are searching for a sense of self.'
'Sense of self?' repeated the boy questioningly. 'But I know who I am; I am my parents' son, and my tutor's pupil and'' he trailed off.
'But who are you to YOURSELF?' reasoned the wolf-creature.
'I've never thought about that,' mused the boy, 'ever. I am'me, I suppose.'
'And who are YOU?'
'I am'Jeremy'I am'eleven years old'I live with my mother and father and''
'But those are all things other people can realize for themselves about you,' she said, 'What is it that you know of yourself, just to yourself?'
'I don't know'' he began to despair again. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning in his consciousness, he had found what he had been looking for, all those years.
'I'AM'ME'' he whispered.
The his two friends smiled knowingly, and then his dream commenced to dissolve around him like a pill in water, and the boy'Jeremy'was lying in his bed, having found the self that he had searched for for so long.
He catapulted out of bed and to the breakfast-room, where his mother sat, drinking her morning tea. He flew to her, and kissed her. 'Mother! I have found it! I have found it! I know who I am! I know who I am! And I know everything I need to know!'
His mother smiled through her tears of joy, and mother and son embraced triumphantly, both knowing that he would never have to search in vain again, for he had found what he needed.