The baby boy felt warm and safe. He was starting to feel drowsy, and he liked the feeling. He knew that very soon, the dream would come, as it had done every night for as long as he could remember. He was never scared by the dream, only confused...he could not understand what the pictures meant, but each night it became a little clearer, a little more was revealed to him.

It always started the same way - in some kind of whiteness, something like a room, but not like any he'd seen when he was awake. There was a man in the room - always the same man, but at the same time he was always different. There were others there too, they were not always the same either.

The man and the others never seemed to be aware of the baby boy watching them, or if they were aware, they never acknowledged his presence. They used strange words, ones he had never heard his mum or dad say, like Dalek or Cybermen, and they seemed very worried about somebody or something they called The Master. He didn't know what any of this meant, and so he didn't fear it.

As the boy grew older, the dream continued. Through his dreams, he visited many times and places. He learnt that the whiteness was, in fact inside something known as a TARDIS, so it actually was a kind of room. The man was called the Doctor, and he was apparently a Timelord - whatever that meant, and that whatever he looked like, he really was the same man inside!

The boy knew that eventually all his questions would be answered, so he was never curious, only content to watch and listen. Sometimes the things he learnt did not make sense in his world, only in the world of his dreams - he sat studying a box one day, wondering how on earth it could be bigger inside than outside!

One of the men had a kind of metal dog, who he called K-9. The boy liked this little dog, and often tried to draw pictures of him, but his mum and dad couldn't understand what the drawings were meant to be, and he wasn't able to explain, so eventually the drawings stopped.

As time passed, the boy no longer felt comforted by the dreams, and began to wish they would stop. He was starting to understand that outside the TARDIS, bad things happened, just like the way that he no longer felt safe outside his own house. The Doctor and his friends had to face strange creatures who wanted to harm them, or even worse. And now in the same way, the boy had to face the other boys who wanted to take his money, or steal his homework, or hurt him just because he wasn't like them. He had tried to write a story in English class, all about the Doctor and his travels, and now the whole class thought he was weird, a geek, a nerd, and other much more hurtful names. He realised that he could never tell anybody about his dreams. If this was how they treated him for just writing a story, what would they do to him if they found out it was all real?

The dreams haunted him all through his school life. He couldn't concentrate on his work, his thoughts were always filled with the Doctor. He felt as if his mind had been taken over, and there was no way he could get back control of his thoughts. The dreams had always been there, and he began to see that they would always be.

He began to hate the dreams, to dread falling asleep, but the dreams kept coming anyway. He felt as if they were controlling his life. He tried taking tablets to make himself sleep, in the hope that the drugs would blot out the dreams, but even that did not work. He began to think that the only way to end the dream was to end his life. He decided the he would go for a walk to try to clear his head and plan his way out.

As he walked up to the bridge, he saw his way out. The bridge was a notorious spot for suicides. He walked slowly to the middle of the bridge, and was horrified to see a man standing there. As he got closer to the man, he thought that he recognised him, but he couldn't work out where from. The man turned to face him, and as he began to speak, the boy realised who he was, and what the dreams had all been leading up to.

"Good evening young man, I'm the Doctor, and I've been waiting for you all your life."