Now, he’s an adult, and has found himself thrust into the same world. The world is no longer peaceful or cheery. He still has magical friends, and they’re still going on magical adventures, but everything seems more urgent and dark. They’re going on adventures because they have to, not because they want to.

Now, here’s the thing. They’ve said that this world exists outside of his own imagination, and he has supposedly met other people within this dream that “prove” that. But honestly, he could just have dreamed that he met those people. Have his dreams always been like this, a world that is bigger than the world that he has known, or is the world slowly evolving and growing as he is?

Alex has proven time and again to be a bit slow on the uptake. Has it taken him eight years to finally realize that the world is a bigger place than he is, and because of that realization, gone back to his fantasy world to cope with that?

I have heard it said from multiple sources that dreams help the subconscious cope with its outside world. As a kid, he was growing up, and learning to cope with growing up was part of what everyone has to do. But as his brother was saying, Alex had stopped caring about other people, and his world was entirely self-centered. In a world like that, perhaps he didn’t dream because he didn’t need to cope. Then, realizing that his life was going downhill, he began to open up to the problems of his brother – and other people in general – around the same time that he started to dream again.

This fantasy doesn’t necessarily have to be outside of his own head. Sure, he’s dragging other people into it, and this doesn’t explain the flat-lining at all, but ultimately he could just be using his dreams to help him grow up.

Or, you know, the old standby. The first time he falls asleep “on-screen,” everything after that is just one long dream. He dreams that he wakes up, and all the rest of this is either a single, night-long dream, or he dies there and this is just the last few seconds of real-time where the dream’s time dilation effect goes to the extreme, and he is allowed to have “one last adventure” before passing on.

If, as some have conjectured, Alex is to become the human king of Dreamland, it’s much better that he learn this lesson before he takes the reins.