Welcome to Creative Corner! Every month, we host a contest to see who can earn the title of highlighted writer of the month. If you have a story you would like to share, then submit it to us, and you will be entered to win a notebook!
Below, we have presented you with a list of prompts to get your mental cogs whirring. You can choose to write a story based on any of these prompts, but choosing one is not required! Feel free to submit any type of story you want. Of course, all submissions have to be school appropriate. Suggestions for future prompts are also welcome!
The due date for submissions to be published in the November 2026 issue is Friday, October 23.
This month's theme is Unfiction, which is a type of storytelling that presents itself as reality. Good examples include novels like House of Leaves or writing communities like the SCP Foundation. These are stories in which you, the author, are a part of the world. You are living in the story, and the events affect you directly.
You might choose to write about the following:
A diary written by an average civilian during a world-altering crisis, whether it is something realistic, like nuclear war, or something out there like alien body-snatchers.
A document within a story. IE: A spellbook written by a sorcerer that teaches the fundamentals of magic, an employee handbook for an organization that fights monsters, etc.
A travel blog describing a trip to an alien planet/alternate dimension.
“Dream big, we’ve got the rest of eternity to do so.”
Hello! If you’re reading this, that means you’ve slipped a bit too deep into unconsciousness, and crossed a bridge you can’t come back from. Allow me to be the first one to say, on behalf of the rest of my fellow Walkers, we’re sorry for you.
You likely spent the first few hours of your time here trying to wake up from whatever lucid dream you’ve fallen into. You may have pinched yourself, or bashed your head against a nearby wall, or jumped off of a cliff. You’ll notice that, despite your best efforts, you’re still asleep, still here.
You’ve likely come to the realization that this clearly isn’t a normal dream. It’s vivid, distinct, alive. Even the most lucid of lucid dreams have never felt as real as this one.
It brings me no pleasure to inform you that you’ve entered into the Mindscape. This is your new home.
This guide is meant to explain the situation you’ve been unfortunate enough to find yourself in, and hopefully reassure you that it isn’t quite as bad as it seems.
You might as well keep reading. It's not like you’ve got anywhere else to be.
I’ll answer the most glaring question first, that being “Where the hell am I?” You’re currently standing in a realm we call the Mindscape. We’re not sure what its actual name is, or if it's ever had one in the first place. That’s something you should try to get used to, we don’t have all the answers. Nobody does. Or if they do, they sure ain’t sharing.
The Mindscape, as far as we can tell, is a metaphysical dreamworld that all human psyches are connected to. It’s the reason we can dream at all, actually. See, people often equate consciousness with the brain, and they operate under the assumption that your brain is what causes you to be conscious. This is incorrect. The brain merely
HOUSES the consciousness.
Here’s an easier way of understanding it. Your consciousness, or what most people would call your soul, has two different layers that it can exist in. By default, you exist and think in your brain, which is what allows you to pilot your body, right? Well, when you sleep, you slip one layer down into unconsciousness. Your brain turns off during sleep, and during that time, your mind travels into the Mindscape.
Every dream you’ve ever had, every nightmare you’ve ever experienced, it's all just you dipping your metaphorical feet into the vast ocean that is the Mindscape. That’s the reason why dreams are so incoherent. You’re dancing on the edge of unconsciousness without fully committing. If you ended up here, that means you went in too deep. Your mind is now fully divorced from your brain, from what you would call reality. You’ve entered into a deeper layer of existence, and now you're stuck here.
Truth be told, we don’t know why some people arrive here when the vast majority don’t. What we do know is that we all have the same story. We went to sleep one day, and we woke up here. Some of the more preachy of us like to believe that we were chosen by some higher power to achieve some grand purpose, but if you ask me, we just got unlucky.
This should go without saying, but nobody knows where the Mindscape came from. We don’t even know if it has a beginning. It seems to just have always been here.
The Mindscape can be a little hard to traverse, especially for newcomers. As it's literally a collective dream, space isn’t constrained by real-world logic. You can find yourself walking the same path for hours without really going anywhere, or falling asleep and waking up in an entirely different location than where you originally were. For reasons we don’t fully understand, everyone who falls into the Mindscape almost always starts in the luminescent forest you’re probably in right now. It’s the closest thing the Mindscape has to a “default point.”
The Mindscape usually isn’t dangerous, as long as you stick to the open areas, that is. As far as we know, this place is quite literally infinite. Even the most well-travelled among us still discover new parts of it on the regular. Be warned, however. There are some corners of this place where even we can’t help you.
Alright, now that you’ve learned the ropes, it's onto the second most important question: who is this “we” I keep talking about?
We call ourselves the Dreamwalkers. Dumb name, I know. We’re all people, just like you, who happened to be unlucky enough to slip into here. Seeing as this place can be rather…unpredictable, we decided it would be best to group up, to work together, and to try to make the best of living in the Mindscape. If we’re all stuck here, then we might as well work together, right?
That’s really all the Dreamwalkers are: the best of a bad situation.
…Well, that’s actually not the whole truth. There is one other reason we decided to form this little family. Remember when I said there are some parts of the Mindscape that even we can’t help you in? That’s because of a little something we nicknamed Null.
I’ll be honest. We don’t know jack about what Null actually is. We don’t know where it comes from, and we don’t know what its purpose is, but we do know what it's doing, and we know we have to stop it.
Null is, essentially, living nothingness. It's a void, its emptiness embodied. Remember when I said that your mind exists in two layers? Null is the space surrounding those layers, and it's actively trying to swallow us whole.
As far as we can tell, the Mindscape is essentially a defensive shield that keeps Null out of our heads. It allows our brains to peacefully enter dreams at night, rather than being exposed to the raw, unfiltered void just outside of it. If the Mindscape wasn’t here, we’d all go to sleep one night, and never wake up again.
We’re not sure if Null really has a consciousness, but we know it’s alive, and it’s actively trying to destroy the Mindscape and flood into the minds of every human on planet Earth.
This is the Dreamwalkers' real purpose: to defend our new home whenever specks of the void try to erase it. Mankind doesn’t deserve to suddenly just stop existing one day. We’re fighting a battle nobody else knows is even happening so that the rest of our species gets to live in a happy, normal world. The Mindscape was here before us, and we’re gonna make damn sure it’ll be here after us.
It’s the closest thing we can do to still feel like we’re still human, like we’re still contributing to something. Even if we never get out of here, and we never get to go back to our old lives, we can at least defend the people we cared about from the outside.
I used to end this document with something resembling a motivational speech, but it's time I start getting more realistic.
I know what's going through your head right now. You’re angry, you’re heartbroken. How could you not be? Your life was stolen from you overnight, and you’ve been forced against your will into a war you never even knew was being waged.
Let me reassure you, we’ve all been there, all of us. None of us chose to be here, and none of us had any idea what we were getting into when we arrived here. We all want to go back, we’ve all tried, and we can’t.
We’ve spent nearly a century trying to find a way back to no avail. There is no way out of the Mindscape, there is no going back. If there was, I promise you, we’d all be out by now.
We all had families, we all had loved ones, we all had lives that were ripped out from under us. It's not fair, I know.
This is why we came together in the first place. Stopping Null came later. You can take some solace in knowing there are others like you, others who feel your pain. I know it’s not much, but trust me, trying to survive out here on your own isn’t worth the effort. We don’t need lone wolves roaming the Mindscape.
Finding this message in the first place means that we already know your location. Don’t try to find us, we’ll find you. Sit tight, we’ll take you somewhere safe.
Welcome again, and my condolences.
-Jericho Smithers.