Aligned & Awake: "The Nothing" Wins Every Time You Talk Yourself Out Of It

What a children's film from 1984 taught me about dreams, action and going after the slightly ridiculous ones

Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.

---

I was seven years old.

Ireland. The school hall smelled of damp coats and chalk. They wheeled in a television and we all sat cross-legged on the floor like it was a religious ceremony, which, looking back, it was.

Then The NeverEnding Story began.

And somewhere between the magic and the flying dog and the quiet boy hiding in an attic, my little heart got absolutely destroyed by Artax sinking into that swamp. Even thinking about that scene now, I’m tearing up.

No warning. And no adult in the room thinking, “perhaps we should prepare these children”. This was the 80s. Emotional preparation wasn't really on the curriculum.

Just a horse, a bog, and a group of seven-year-olds learning grief for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon in a small Irish town.

We all carry that scene. A shared childhood wound, passed down through every millennial who has ever had to explain to a therapist why they have complicated feelings about horses.

What we didn’t understand then was what the film was actually about.

The villain isn’t the wolf or the darkness creeping across the land.

It’s The Nothing.

And The Nothing is exactly what it sounds like — the absence of something. It moves through Fantasia dissolving everything in its path, and it wins not through force but through quiet erasure. The world falls apart because humans have stopped dreaming. Imagination gets filed under not practical. Creativity gets replaced with being realistic. And Fantasia, built entirely from human dreams and stories and wishes, starts to disappear.

The only one who can save it is a boy reading a book in an attic.

Bastian Balthazar Bux. A dreamer who almost didn’t believe he mattered enough to try.

I keep thinking about that.

Because I’m here, at 46, building a life that didn’t exist two years ago. Writing things that didn’t exist before I wrote them. And saying out loud, to anyone who will listen and several people who didn’t ask, that I want to win an Oscar. A Tony. Basically, the full EGOT. I’m freshly unhinged and apparently that’s exactly the right qualification for it.

A lot of people hear that and raise an eyebrow.

Good. That’s how I know it’s the right-size dream.

Nobody ever changed their life with a sensible little goal that kept everyone comfortable and mildly impressed at dinner parties. Dreams are supposed to stretch you past the point of dignity. Make you laugh at yourself. Make other people secretly wonder if you’re okay.

That’s the whole point.

The piece that hit me hardest is this.

Bastian didn’t save Fantasia by thinking nice thoughts in an attic. He had to say the Childlike Empress's name out loud. That was the whole thing. One act. One moment of believing enough to try. He had to step into it, risk looking ridiculous, risk being wrong, risk the whole thing.

The Childlike Empress asks him directly:

“Why don’t you do what you dream, Bastian?”

That’s the shift that matters. The dream on its own isn’t enough, it’s the moment you stop keeping it safely in your head where nobody can have an opinion about it. The moment you say the name out loud and commit to the direction of it, even when the path isn’t clear, even when the footing is shaky, and you’re making it up as you go.

Because you are. We all are.

The world feels heavy right now. Loud and fractured and exhausting in ways that make it very tempting to get small and sensible and keep your head down.

That's how The Nothing wins. Through every dream you talked yourself out of before anyone else got the chance to.

So I’m choosing something else.

There’s a line she says that I love:

“Fantasia can arise anew from your dreams and wishes.”

I come back to this line more than I expected to. Because it isn’t just about a fictional kingdom. It’s about what gets built when people decide to keep going anyway. The stories that get told. The things that get made. The lives that shift because someone somewhere decided their dream was worth the embarrassment of actually trying.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Your dreams aren’t just yours. They’re part of something larger; the collective imagination of people who refuse to let The Nothing have the last word.

So if something is sitting in you right now, an idea, a story, a version of your life that feels a bit too large and slightly ridiculous, I’ll leave you with what the Childlike Empress tells Bastian when he asks how many wishes he gets.

“As many as you want.”

Start there. Say the name out loud. Take one step in the direction of it, even a shaky one, even a small one, the one that makes you laugh at yourself a little.

The trail starts somewhere.

It might as well start here.

---

Tell me…

What's the dream you've been keeping safely in your head? Say it out loud in the comments. Consider this your sign.

---