What Happens When Dreams Become Lies: Revisiting The Neverending Story in an Age of Confusion

Most people remember The NeverEnding Story as a beautiful fantasy film from the 1980s. But the original book by Michael Ende offers a much deeper—and darker—message. In one pivotal scene left out of the movie, a dying werewolf named Gmork reveals how fantasy becomes delusion, and how belief itself can be weaponized. In an age of “wokeness,” culture wars, and technological burnout, his warning feels eerily prophetic.

The Scene That Didn’t Make the Movie

Most people have seen—or at least heard of—the 1984 children’s fantasy film The NeverEnding Story. It tells the tale of Fantasia, a magical world threatened by a force called The Nothing, and a boy named Bastian whose journey into a book becomes a journey into himself. The movie is filled with emotion, imagination, and memorable scenes—but like many book adaptations, much was left out.

The film is based on the novel The Neverending Story by German author Michael Ende. And one of its most powerful scenes never made it into the film. In it, the dying werewolf Gmork—servant of The Nothing—reveals to Atreyu the true horror of Fantastica’s destruction. And it’s not what you’d expect.

“You’ll be like a contagious disease that makes humans blind… You and your kind will be called lies.”

Gmork explains that when creatures of Fantastica fall into the Nothing, they don’t just disappear. They pass into the human world as distorted versions of themselves—becoming delusions, propaganda, irrational fears, or seductive distractions. Things that poison our minds and blind us to reality.

More Than Just Dreams

But here’s the part often missed: Gmork also tells us what the creatures of Fantastica really are:

“Dreams, poetic inventions, characters in a neverending story.”

They’re not just entertainment. They are symbols, archetypes, and guides—like the muses of ancient Greece or the spirit beings in Indigenous dream quests. They represent the spark of creativity, the inner voice of conscience, the source of moral imagination and insight. They are what Carl Jung might call the contents of the collective unconscious.

When these sacred dream-forms fall into the Nothing—when meaning is stripped from myth, or imagination is reduced to distraction—they become lies. And this is what Gmork wants. He serves those who manipulate belief.

“Humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.”

This isn’t just fantasy. It’s a mirror held up to the modern world.

Woke, Asleep, or Dreaming?

Today, we live in a world flooded with information—and haunted by a creeping sense of unreality. Culture wars dominate headlines. Accusations fly: “woke ideology,” “right-wing extremism,” “cancel culture,” “fake news.” The result? No one can agree on what’s true. And worse, many no longer believe that truth is even possible.

Terms like woke once meant heightened awareness—especially of injustice. But in today’s polarized world, it’s a loaded term. To some, it signals progress and compassion. To others, it signifies censorship, groupthink, or ideological delusion.

The tragedy is that meaningful vision—real imagination, real dreaming—is being drowned out by weaponized narratives. By lies wearing the skin of dreams. By belief systems stripped of soul and used as shields, slogans, or sales pitches.

Just like the creatures of Fantastica who, once corrupted, go out into the human world and work (without knowing it) to convince people that Fantastica never existed.

“And as long as they don’t know you creatures of Fantastica as you really are, the Manipulators do what they like with them.”

A World Without Vision

Thinkers like Eric Weinstein have noted that, outside of the digital space, most major advances in human creativity—physics, public infrastructure, visionary science—have stalled since the early 1980s. We’ve had breakthroughs in AI and the internet, yes. But where is the next space program? The next Eiffel Tower? The next unified theory?

Weinstein doesn’t link this directly to politics—but we might. Around the same time this stall began, leaders like Ronald Reagan began pushing a neoliberal ideology: trickle-down economics, deregulation, and the defunding of public research and the arts. Market logic replaced public vision. Storytelling became branding. Exploration gave way to efficiency.

Reagan's era didn’t just change budgets. It changed the cultural permission to dream. It taught a generation that worth is measured in profit, not in beauty or insight or meaning.

And so, just like in The Neverending Story, the creatures of Fantastica began to fall.

The Real Enemy Isn’t Left or Right—It’s the Nothing

The movie made The Nothing look like a storm, a cloud of despair. But the book makes it clear: The Nothing is what’s left when meaning dies. And in its place come the lies—useful to those who want to manipulate.

We are not just fighting over politics, culture, or language. We are fighting over belief itself. Not just what we believe—but whether belief has any value at all.

In that war, Fantastica is the battleground. And if we lose it, we won’t just forget how to dream—we’ll forget that dreaming was ever real.

So the Question Remains...

Can we remember?

• Can we still hear the call of the muses?
• Can we still seek vision, and carry something sacred back from the realm of dreams?
• Can we rebuild a world not just of information, but of meaning?

Or will we continue mistaking the lies for dreams, and the dreams for lies?