I read this for a second time in my 20's, alone, while on a tab of acid. Bawled my eyes out. I think I would have regardless.

It was around this time that I began to see just how deep some of the messages are behind some of oldest fables known to man. There are the surface level morals, such as in "The Never-ending Story", where we have suicide, the death of a parent, depression, loss of innocence, courage etc. but if you dig a little deeper, the author was really talking about human imagination, as being the very essence of our humanity and how our future rests solely on maintaining that fundamental ability to create novel images in our mind's eye, at a time when technology and automation was beginning to alter the foundations of our world. If you dig deeper into many of the world's most famous tales, you will see that many authors similarly harboured this fear, that we would take this incredible and very human ability for granted in the years to come as we lose sovereignty over our time and our minds as we are overrun with unsolicited information for someone else's agenda, leaving little time for imagination.