The inspiration for it came from an incident that happened many years ago when our boys were little. We lived in a mobile home and every time the furnace turned on it made a lot of noise. Each time the boys would immediately stop what they were doing and ask "what's that?" and at some point, my wife walked them down to the cabinet that hid the furnace and told them that a dragon lives in there and the noise they hear is just the dragon waking up and blowing warm air to heat the house. From that time on, whenever the furnace turned on, the boys would say "the dragon's awake" and continue playing. I wrote the story a few years later. (On my Commodore64. It was that long ago.)