Pixie dust is a mysterious magical substance that allows people to fly when they think happy thoughts. How it works is never fully explained, but I believe enough of its effects have been shown to make a thorough analysis of its composition.
One thing I would like to be clear on is that I will not be referencing Peter and the Starcatchers for this. Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson have already outright contradicted established canon. They are not affiliated with the original book, and, despite the fact that Disney published their books, are not included in the official Peter Pan franchise.
Pixie dust doesn’t actually come off of pixies. They are shown getting rations from the dust keepers, and can’t fly when it runs out. Pixies are unique in that they need both dust and wings to fly. I would attribute this to the fact that they have weak wings from lack of use and have evolved to use the pixie dust as a crutch, but Lord Mallory had a torn wing, and he was unable to fly using the dust alone. This raises some inconsistency as to whether the pixies are physiologically linked to the dust. Perhaps the dust usually can run on happy thoughts alone, but the pixies have developed a sort of immunity to it and require to use it in correspondence with the wings.
So where does pixie dust come from? In Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure, we are told that every eight years, the fairies create blue pixie dust when the light of the blue moon hits the moonstone. Nobody knows what the moonstone is or where it comes from; all we know is that they found it. I believe the implication was that it came from space. When the blue dust comes in contact with the gold dust, it disappears and creates more gold dust. The blue dust grain disappears, which means it must have been the source of matter for the new gold dust, which would make sense spatially since the individual blue grains are larger than the gold ones.
In order for anything to run off of “happy thoughts”, it would have to have some way of detecting them, either by reading hormonal signals or electrical impulses in the brain. This shows that it isn’t just a simple chemical compound, but a something much more complicated. This is reflected again in the way that it falls. Some of the grains plummet straight to the ground, while others float slowly like a feather, so there’s clearly an inconsistent density distribution, a mixture of separate types of grains serving a separate purpose. As we can see in Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy, different colors of dust can alter a fairy’s talent, proving the dust reads and alters an organism’s biological structure, which would also explain how Peter Pan never grows up. The pixie dust is manipulating him from the inside to keep him from aging.
The only explanation for this is that it is mechanical. I wanted to find a chemical compound that would fit the description, but the procedures performed here are far too complicated for that. Pixie dust is made of nanobots.
The first kind would have to be of a surgical type, manipulating and reshaping the body so that it remains young and healthy forever. They only last for a brief period of time before having to be replenished, so you would only maintain the effect though constant exposure (such as living in Neverland). This would also provide a good explanation for the inconsistent aging patterns in Neverland. In the original book, Peter Pan forbade the Lost Boys from growing up, but some of them did grow a little on the island anyway due to lack of exposure.
The second type of nanobot is responsible for flight. It’s difficult to find a reasonable explanation for how this works. I considered the possibility that they might be antimatter because of a theory that antimatter has a negative gravitational pull, but there’s no actual evidence behind it and it is intuitively an unsound theory. There’s also the fact that antimatter and matter annihilate each other on contact. One thing that is certain is that it has some sort of dopamine or serotonin detector which determines when the flight is activated. Then it lifts the target off the ground. Humans are not exactly aerodynamic and the regular laws of lift and thrust don’t apply here, so how they manage to make a human fly without any large-scale augmentation is bizarre. The most reasonable way for a robot this small to move objects around would have to be an ability to alter electromagnetism. By warping the electric charge of the person and the objects around the person, the pull could be strong enough to lift them off the ground and move them whichever way they want to go. In order for this to work in any given environment, on a moving target that isn’t even fully covered in the nanobots, would require an immense number of calculations and an extremely advanced AI, but I’m going to say that it is theoretically possible.
So we’ve worked out a possible structure of pixie dust, but now the question is where it came from. The technology presented here is too modern to have been done by modern science, let alone the early 1900’s. Therefore it must have either been created by aliens or time travelers. I’m going to say aliens, because backwards time travel would be much further ahead technologically speaking than pixie dust, and people wouldn’t need a material that can make them fly when they can already warp time, and presumably space. So that leaves aliens as the only explanation. There is nothing that I could find in any Peter Pan canon that leaves a clue as to who they were and why they sent the pixie dust to Earth. Perhaps it wasn’t sent here intentionally at all. Maybe it crash-landed here by mistake. Who knows?
Let me know what you think, especially if you’re an expert in this sort of thing.
Overanalysis of Disney Movies 