Nocturn Core (Abridged)

I'd like to apologize for disappearing again. I've popped in a few times over the past week, but I haven't been posting or keeping up with any of the programs I'm involved with. Basically, my recall has gotten wonky. All of my dreams recently end the same way, but I haven't been able to take advantage of this for purposes of lucidity. As far as I can tell, I'm waking up immediately when I hear the noise.

On top of that, it's taking me longer to get to sleep, and I'm not able to stay asleep as long. It's probably due to stress, thinking about other things, the usual assortment of life-related factors. I'm not really sure.

I just wanted to explain that in case someone from IOSDP or Dreamwalkers wonders where I went. On the subject of DVASA, my mind's just not there right now. The gradual disconnection of my dream life from waking has become a much greater focus than preparing for the upcoming mission to project to the moon. Maybe I'll get lucky and succeed in projecting this month, who knows?

Good luck, everyone, and happy dreaming.

I was at some kind of performance. I understood that the members of my IPRO team had all selected songs to describe themselves. They were performing them on stage in front of the rest of the team. Amar and I walked down to the front of the auditorium to find a couple of free seats. Autumn showed up and sat down next to me. For some reason, a number of people brought props from the Sword of Truth series or dedicated their songs to Richard Rahl. I wasn’t sure why this kept happening, but it was amusing. I clapped when I saw each of them refer to the series. Two people trying to walk past each other in the aisle got stuck, and I suggested folding their props in half so they could squeeze by, but neither of them did it.

A dog of some kind put its head in Autumn’s lap. When I tried to pet it, its eyes turned red. It snarled viciously at me. She explained that it had a poor first impression of me… I tried to ignore it, but now that I had angered it, the dog started lashing out at me. It ended up pushing me to the ground, and I barely kept it from tearing my face apart. I was puzzled when the animal suddenly gave up and trotted away. While the performances continued, I feared that Limia would ask me to sing something… I had missed the day when we picked our songs, so I hadn’t rehearsed anything. If I had to, I could always sing Happy Birthday to the audience. The list of music I knew by heart was pitifully short and consisted mostly of children’s songs.

I was in my dorm room. It seemed that the world was going to collapse, destroying the souls of everyone in it. The only way to save them was to take them to another world entirely. Although I don’t recall doing it, I knew I had created a portal for them in my room to take them to Nyre. It was the safest place I could offer them. People ran through the portal in desperation. As I explained it to Autumn, we could save everyone who wasn’t actively dreaming up the “waking” world. In the end, it would only be as stable as the dreams of the last person dreaming it – probably not stable at all. Autumn was clearly worried that I would try to save everyone from the world’s collapse. I ran into the room connected to mine and warned everyone there that time was running out. They had a matter of minutes to escape. I checked the bathroom and found a little girl being attacked by shadow creatures. They pinned her to the wall.

Drawing Apheri in a swift motion, I tore through the shadow beings and banished them from our world. The little girl threw her arms around me on the verge of tears. I reassured her and brought her back to my room where the portal awaited. With Autumn’s help, I convinced her to go through to Nyre. The other portals I’d created around the world were allowing billions of people to escape the crumbling world, but the number of people I expected to die with Earth was still enormous. Some of them refused to believe it was happening.

“I have to try to save them,” I told Autumn. She grabbed my arm.

“You don’t have time,” she replied. “Four minutes won’t be enough.” I almost argued, but when I thought about it, I realized she was right. I would die with the rest of them if I stayed here too long, and then what would become of Nyre? Perhaps it would collapse just like Earth. I gave in and joined her in stepping through the gray-blue rift.

The dream jumped. Autumn and I sat on the back of a riding lawn mower with my grandpa. After coming to Nyre, he found an enormous plantation and built a house. It seemed like a lot of land for him to take care of… He was living his dream, so he didn’t mind the work. We accompanied him back to his house before going our separate ways. Autumn and I wanted to find the people we saved in Illinois. I also wanted to make sure no one had found Nocturn Isle. I couldn’t trust Earth’s society with Symphony. Autumn didn’t want to drive, so I agreed to it. A light snowstorm blew in as we departed.

I was playing on WMBRO. The character rankings indicated that there were four level 194 players. I observed that one of them was a thief, and another was a novice. I couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible. There were at least two new game masters who announced random things while I walked around on my character. Autumn voiced her suspicions that these high level characters belonged to the game masters. How else would they have leveled so quickly?

I wandered into a dungeon that combined elements of the Toy Factory with Glastheim. An abysmal knight and at least thirty other monsters attacked me in a swarm, but I was able to destroy them with ease. I sensed that I was using the wrong arrows, though, so I wanted a chance to switch them… Unfortunately, the monsters just kept coming, and I intended to pick up the items dropped by the abysmal knight first. It died, but so did fifteen other things standing in the same spot, so distinguishing the abysmal knight’s loot from everything else was impossible. The items disappeared before I even made it over there. After I killed all of the monsters on-screen, a game master teleported to me. He apologized for any latency and explained that the server was under maintenance. I didn’t care at all about that… The only problem I had with the server at the moment was the mysterious appearance of so many high level characters without the capacity to level quickly. I walked past the game master without speaking to him. Further into the dungeon, I found the other new game master standing idle. I didn’t speak to him, either.

I was at my dorm with Autumn. My roommate was a former quarterback for his high school's football team, but as he explained later, he got sick of tiring himself out on the field. He invited a girl over from Japan. She was originally from America. The girl had long, slightly curly, black hair. She was really proud of the fact that she was on a game show in Japan. Basically, competitors fought and raced each other on a variety of stages in order to prove their skill. I realized she was talking about a game show I had participated in recently. We each had a white handheld device which allowed us to connect to the game course. We synchronized for a quick practice round. Her avatar on the game show was similar to her actual appearance, but she wore a schoolgirl outfit and star pins in her hair. I took the form of Igarashi Ganta for some reason. For the first round, we appeared on a circular platform in the middle of a pool. The objective was to push the other person off the platform. When the fight began, the girl charged at me. One of her star pins flew off her head and struck me in the heart. I never knew that magic was allowed on the game show; my dad had forced me into participating, and no one told me the rules in English. Anyway, I stumbled backward, and it didn't take long for her to shove me into the water.

"Moonbeam is victorious!" the announcer screamed. I popped out of the game world for a moment, stunned.

"Wow, you're good," I commented.

"I'm one of the best," she answered without leaving the game world. I heard her voice through my console. "Shooting Star Moonbeam." I watched her standing on the platform in awe. When she smiled at me and pointed at the next stage, I reconnected.

I found myself on an obstacle course. I had to climb over a massive cube made of stone, run down a slippery slope while keeping my footing so I could jump over the pit of spikes that came right after, jump across logs sticking vertically out of the water, and finally run across a bridge before a flame on a fuse could burn it down. Moonbeam sent me a heart through the chat interface.

"Good luck!" she said. With the sound of a pistol firing, the second round began. I struggled just getting over the stone block. By the time I made it to the other side, Moonbeam was already on her way over the spike pit. I began to catch up, however. I completed the log obstacle in half her time, so we were speeding down the bridges on each side of the course at roughly the same time. She still came out ahead.

"Moonbeam wins again! She's on fire!" the announcer cried. The bridge erupted in flames behind me.

"That's enough for now," she said, disconnecting. I followed suit.

The dream jumped. Wanting to improve my skills, I helped Autumn join the game show roster. We connected to the game world and set up a system to rapidly strengthen our avatars. Basically, the avatars collected experience and leveled up like in a roleplaying game. There were porcupine monsters that shot out their spines and regenerated them in the game world. Each of the spines gave a little bit of experience. I bought thirty porcupines from a merchant and put them in a room with us. Autumn and I did our best to destroy all of the spines as they shot toward us, and we quickly gained levels. I was already level 121 when we started. By the time I reached level 139, one of the system administrators appeared and destroyed my porcupines. He accused me of cheating because it was too easy for us to level this way. Without considering anything I had to say, he took away the levels we'd gained - plus one more each. I decided this wasn't worth it and disconnected.

The dream jumped. Autumn and I were working on building some kind of giant truck for a performance downtown. It had to be ten times the size of a normal cargo truck. We connected huge steel boxes on lifts while the other people worked on the exterior. It wasn't very hard, but we had to make sure everything was aligned properly while maximizing the size of the cargo chamber. When we were satisfied with it, we had the guy controlling the lift let us out at the front of the chamber. We were done working for the day. Autumn decided to go home and take a nap, but I wanted to eat dinner before leaving, so we parted ways. I grabbed some food and sat down by myself.

Before long, my roommate and Moonbeam joined me. My roommate told stories about working in the union and his high school football days. I just sipped apple juice and kept to myself. He got up at one point to grab seconds, and Moonbeam asked something about dreams. I didn't quite catch it. My roommate came back before I could clarify what she meant. I was a little more interested at this point, and my roommate was interfering... So I put laxatives in his cake and waited patiently. He excused himself when his face paled.

"Be honest," asked Moonbeam, "did you do that to him?" We walked over to the drink machine. I couldn't decide whether I wanted more apple juice, water, or some kind of soda. I decided apple juice was probably best. "Get soda if you didn't do it!"

"Well, I'm not going to lie," I laughed. I filled up my glass with juice. I filled up a glass for Moonbeam, too, but she already had her own. We walked around to the other side of the cafeteria and found strawberries growing in a miniature garden. When Moonbeam pointed them out, I snatched one right out of the garden. It wasn't fully ready for consumption, but it was delicious nonetheless. One of the cafeteria workers got mad at me for eating the strawberries. She took us over to a giant watermelon tree. For some reason, the melon grew into slices, and it was enormous! She pulled down a watermelon slice the size of my body and asked Moonbeam if she wanted any.

"Use your fingers," the worker instructed. Moonbeam took a handful and stuffed it in her mouth. She smiled at me. We continued out of the cafeteria. On the way back to my dorm building, we started free running. I was sliding down railings on my shoes, running across walls, and jumping over anything in my path until I landed in front of a red robot with a computer monitor for a head. The screen said Minahpen - Nephanim backwards. Moonbeam's excitement with our free running dwindled.

"What's that?" she asked.

"It's me from another world," I explained. "Stand back." A rift opened, sucking all three of us in. We landed on a deserted street in what looked like New York City. Most of the buildings were in ruin, and the sky was gray with storm clouds. I was surprised to find my roommate standing behind the robot. "Did you do this?" I asked him.

"Who else would have?" he laughed. "This is payback for what you did to me." I didn't feel any remorse. The robot charged at me and began singing a song. The appropriate background track played throughout the dreamscape. I caught the robot's fist and leaped backward, skidding past Moonbeam. Heeding my advice, she finally took refuge on the sidewalk. I made distance between me and my other self as soon as possible and summoned Axis' gauntlets to my hands. This wasn't a job for Apheri... I wanted to punch myself into the ground.

Lyrics appeared in my field of vision. I stared at the yellow-framed bubble letters in disbelief.

"You want me to sing?" I laughed. Every word I missed made my robot opponent stronger. I sighed and swallowed to clear my throat. The words were in Japanese, so I was even less confident about singing them, but I knew I could do it. As my robot self sprinted forward again, I brought back my fist, charging up my punch with power. I released it just as my portion of the song ended and my robot self reached the limit of my range. He tumbled backward, rolling on the ground until he crashed into a rusty car parked in the road. Moonbeam cheered and applauded me.

"Way to go, Nephanim!" she shouted with her hands cupped around her mouth. I felt strangely empowered. This was my element. I didn't understand why, but I was more powerful than I ever imagined. I clenched my fists and charged after my robot self. Spears of blue light struck the street, but I was too fast for them to hit me. I leaped into the air just before I reached the car and punched the robot in his monitor just as he started to get up. The rusty car slid backward from his second impact.

I woke up halfway, and for a time, I was lying in bed while standing on the deserted street. I turned to look at Moonbeam.

"This is... a dream," I realized. I could feel my body in bed, but I hadn't left the dream yet. "Moonbeam!" I shouted. "I'll see you again!" She and I shared a smile as I fully awakened.

I was lying in bed on top of Chichen Itza. A glowing, yellow orb floated in the sky above me. Instantly, I recognized where I was. I was dreaming! I climbed out of bed and walked over to the edge of the top platform. From my height, I could see a number of shadow figures walking around at the base of the pyramid. Some of them looked up at me, but most were oblivious to my presence. Something woke me up immediately after.

Nicole and I were staying with my parents in Texas. Austin was sick, but my parents couldn’t take him to the hospital because the health care infrastructure had been taken over by a group calling themselves (simply enough) the Organization. My mom did her best to take care of him, and his situation seemed stable. We assumed he would be able to wait a few weeks for a military action to sort out this mess with the Organization. As the days wore on, the news reported that the Organization’s reach was spreading. They captured residential lots for use as barracks and weapon storage. What they didn’t capture, they ransacked. All of the food, water, and valuables were stolen from countless homes in the vicinity of the hospitals. It was a terrorist attack on a level the country had never seen. We decided to build a secret basement beneath our home. Although building codes prohibited the construction of basements in Houston, the area beneath our house was suited to that, so we didn’t have to worry about any serious health issues – at least, that’s what my dad thought. I wasn’t so sure. He finished digging it out in two days, and we moved a good portion of our food down there. We left enough food upstairs that the Organization would just take it and ignore the possibility of people hiding under the kitchen tiles. It wasn’t long before the Organization made their rounds… We could only get the news by radio now, and many of the standard broadcast stations had been knocked out, so much of what we listened to came from other people like us living in secret in their own homes. The airports were under the Organization’s control now. Everything seemed to be getting worse, and Austin’s condition wasn’t getting any better.

A few days after the Organization stopped running in and out of our house, my dad and I went outside to check out the area. It was spooky how normal everything looked. The streets were empty, of course, but the houses all looked fine on the outside. We went door to door trying to find anyone who had hidden themselves properly. We found a couple of corpses, but I tried not to dwell on it. I didn’t know any of these people, anyway… We found one family that did the same thing as us. Their basement area was a little larger, so they invited us to come stay with them. My dad wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but we agreed to attend a party. When we got back, we told the rest of the family all about it. We went back to the larger hideout the next evening to try to enjoy ourselves for the first time in a while. Unfortunately, a passing truck under the control of the Organization stopped in front of the house. The driver picked up the music playing in the basement from his vehicle. Before we knew this had happened, the driver called a couple of loading trucks to the scene. They infiltrated the house, broke up the party, and captured everyone as prisoners.

We were loaded one by one onto the trucks with our mouths gagged and our wrists bound. I thought it was dumb of them to leave our ankles untied, but when they closed the back of my truck and locked the door, I realized there wasn’t much we could do to escape. I had to sit in pitch black darkness for the whole ride. I wasn’t even sure where we were going… After the first few turns, I was lost. Maybe in Illinois, I could’ve followed the trail better, but I wasn’t familiar with this area. I knew Nicole wasn’t on the same truck as me… It didn’t seem like they were shipping women anywhere different from the men, so I was relieved at least by that much. I had even less of an idea where she had been sent, though. The truck stopped at another house, and they loaded some more people onto the truck. It was becoming crowded in the cargo area, but they didn’t care. We were just merchandise to them. I supposed we would probably end up doing slave labor for the rest of our lives.

By the time we reached the next stop, I realized the knot binding my wrists was loose enough to wriggle out of. I freed myself and cautiously undid the knots binding the men on my left and right. We left our gags in so the Organization wouldn’t notice we had untied our wrists. It worked like a charm. We could undo the knots just as well in pure darkness as in blinding light, so it didn’t matter that we had to work on them en route. We had most of the prisoners free by the third stop – and that was way more people than they were ready to deal with. We had to leave some of them bound, but we were able to rush the soldiers in charge of the loading process and take their guns from them. Only a few people died. Someone else killed the driver of the truck. We were the only truck on this street, so there was no one else to challenge us. Everyone scattered, and so began my long journey across the country.

I found out they had taken me over the border into Oklahoma. I figured it would be fastest to make my way back to my parents’ house from there. I didn’t have a car, and besides, the roads were dangerous with the Organization about. It seemed they were no longer content with just taking supplies. They needed an army of slaves for something. I didn’t intend to trust my fate to chance again. I walked from Oklahoma back to Houston, sneaking into restaurants when necessary to supply myself with water and food. I kept away from the major roads when I could and made short work of crossing them when I couldn’t. I don’t know how long it took me, but I made it back to my parents’ house. I was a little disappointed to find that I was the only one who made it back… None of my family members were in the same truck as me, so I hadn’t been able to free any of them. I didn’t check the other house to see if those people had made it back. Their hideout had been compromised. Although ours was empty, at least I figured it was secure. I stayed there for about a week to give Nicole time to find me. When she didn’t show up, I put a backpack of supplies together and took to the wilderness again. This time, I headed for Illinois.

Traveling during the summer was rough, so I was grateful when things began to cool down. It meant that I had taken a long time to cross the country, but I hadn’t been counting the days, anyway. I was too worried about what might’ve happened to Nicole and my family to think about something as abstract as time. Eventually, I made it to the edge of Chicago. A big storm blew in from the west, and the whole area quickly flooded. I jumped on the back of an Organization truck when the driver wasn’t looking and rode it into the suburbs so I wouldn’t have to spend so much time in the pouring rain. It pulled off into someone’s backyard, so I took the chance to hop off the truck and continue on foot. As I passed a house, I saw a television on inside. I wondered how long it had been playing… There didn’t seem to be anyone in the room. The TV played an episode of the Fairly Oddparents in which Timmy Turner gained the power of invisibility. He tried to save a girl on a motorcycle from the Organization, but he was unable to do anything. They threw her on a train and took her away. I couldn’t help noticing I was in a similar situation…

I had to wade through three feet of water to get across Nicole’s street. Her house was empty. Her garage was empty. All of the canned food was gone, and it basically looked like no one had been there in ages. I noticed that Cleo was also gone… I figured she had decided to fend for herself if she was still alive. Since there was nothing for me to find in Chicago, I decided I might as well go back home and prepare the house for my family’s return – if they ever returned. The trip back took even longer than the trip there; I had lost much of my motivation. The winter months weren’t so bad since I made it far enough south to avoid most of the snow. The new year arrived, then spring, then summer, and I finally made it back to my parents’ house. When I went inside, my heart sank. There were people everywhere. I immediately assumed they were with the Organization and threw up my hands in surrender. It wasn’t worth fighting anymore, I decided. If they were going to kill me, whatever… I didn’t want to live in fear like this anymore. Then my eyes narrowed. Nomad was with them. Nomad wouldn’t join the Organization. I noticed many of them had weapons strapped to their bodies. Some of them – including Nomad – had war paint on their faces. These were rebels preparing to stand up to the Organization. They laughed at my surrender and pointed me to my mom and sister. I was shocked by how similar Chelsea looked to my mom. It had been a year since I saw them, and Chelsea changed quite a bit. I hugged each of them several times. By this point, I was already in tears. Just finding one of them would’ve been enough to make the past year of running worth it.

I headed straight for the secret room, hoping to find my dad and Austin. My mom grabbed my hand before I could reveal the entrance. She hadn’t told the rebels about it yet, and in case one of them really was working with the Organization, she didn’t want them to know. She said she didn’t know if my dad was awake right now, but he would come talk to me soon. I sat down with them in the kitchen to wait. My mom explained that she and Chelsea had been separated from my dad and Austin early on, but they were reunited at the start of winter when they made it back to the house. She spared few details of their experiences… The Organization was trying to construct something to control the minds of the human race, but the details of this weren’t exactly clear. I made a mental note to ask Nomad about this later. Within half an hour or so, my dad walked into the room. He had a pistol on each side and wore a bulletproof vest. I felt small compared to him. It was obvious he’d been through a lot in the past year. I hugged him several times, too.

Immediately, I asked him about Austin. I hadn’t seen him in the building anywhere. I assumed he had just been in the basement or something. My dad put a hand on my back and led me outside. Because of his silence, I already knew what had happened. The tears started flowing. He took me to a little garden beside the house. The plants were artificial, and they had words written on their leaves. There was a little piano in the back for some reason with certain keys marked. It was a memorial for Austin. I knelt in front of it, wondering what I should do. Praying didn’t seem right, but what else was I supposed to do in this situation? My dad read the memorial leaf by leaf, but I couldn’t understand any of it. The whole thing seemed ridiculous, like he would tell me at any moment that Austin was actually just sleeping in the basement. That was just a hopeless wish, however.

“How long has it been…?” I asked, covering my eyes.

“Since November,” he replied. “We couldn’t get him the help he needed. The winter was too much for him, even here.” I could hardly breathe. My only brother was dead, and I never got to say goodbye. I knew how my dad felt about his brother’s death. Was this normal, I wondered? My thoughts raced out of control. I wondered if I would ever see Austin again… Probably not, I decided. There was nothing left of him. I knelt there for several minutes in grief before I could even move. I knew the Organization could come by at any moment, though, and if they saw us here, they would want to search the house. For the sake of everyone inside, I sucked up my tears and went back inside. I sat down on a bench in the basement to be alone while I tried to grasp everything that had happened. All the time lost, all the families torn apart… It was all because of the Organization. My immediate family gathered in the basement to try to cheer me up.

“When I saw Josh was here, I thought he was going to tell me he brought Nicole and two kids,” my dad joked. Clearly, this didn’t help much.

“I haven’t seen Nicole since the party,” I choked. It took me a few times to get this out. I went through my whole trip in summary, stopping whenever the horror of Austin’s death or the year without Nicole gripped me. When I finished telling the story, everyone seemed to agree that I should try going back to Chicago and finding Phil. He might be doing secret work for someone in the city, my dad suggested. I couldn’t imagine anyone having a stable job with the country in its current state, but it seemed remotely possible that he could be working in secret. In that case, he might have a place for Nicole and her family to hide. Knowing Nicole had to turn up somewhere, I agreed to give their idea a try. They probably wouldn’t see me again… I could come back and find all of them dead. We went outside for some reason and sat in the backyard. The sun was already setting, so it was too late for me to leave. I would have to stay for the night. After I finished talking to my family, I turned back to the house. A number of the rebels were staring at me. As Apheri appeared at my side, I put my hand on her black hilt.

“The Organization will pay,” I whispered.

I found myself in a forest. There was no sign of other life except for the vegetation. The area immediately around me had been cleared to make way for a mirror framed in silver. The frame had ornate carvings of drills and leaves on it. When I saw myself in the mirror, I had unkempt black hair. I realized I was dreaming. I had reached the forest outside Denn in the Land of Aud. I focused on what I wanted to look like and let the features morph in the mirror. The mirror’s surface started to bend toward me as my eyes turned green and my clothes turned into a black and gold robe. I had become the dream self I envisioned, Presence, and in doing so completed the first of WakingNomad’s tasks.

At this point, I tried to remember another task. Surely there were more, right? I stared intently into my deep, green eyes as I struggled to recall… Nothing came to mind. I decided I would just step into the mirror and see where it went. As my body merged with the mirror, everything went black.

I was reading The Law of Nines in the commons. A guy sitting next to me reached over and turned the page as I was about to finish it. I figured he had been reading along and wanted to continue without me. With a brief glance in his direction, I turned back to the previous page. I made a point of taking a slow drink from my glass of water to show him that I wasn’t going to speed read for his satisfaction. He turned the page again. This time, I glared at him. It was Absence. As usual, his hair was white, but it was shorter. He had his own copy of The Law of Nines, but he was much further in the book than me. I made sure my glass was almost empty before spilling the water all over his copy of the book.

I set the glass down and rose from my chair. There was no need to worry about what he might do to my book. I was only dreaming, after all. I left my backpack on the floor. I took the quickest path outside – straight back to a garden. I realized I still had the book and dropped it right there. Bringing it would just get in my way. Once I was outside, I looked up at the open sky. Smiling, I took flight. The walls narrowed near the roof of the building, so I had to turn my body to fit through. To my surprise, I looked over my shoulder and saw a library on top of the campus center. Weird. I flew further up, kicking off walls to better navigate what quickly became a maze of black metal. It looked like another bizarre architecture project. I wanted to find a portal to the Monolith Gardens. If I was lucky, I might even meet up with WritersCube! I saw an old furnace inside the third floor, but I realized making that into a portal wasn’t going to be as easy as finding a preexisting one. I was sure a portal would turn up if I kept searching.

The fourth floor was a GameStop. I saw the sun rising on a TV and focused my attention on that. I remotely paused the video when the sun was clear of the horizon. It began to glow white. Since I proved to myself in my last lucid dream that I could easily pass through glass quite easily, I ran headfirst into the TV screen. The sun portal widened as I approached and engulfed me. I fell through it with no more sensation than an internal shift in my weight. I pictured huge trees in that brief moment between entering the portal and appearing on the other side. Instead of reaching the Monolith Gardens, I found myself back at the open window through which I entered the fourth floor. I hit the ground running and picked up still more speed. This time, as I fell through the glowing, pulsating sun portal again, I summoned a vivid picture of the Monolith Gardens in my mind. It still didn’t take me there; it just dumped me into emptiness. I frowned.

I waited for the dream to come back, but after a while, I was sure I was awake in bed. I went back to sleep, intending to do better next time.

I was on a train. Two guys noticed that they both had Swiss Gear backpacks. I showed them mine, and they laughed when they saw I had one, too. I realized one of the guys was Eric Weller.

“Eric?” I blinked. He pointed at himself as if to make sure I was talking to him.

“Yeah, I’m supposed to be Eric. Who are you supposed to be?” The phrasing of his question was bizarre. I replied in a manner that struck it down.

“I’m Josh.”

“Oh! Right!” Awkward silence followed. We got off the train and came to a room with strangely shaped windows… It was painted purple throughout. I thought about how much I wanted to realize I was dreaming. Then, confused by the origins of the thought, I looked around. I was dreaming! I grabbed Eric by the shoulders.

“Dude, we’re in a dream. What do you feel like doing?”

“I dunno…”

“Neither do I! Let’s fly!” I threw him out the window forcibly and jumped out after him. He didn’t know how to fly, so he just tumbled toward the rugged mountain valleys below us. I swooped down and pointed a finger at him to levitate his body in the air.

“What are you doing?!” he cried, waving his arms.

“Try moving. Float up.” As I spoke, he drifted upward. He panicked when he couldn’t change directions, however, and I had to bring him down with my magic finger. “You’re bad at this…” I brought him down to a boat on the side of a mountain. I gave my intent to summon Nicole, and voila! There she was, standing on the deck. She looked around, then at me. “Welcome to my dream,” I said. “Is it really you, or are you just ‘supposed to be’ Nicole?” Eric didn’t seem pleased by my teasing question.

“I’m me…” Nicole said. “So hold on, we’re dreaming?”

“Yes. I saw a portal while I was flying around. Let’s go into it!” Nicole agreed, so we flew up to a purple vortex in the sky. Darkness spiraled into it as it seemed to spin. We were both sucked in. Hopefully, dream Eric didn’t starve in the middle of nowhere – we left him behind. The vortex filled my vision.

I had a false awakening. I sat up in bed, staring down at my hand. My arm was incredibly long – at least five feet – and each of my fingers branched off into two. I felt like I was going cross-eyed. I couldn’t focus on anything properly. After a while, things stabilized, and my hand was normal.

“I guess we’re not dreaming,” I told Nicole.

I saw Symphony standing in front of me. I blinked, and then there were two. I blinked again, and then there were endless clones of Symphony as far as I could see in the incomparably large room. My heart started racing. I blinked again, and it was just one Symphony again. I started to calm down.

“Complete me,” she said in her flat, high-pitched voice.

“I will as soon as I can,” I answered. She reached forward. I blinked, and she was in front of me, gripping my shirt.

“I am already complete,” she responded. I didn’t understand. “I have waited forever, and I will wait forever. Time is not a hindrance.”

“What do you mean, you’ve waited forever?”

“Forever.” She stepped forward, fusing with my body. I felt a rush of energy, and then it all vanished. I looked behind me, but Symphony wasn’t there. Chunks of metal started falling from the impossibly high ceiling above me.

I had a dream in which I was part of a group project about completing group projects. Alex and a girl from Japan whose house was destroyed in the recent tsunami were my teammates. Alex and I had most of it planned out. I recall a strange period of time during brainstorming in which I couldn’t remember who I was. A strange jumble of identities flowed through my brain, and with every passing second, I was convinced I was someone else. When we managed to decide what we wanted to do for the project, all of this stabilized, and I remembered my true identity. We were going to have the Japanese girl stand up with a poster that said: “I just can’t wait to start part (a)!” We interpreted it more as a project on procrastination than anything else. It was fortunate that we finished our project in time; our instructor announced that we would be continuing the discussion of DSM criteria for dissociative disorders.

I was talking to Ben about him visiting us in America and us visiting him in Australia. There was a canyon in Australia that I was particularly interested in seeing, but for some reason, he wouldn’t talk about it. We went through a list of reasons why it was a bad idea – too far away from Brisbane (either twenty-five minutes or five hours, he never specified which), food for the trip, silly things like that which are rarely the biggest factor in planning an international trip. He and another Australian guy debated how well the car would hold up on such a long drive. We were in some kind of virtual reality world. Ben had spent a lot of time converting image data to 3D models of scenic places in Australia, but he wouldn’t let us see them… I was confused, so I pressed this a bit. I finally told Ben flatly that I wanted to see the natural beauty of Australia, and I would see it with or without his help. He wouldn’t talk to me or Nicole after that. We got involved in some kind of weird mind meshing game where we turned Ben’s brain into a marble and rolled it around in our thoughts, making him rethink his decision. He eventually decided he would cooperate with us after all. As we learned, the only reason he had argued was because he thought my request to see the sights in Australia was my way of criticizing his appreciation of nature. Since it was settled, we apologized and settled our disagreement. We missed each other’s company too much to hold out alone anyway. Ben made what was supposed to be a bold statement, then – he would buy a bike in Australia and ride it proudly to show the world how much he loved natural beauty.

The dream jumped. Ben and I were meeting up at a restaurant and hotel. We were all going to stay there together. One of the employees at the restaurant, a woman with blond hair in a sophisticated, black uniform, asked if I needed any help. I declined any assistance; I was waiting for someone, I said. I stood in the middle of the busy restaurant as waitresses zoomed back and forth between tables. I observed that the hotel was separated by a swamp-like stretch of gooey, red organic tissue. I dared not step on it. I asked the blond woman from before how I should cross it. She pointed out a narrow path made of stone that led across. All of this was clearly a reference to Althea’s swamp in the Sword of Truth series. I thanked the woman for her help as Ben appeared in the distance… He was riding a bicycle! When he approached the restaurant, he hopped off the bike. He asked me which coins he was allowed to use as payment in America.

“The American ones,” I laughed.

“The quarters, dimes, and nickels, then…?” he asked, nodding.

“The pennies, too!”

“No…” he said in sincere disbelief. “Really?!” He came into the restaurant after paying some kind of bike fee. Even inside the restaurant, he rode that bike everywhere. He nearly fell in the living swamp water as I was showing it to him. I warned him about it… At best, the water would just creep us out. I didn’t want to find out it was deadly and acidic. Anyway, we went to the winding stone trail. Naturally, Ben had to ride his bicycle over it. He nearly fell in twice; one of the stumbles put most of his weight over the edge, but Ben somehow floated to safety. I asked if he was feeling alright… He was having a lot of trouble with balance. Although he assured me he was fine, he seemed very dizzy… He started coughing and eventually vomiting bile. I invited him to sit on a bench with me and rest before we continued onward. He accepted the offer. I took photographs of the swamp.

The dream jumped. I had a false awakening in Nicole’s bed. The room looked as it did before she rearranged the furniture. I understood that this room was connected to the hotel from before. I kept hearing sounds like a squeaky bike outside. I tuned it out as I relaxed in bed. It was a bright, new morning… Nicole stirred and immediately asked about the strange, periodic bouts of squeaking. I told her I would check it out. The next time we heard it, I saw up and looked out her window. In the street was a metallic figure attached to bike wheels – one big, one small. It cycled freely down the road. I figured out what was going on instantly and ducked out of view.

“You can’t be serious…” I said, mostly to myself. “Get under the bed! Now!” I urged Nicole. She and I managed to squeeze under the bed together. It looked like it would be easy for the robots to detect us if they checked the house; the bed seemed higher up than it actually was from our low vantage point. Anyway, the moment I saw the human-like design in what otherwise could’ve been an interesting vehicle, everything came into place. I knew it was an artificially intelligent robot. The fact that I heard several on the street – but no cars, frighteningly enough – indicated that they were large in number. I suspected they had built up their forces in secret and overwhelmed our society. They hadn’t checked our room while we were sleeping, I decided, or we would be dead. Our robotic overlords had no reason to allow us to live. I explained all of this quietly to Nicole. We watched, terrified, as a robotic sentinel walked past our door on its metallic legs. They didn’t have feet – just long, narrow legs. I wished I had Apheri.

Once the coast was clear, we knew we had to get Ben. Nicole and I went to the bench outside where he stopped to rest the previous day. A fleshy cocoon surrounded it now. I gestured for Nicole to follow me in. It was empty… I didn’t want to imagine what the robots had done to him when they found him. Order is a disturbing foe… We heard the squeaking of metal joints as a robot sentinel approached the cocoon. Nicole told me to hide, but there was nowhere to hide! I prepared myself for a fight. The robot raised its arms when it saw me and opened fire. Bullets filled my body. I tackled the top-heavy machine and tumbled with it into the murky water outside. Nicole gasped, fearing the electricity would kill me as the robot’s body began to crackle. Fortunately, it didn’t. The robot turned into a small bug on my arm. I crushed it with a finger, but like a cockroach, it seemed to come back to life despite seemingly fatal injury. I crushed it again, and it took flight. It bit me, injecting nanobots into my body. I couldn’t destroy it.

“They’re immortal…” I laughed uneasily. What was I going to do? I basically resigned myself to my fate. I couldn’t fight this… I couldn’t imagine how, but the robots had conquered us overnight, and they would exterminate us without fail. I saw them marching toward us. “Go hide, Nicole.”

“What about you?”

“I have something to do… It’s our only chance.” My body was full of bullets. There was no way I would survive – but maybe I could save Nicole.

The dream jumped. I was walking around in tunnels built in a Minecraftian style. I was just above bedrock. Everywhere I looked, I saw robots mounted to the floor or ceiling. When the first one saw me, a white laser trained itself on my forehead. Intense battle music started playing. Inspired by this, I ran for my life as bullets rained on me. I turned away from the few that were shooting me and nearly fell to my knees when I saw hundreds of robots staring at me. There was no escape. They had me trapped. I ran for my life past one of the three in front of me. It shot a boomerang sword at me, cutting off my left arm. Blood spurted out.

“No way…” I choked. It shot the sword again after it returned, taking off my head this time. The bloody head rolled as my body slumped forward. I heard Nicole commenting on how cool the weapon was. I saw her standing by the lighthouse on Sailor’s Isle (Skies of Arcadia). She practiced throwing the sword. It was nearly Apheri’s length and probably just as heavy, but it moved through the air like a phantom.

I was in the living room of my Omi’s old house in Louisiana. Austin was playing old video games. I went into the bathroom to relieve myself. Sometime later, I flushed and realized the toilet was clogged. Not only that, but a massive lump of waste (about the size of my head) had somehow ended up in the bath tub full of water beside me. I fished it out with a plunger, but I kept dropping it back in the water and on the floor of the bathroom. Every time I dropped it, a little chunk fell off. Eventually, it was small enough to fit in the toilet, so I put it in there. I didn’t clean up the mess on the floor. I put the plunger back in the bath tub, and suddenly, I was floating on the surface of the water with a fishing rod. A message appeared at the top of my field of vision, warning me that something was approaching! I tapped a button on a controller several times and pulled a Gyarados out of the water. The traditional Pokemon battle screen appeared. I didn’t have any Pokemon yet, so my health bar appeared. I only had 19 HP. The Gyarados had several hundred. I knew this couldn’t possibly end well, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d saved my game, so I fled. I got away without any problems. As I swam to the edge of the bath tub to get out, I had another random encounter – this time with a Magikarp. It was much weaker, obviously, but it had some abilities other than splashing around like an idiot. I ran from that fight, too, to save time.

I encountered a Rattata on the tiled floor of the bathroom. I decided I was going to catch it. I punched it in the face when it was my turn, and then it bit my arm. This continued for a couple more turns. After that, my health was getting low, so the game asked me if I wanted to use pills to heal. I started popping pills. The rat did the same thing. It wouldn’t give me the choice to stop taking pills every turn… The Rattata and I both restored ourselves to maximum health. Interestingly, I had seven health bars, and the Rattata had nine of them… When I punched it once, eight of them disappeared. I prepared to throw a Pokeball and capture my first Pokemon…

The dream began with me driving home in Texas, reportedly from my job. My parents still lived in their old house, so that was the neighborhood I went to. All of the stores in the small shopping center clustered around the Subway were gone. In their place was a huge supermarket. The parking lot was a mess of broken slabs of concrete. I went into the store, and Nicole called me. I could hear the cast of Glee in the background; she was watching it while talking to me. Just from the actors’ voices, I was able to reconstruct the episode in visual form in my head. I laughed when Will suddenly swept Emma off her feet in a rare moment of manliness. She giggled and pleaded with him to let her down. When he did, she calmed down a bit.

“What was that?” she asked. “Some kind of… fatherly instinct, Will?”

“I’m gonna beat my children…” He said it so calmly, so unabashedly! It was almost as though this was supposed to sound romantic. I cracked up laughing. The show went to a commercial break without a comment from anyone else. Nicole didn’t think it was funny at all, but I was enjoying the chance to see how pathological Will’s perception of life had become over the course of the show. I grabbed a can of pasta off a shelf and waved it around in the air as I joked with Nicole about how that was the best line in the whole episode. The can was covered in something sticky like orange juice, so I switched it with another one. I went straight to the checkout. I guess pasta was all I needed… A plump, black woman waved me over to her register. She swiftly processed my single item. When she printed a receipt for me to sign, I just wrote my first name. I carried my one grocery item in a bag back to my car. Instead of getting in the driver’s seat, I climbed into the back of the car… The air conditioning turned on as soon as I closed the door.

“I’m so glad it does that,” I murmured to myself in relief. It was a warm, humid night in Texas. I wondered briefly how it was possible for my car to do that, but I didn’t worry too much about it. I locked the door. I didn’t want to get mugged. Only then did I lean into the front of the car and turn it on. I quickly flipped on my lights and popped the car into drive, then spun around to the only exit onto the road I could see. My side of the exit was horribly ruined; huge slabs of concrete blocked the way. I swerved around it and angled the wheels so I could easily turn that way. I made a right onto the street once it was clear. Basically, the street was divided by a huge median with trees growing all over it, so in order to get to the correct side of the street, I had to make a U-turn about thirty yards down the road. I must note that this U-turn was impossibly tight; my car pivoted around the narrow, three foot wide tip of the median without any difficulties. I found myself in a turn-only lane going left and had to switch. Then I saw a yellow light.

Yellow, I thought. Yellow, yellow, yell – oh! I realized I was supposed to stop at the intersection up ahead! The light turned red, but I was still going too fast. I slid right into the middle of the intersection. Oops. I figured it was better to just keep going, so I put my foot back down on the accelerator. Almost as soon as I passed through the intersection, I saw a cop coming the other way. I was horrified. He must’ve seen me – how could he not? I knew he would pull me over as soon as he could turn around. I had to act swiftly. In order to evade the police, I planned to take an unusual route back home. I turned left onto a small street, disappearing from the main road before the cop could find me. This road bisected another in a place that looked like the suburbs of Chicago. I started talking to Ben on the phone. I didn’t have to hold it up… I could just hear his voice. This is probably a fortunate side-effect of using headphones when I’m on the phone lately. Anyway, Ben complained that it was snowing in Australia, but we somehow determined that it was actually raining because it was forty degrees in Brisbane. Ben pretended to be confused about the temperature. He said it was 40 to 100 degrees outside – first in Fahrenheit, but then in Centigrade. That didn’t sound right at all. If he was using the Celsius scale, much of that range would be intolerable, even lethal. I turned onto the next street. Traffic lights and driving in general were beginning to pose crippling difficulties. I couldn’t focus my eyes properly on the lights, and some kind of weird, yellow dot appeared in my field of vision to direct the car. On top of keeping the wheel straight, I had to keep this light in the middle of my perspective with my mind in order to keep the car going straight. Anytime I looked away from the middle of the road, the car turned in that direction. The only way to counter it was to turn the wheel in the opposite direction at the same time. As one can imagine, this wasn’t easy. It was incredibly difficult for me to multitask in this dream on top of everything else, so it’s no surprise that I went through three red lights in succession before finally stopping.

Ben explained that he needed help with a quest. The road took me along the edge of a massive, red curtain – the kind used in theaters. I knew there was an abandoned hospital inside. Ben needed to get into the hospital and retrieve something. I stopped the car, got out, and slipped under the heavy curtain. The hospital was dark, and many of the doors and windows were boarded up. Ben transformed into Goofy (Mickey Mouse). He started going to the main entrance, but I insisted that I knew which entrance was the right one to use. I had done this quest before, I said. Actually, I was just attempting it for the first time – but with Ben’s help, I knew we would be fine. We circled around the building to a small back door. Inside, we found two elevators and a door to a stairwell. The stairs were the obvious choice… The building probably wouldn’t have any electrical power to spare, considering the state it was in. Despite that, Ben went for the first elevator.

“I don’t think that’s going to work…” I said. He pushed a button. The elevator dinged at us as it opened. Nervously, I followed him in. “What if we get stuck in here? This is a bad idea… I hate elevators.” The door slowly closed. Ben picked a floor, and the elevator began to drop. The walls were made of mirrors. Staring at reflections of reflections of myself wasn’t helping my sanity. Ben apologized for choosing the elevator; he hadn’t intended to disturb me. We would take the stairs back up, he promised. When the elevator stopped, I stumbled out. Moving was difficult down here for some reason… Ben didn’t have any trouble, though. We were inside a small Minecraft level. The path curved around a pit of sharks before coming to a slide. I almost slid straight down, but there was a lava pit at the bottom! That would have meant my death. I had diamonds and quite a bit of iron in my inventory, so I was glad I hadn’t fallen. I had to slip into a tunnel on one side of the slide. I found it difficult to make any progress… I got my legs in the tunnel, but the rest of my wouldn’t move at a normal speed.

Ben started arguing with another guy in the room with the shark pit. The guy said that the official Minecraft system made dirt grow infinitely high over time, simulating growing grass. Anyone who still played the old Minecraft was in denial, he claimed. Ben made jokes about dirt reproducing like guinea pigs as he hopped across the shark pit. He ran past me into the tunnel. I followed him as a point of awareness as he jumped skillfully across a couple pools of lava, then trudged right through a tunnel half full with lava without taking any damage. I thought he was doing this because he had food to heal himself afterward, but I realized after he emerged that he was wearing chain mail. He was invincible! He came across some kind of harpy woman and didn’t realize she was an enemy for a few moments as she slapped him with her wings. He killed her in a few seconds.

My awareness returned to my body, and I followed after Ben. Since I didn’t have anything to protect me from the lava, I planned to build a path through it. When I got to the tunnel of lava Ben traversed before, however, I saw that it was just steaming water. I figured I would probably be okay… I waded to the other side without taking any damage. A puddle of water on the ground just past the tunnel (where Ben encountered the harpy before) took the shape of a woman. It was a water elemental. I struck her with a bolt of lightning, but the damage was paltry. She was resistant to magic, being a creature of magic herself. I knew cutting her wasn’t going to do me any good. What did I do in the past when I encountered these, I wondered? I vaguely remembered running. I considered calling Ben for help, but he was way ahead by now.