Nocturn Core (Abridged)

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.

I was in the car with my dad driving. We were on a one way road and had to stop at an intersection. He pulled around the cars in front of us and parked the car in front of a huge, bright screen mounted to the curb. The front of the car bumped the underside of the screen. I looked up at the screen itself, and my vision warped.

I was in my bedroom on the computer. Like some kind of background train of logic slipped into place, I suddenly realized I was dreaming. I laughed at the strange sequence of events… What did my computer have to do with my dad driving around? I wondered how long I had been dreaming. Not very long, I realized. I immediately felt the dream fading as it always does, but I transformed myself into a wolf to put pressure on my hands and feet. I felt that would help. After a brief jog through a forest, I started flying around the world in one frame of reference. In the bedroom, I was gently floating through the air. I laughed when I saw what I was doing in the room. This was the dumbest stabilization technique I’d ever come up with. I turned back into a human. I had brief sexual thoughts, but I reminded myself not to pursue them this time. I would learn much more from experimenting with the dream state. I drifted down to a sitting position and rubbed my hands together. I brought them into view and saw that I was wearing black leather gloves. That explained why my skin felt so leathery. I pulled the gloves off and tried rubbing my hands again. It worked. The skin on my hands was so finely detailed afterward… I noticed every little stretch in the skin. I reminded myself not to get lost staring into them. I pinched myself in an attempt to inflict minor pain. I wanted to ground myself further in the dream. My hand just felt numb. I tried my arm, too – also numb. Whatever, I thought, at least pain wouldn’t distract me. As soon as I started toward the door, things became fuzzy and blacked out. I patiently waited without mental comment.

“Furley?” I heard my mom calling Austin from downstairs – that was her nickname for him around the house when we were younger. Her voice caused me to lose a little lucidity for a moment. Time to get up, I thought… Wait! My mom wouldn’t be in my dorm room, I reasoned. Vision rapidly came back, and my lucidity was back to where it had been before.

I “respawned” at my computer desk after a few moments. Chelsea walked into the room and handed me a soft drink from a fast food restaurant. About half of the drink remained.

“Are you done with that?” I asked, taking it from her. I wanted to try Coca Cola in a dream. I haven’t had it in a long, long time in waking life because it’s so acidic. The taste was convincing, and getting a drink was refreshing since my throat was so dry. I checked my hands… No gloves. Good! I noticed I was really warm because I was wearing my hoodie. I took that off and tossed it on the floor. Keeping myself warm wasn’t at all necessary… If anything, staying cold would keep me alert. Chelsea gave me a weird look when I pushed the chair back. She had been talking to me about something, but I wasn’t listening. I felt a little guilty, but it didn’t seem like it was that important. If it had been, I wouldn’t have been able to ignore it.

“Come with me…” I said. I grabbed her hand and led her out of the room. We went down a flight of stairs. I recognized our old house in Texas from the general layout, so I knew where to expect the front door. It was wide open. Clearly, I was on the right path.

“Where are we going?” Chelsea asked. I figured I could tell her she was a dream character, or I could let her see that we were in a dream for herself. I chose the latter option.

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll see.” I wasn’t sure myself. When we reached the door, I saw that it was raining. I smiled. I love rainstorms. “You don’t need shoes,” I told her, urging her out of the house even though she was barefoot. I didn’t notice I was wearing socks until I stepped onto the wet driveway. Just intending for them to go away was difficult, but I knew it would be better if I could feel the cold driveway under my feet. Chelsea was hanging back by the door to avoid going into the rain. “What’s wrong? Come on!”

“We do need shoes,” she objected. Sighing, I grabbed her arm and pulled her outside. “Wait!” she objected again. “We have to close the door!”

“There’s no one else in that house,” I laughed. “Stop worrying. Look at all of this!” Where there should have been houses, the terrain was just flat. It was nostalgic in ways – the same trees were there – but with all the buildings missing, it was so foreign. As we walked into the rain, the dream rapidly faded.

I found myself in my computer chair in my dorm room. I relaxed in the chair, attempting to go back to sleep. I wasn’t aware that this was a false awakening. A program called Dream Apache tracked my dreams from the previous night. It even listed the durations of each dream so I could determine the order in which I had them. I waited almost a full minute (53 seconds) in this relaxed state before my head seemed to swell. Was this what it was like to cross the threshold, I wondered? Tunnel vision went to darkness, eclipsing the blinking message on the screen that said “DREAM ACTIVE.” The program even told me where my dream body had gone, but I didn’t pay attention to that.

I felt hands grip my ankles. Interesting… I was dreaming again for sure. The hands were soft, but the force behind them was strong. I felt a forward tug. I was being pulled somewhere.

The rest has been omitted.