Nocturn Core (Abridged)

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.

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 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.

I struggled to get back to sleep after writing my other dreams down, so I wasn’t surprised when I heard my alarm go off. I got out of bed with no further dream recall, wandered into the bathroom, and saw Nicole’s dad staring at the shower curtain. For some reason, I thought I had time to shower before heading back to my dorm. I understood that there was a leak in the shower faucet recently.

“Is it working?” I asked Phil. He nodded.

“What, are you planning on taking a shower?” He said something else, but I didn’t quite catch it. I unclothed myself in a few seconds. Immediately, I remembered the door was still open. Was he coming back? I grabbed a towel off the wall to cover myself just in case. What was I going to wear? There were pants in the bathroom, but I quickly realized they were Nicole’s… They didn’t look like any she owned, but they were the right size. I didn’t have anything to wear except the clothes on my back. I supposed I could just wear those back to Nicole’s room and change after the shower. I closed the door. As I looked up at the mirror, I scrunched my eyebrows. There was a bed in the mirror. The door was still closed, so I knew I wasn’t seeing another room. I looked behind me in disbelief and found nothing but a white wall. The bed was still in the mirror when I looked back. I laughed as I realized what this meant. I looked at my right hand. Even though the hand was perfectly normal, I knew I was dreaming.

I walked out of the bathroom (still naked, but now unashamed of my nudity) and made my way into Nicole’s room. Maybe if she was dreaming, I could contact her and have a shared dream! A lucid shared dream would be a great start to my week. I stood at the end of her bed, observing that she was sleeping in the dream, too. I tried speaking to her telepathically. She didn’t seem to hear. Hm… I figured I would try communicating the “normal” way.

“Hey!” I shouted – except not really. My voice came out as a hoarse whisper. For fairies’ sake, not this garbage, I thought. I rubbed my hands together, swallowed, and tried again. “Hey, Nicole!” It didn’t help my voice much (just made the phlegm in there drain), but the dream was less unstable. I decided to confidently continue shouting until the dream gave in and let me project my voice. I didn’t want to let a little loss of dream control hamper my experience. Nicole rolled over in bed as I continued shouting at her. She murmured something in her sleep – how cute. “Nicole, wake up! This is a dream!” I laughed at the irony of telling her to wake up when I wanted her to partake in the dream with me… “Get out of bed!”

At this point, I thought about how well the dream was holding up despite being so late in the morning. Usually, by the sixth hour or so of sleep, my dreams are kind of unstable – much like those early in the night. Thinking about it was a mistake; the dream began rapidly fading, and although I rubbed my hands together to try to stabilize it, there was little I could do. When it collapsed, I waited a few moments for another dream to begin, but I realized I couldn’t have much time before I was supposed to wake up anyway, so I decided to get up.

Nicole and I were playing on a Minecraft server together. We ventured into an unexplored area and found some strange, circular platforms floating in the ocean. They looked like targets. Assuming the administrator had plans for these, I decided building on them was pointless; the buildings would just get destroyed. We walked back in the other direction, and I found an old cabin I had built previously to survive a night. I decided I would stay there until morning. I was glad I found it when I did since skeletons were already patrolling behind it. I looked around the cabin and quickly discovered the basement. I couldn’t remember why I abandoned the cabin… Until I saw the creepers hiding in the basement, that is. There were at least seven of them, and they all noticed me. Only one jumped up to the ground level, though. I backed into a corner to try to force it to blow up where the damage would be minimal. I knew I couldn’t fight a creeper in this small space. Unfortunately, the creeper knocked out nine blocks on the south wall, exposing me to roaming zombies! The open space was three blocks high, so I quickly placed a line of wood across the middle to keep the zombies and creepers at bay. This didn’t protect me from skeletons or spiders, though. I tried to find materials to use without going into the basement. I tried typing “/give Nephanim diamonds” to see if I had operator rights on the server for whatever reason. The dream didn’t seem to care that I typed the command incorrectly. As I worried that someone would see the request for items and complain that I was cheating, I got a red error message back from the server. It said that I had received a warning from the staff, and the item request had been denied. Boo… I decided to brave the basement for some dirt. To my surprise, it was now empty. Dirt was better than nothing… I don’t know why I had thought to put diamond blocks up instead of something less valuable. Anyway, while I was down there, I found these long, skinny lego blocks and put them together to form a red and yellow striped wall. It still wasn’t wide enough. The corners of the hole were still open, and skeletons were shooting me. I saw that my health was empty. I was alive, but not for long. Another arrow hit, and my items burst from my body. Apparently, my spawn point was close tot he cabin even though I expected to have to run across the island. I carefully returned to the building, collected my belongings, and went on my way.

I met up with Nicole again, and we found a water purification plant beside a street. We filled buckets with water from the clean end and sampled it. The water was horrible… On top of that, we were stealing it. We laughed about all of this as we roamed some more. We found a car, I guess… Some people called Nicole and told her to pick things up from Chick-fil-A. We went there, but we didn’t buy anything for these people. Nicole spent $14 on something applicable to her diet. I saw that $5 of it went toward adding extra bacon. That plus my food and two drinks came out to $21.45. I misheard the amount, so I only pulled out a $20 bill. The drive-through was reversed as if we were in Europe, so I had to pay. To my immense surprise, when we pulled up to the window, the cashier handed us $21.45 instead of taking our money. Speechless, I put the money away. She passed our food over and closed the window. As Nicole drove off, we argued about what just happened. Nicole seemed to think she had gone to the wrong service window, but there was only one.

“They just paid us to take their food,” I said. “That’s all there is to it. It’s not really stealing if they don’t ask you for money… They didn’t ask you to pay when you ordered, right?” Of course not – the woman just said the total was $21.45. It really was our lucky day! Free water, free food, free money! As we continued driving, I became aware of another reality overlapping with this one. I was on a modern pirate ship as we sailed away from the coast. The farther away we went, the more I worried about dying and being too far away to retrieve my belongings. I remembered that I could set up to ten warp points, though, so I kept resetting one warp point as we continued south of the shore. My crew mates discovered stitches on my arms just below the elbow. I explained that I cut them off in order to switch my arms with Nicole’s. I would probably have scars for the rest of my life. For some reason, my crew decided this was traitorous, so they dragged me toward the back of the boat. I was shoved overboard. As I flailed in the ocean, I returned to my former reality. I was in the same car, but my mom was driving instead of Nicole. Nicole and I moved from the middle seats to the back and sprawled out on top of a bunch of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I kept lulling Nicole into sleep so I could carry her. It worked. She almost fell into a sea of stuffed animals behind the seat, but I caught her.

Meanwhile, I swam back to the ship in the pirate reality. I don’t know why I bothered to go back there, but it was the only place I knew to go. Once I was safe, I switched realities again. Nicole stirred. She looked like she had lost all sense of time and place. She wasn’t wearing a shirt, either. I told her about the overlapping realities. She seemed impressed. I tried to have my way with her, but she refused. I kept asking until she suggested something else. She turned me into a child and herself into a babysitter (although we were like small action figures instead of people). We were going to roleplay. While we entangled ourselves together under a thin blanket, I began to wonder where we were going. We had been driving in one direction for a while. I looked at my mom beyond the shadows of the blanket. She made eye contact with me in the rear view mirror. I saw an infinite stretch of interconnected highways in front of us. There were street signs all over the place, and no matter how far we drove, the dream was always able to fill in the space with the same amount of detail. It could continue indefinitely, I realized. We were in a dream. If nothing changed, my mom would keep driving forever! I tried to use my intent to bring us to WritersCube’s canvas void by car so could get out and try teleporting to his Monolith Gardens dreamscape. I didn’t want to bring the car along. Strangely, I lost some time here… That doesn’t happen very often. The next scene I remember was non-lucid, but there wasn’t a rough jump in the dream like there usually is.

I sensed that a police car would pull up beside us on the highway soon. I was lying across the area behind the back seat with all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals. I knew this wasn’t legal – for one, I didn’t have a seat belt on – so I tried to keep still to avoid drawing attention to myself. Sure enough, a cop car merged onto the highway right beside us. My mom ordered me to come sit in the middle seats once we passed the patrol car. She explained where we were going at last: to a mental hospital. I understood immediately that I had been tricked. I grasped at fleeting questions in my head, but I didn’t know how to respond. I would be kept in solitary confinement for my own good, she said.

“This will keep you from polluting your mind on the computer all day,” my mom continued. “Think of it like this: you’re decontaminating your mind and body until you can function like a normal person in society. You don’t need all that bacteria.” I wasn’t sure I agreed (if I even understood what she meant). It didn’t occur to me that I was free to say no. Rather, I wondered how I would finish school… We pulled onto the side of the road beneath an overpass where a bunch of other cars were parked. My mom and dad got out of the car (when did my dad show up?!) and started moving luggage to a man sitting on a white couch. My dad put all of Chelsea’s stuffed animals in a suitcase.

“Do you really need all of this?” he asked me.

“Those are Chelsea’s, not mine. Ask her.” I looked over and saw that the guy on the couch hand his hand on a zipper. I thought he was opening a suitcase to see what was inside. “Don’t screw with my stuff!” I yelled. Everyone stared at me, clearly prepared for me to attack one of them. I realized the guy was just zipping up a compartment in the bag that had been open. “Sorry. I thought you were going through my stuff.”

“Don’t you want these gloves?” my dad asked, showing me a pair of new winter gloves. I saw an old pair of gloves on top of one of my suitcases. “Those old gloves are falling apart… These are flame-resistant, too, so they won’t burn in the summer.” I quietly accepted the gloves. I still felt awkward because of my previous outburst. I walked over to a woman sitting in a chair. She had a computer monitor for a head. She asked if I had any questions about the hospital.

“Yeah, will I have internet access…?” I asked. No response. “Because… Well, that’s how I keep in touch with people… And I keep a dream journal online.” At least one good thing came of this, I realized. I would be able to devote most of my energy to dreaming. I had argued briefly with my mom about this in the car, but the more I thought about it, the less I felt like struggling. If everyone felt I belonged in a mental hospital, I wasn’t going to fight it… The computer woman still didn’t respond to my question, though! I scrolled through a list of frequently asked questions on her screen. It seemed the hospital made every effort to provide patients with internet access, so I was basically content. An IRC window popped up. I saw “Tande” at the top of the chat and thought Kelsey was running the hospital until I scrolled down and saw Nicole’s IRC username in the user list, too. “Oh… IRC just recognized me as Elita.” I closed the chat and walked away from the computer woman.

I heard a girl screaming behind a closed door. When I opened it, I saw a large rat jumping around in a garage. The girl was terrified of it. I grabbed a broom and said I would save her, but I had to wait for the rat to move away from the door so it wouldn’t see me. The rat chased her into the corner. Then, it came back toward me. I slammed the broom down on its back, pinning it to the ground. If I could just hold it there, I could kill it with something… It was a perfect hit, but this rat was tough; a broom wasn’t enough to bash the life out of it. The rat squirmed free of the broom. It went straight to its attacker, jumping onto my chest and sinking its teeth through my clothes. I swatted at it. As I awakened, I sat up frantically in bed to get away from the dream rat. I did this twice before I realized I was in a different reality.

I was chasing Austin around our parents’ old house in North Carolina. I lost sight of him upstairs, so I started checking hiding places – our bedrooms, closets, under beds and desks… I saw that it was oppressively dark in the hallway bathroom. Where else could he be but in there? I approached the shower curtain to draw it back. I knew what would probably happen, though… I would find some kind of shadow creature instead of Austin because this was a dream. My mind enjoys those kinds of cheap thrills, I thought to myself. I braced myself for the shock and pulled aside the curtain. I heard Austin’s laugh echo all around me. I couldn’t see anything in the shower except a twirling puff of smoke. Right… I walked out of the room.

I found myself in what I knew to be a fleeting dream in between states of wakefulness. I was about to get out of bed and write down my dreams, but then I saw what looked like a can of coffee grounds on my mattress. A picture of Santa Claus was in the middle. There was writing above and below the image, but I knew the dream wouldn’t last long enough to read all of it, so I focused on the bottom and committed it to memory. I would only have to remember it for about thirty seconds to record it in my journal.

“And so, only one thing is for certain. My angry colony will become bad if something were to happen.” I understood that this was a threat from Santa Claus to the United States. He was raising an army of ants to attack us. As predicted, I woke up right away.

I was reading something on my computer screen when I realized quite abruptly that I was dreaming. I moved my hands via thought alone. A moment later, everything became fuzzy. I reminded myself that it would come back if I focused and relaxed my thoughts. I got hazy visuals of the computer screen fading back in (I was no longer on the same website), then my dorm room. I was sitting at my computer desk again.

“Increase lucidity!” I shouted inside my head. Surprisingly, this didn’t work. My dream control’s usually pretty good… I tried morphing my bedroom into a lush rainforest full of sights and sounds to engage my senses. It worked! I got about halfway through the transformation before I lost the dream.