Nocturn Core (Abridged)

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 befriended a black man named Bob. At first, he seemed pretty normal… I understood that a number of people I knew on campus had warned me not to associate with him, but I didn’t see what the problem was. He said he would show me his house. Instead of taking me to a residential area, he led me to the shore of the Chicago River where he had a mat of old, hardened newspapers set up under a bridge. I quickly observed that he was homeless. Immediately, I lost interest in the friendship; my positive experiences with homeless individuals were few and far between. I stared at the long since faded ink on the newspapers as I pondered a way to lose Bob. He would follow me if I tried a normal method of escape. I came up with a plan – I would take the train! Since he was homeless, he probably couldn’t pay the train fare. While I finalized the plan in my head, Bob asked me about random people. I didn’t understand his questions, but I soon figured out why – he thought the people were standing there with us! Bob was having serious hallucinations. I was glad I had figured out a way to distance myself from him… That wasn’t the sort of company I needed. When I told Bob I was going to the train station, he said he knew a shortcut. Rather than insist on just walking to the nearest one (the Green Line was only a few blocks away), I gave in and followed him.

The dream jumped. I was in an underground passage, following Bob with next to no idea where we would surface. He stopped me before a ladder and asked if I was sure about going on the train. Something about it frightened him. I insisted on continuing. I needed to get somewhere, I said. Bob started growling to himself in rage, but he cooperated. He had to release at least ten trap doors on the way up. These were intended to lock people out of his secret passage. He complained the whole way up about trains. When we emerged, I was stunned. We were on a train platform. My plan had been completely foiled by Bob’s clever shortcut… Of course he wouldn’t pay the fare – he could just skip the entrance! A quick look around revealed that we were on the Green Line, but a bit further west of the river. I wasn’t going to lose him so easily, it seemed… Surely, he wouldn’t be able to follow me onto a bus to the suburbs. He couldn’t tunnel his way into that one. I got on the next train to arrive and sat down close to the operator in case of an emergency. I still wasn’t sure what to expect from Bob. He took the seat next to me. As soon as the train started moving, he burst into sobs. This drew quite a few stares, but I let him cry. I did my best to seem like I didn’t know the guy. This continued for a few awkward minutes before he calmed down. He asked if I liked his new boots. Confused, I stared at his feet. He was wearing sneakers, not boots. He showed me his hands, and I realized he was supposed to be holding something. He was hallucinating a pair of fine boots.

“Oh… Yeah, they’re very nice,” I said in a kind voice. I came up with some kind of oxymoron to describe them, and he doubled over in laughter. I sensed that he might be on drugs. He was one of those people who don’t breathe when they laugh, so his chuckling was coupled with wheezing noises. Another black man walked up to us during this fit of laughter. He was wearing a baggy, black jacket, baggy jeans, and white sneakers. He was also half-wearing a baseball cap; it looked like it might tumble off his dreadlocks any moment.

“Shut up!” he shouted at Bob. He continued with a stream of vulgar, obscene name-calling before finally calling us both annoying. I tried again to pretend I didn’t know Bob, but the association had been made. I suddenly realized I was blind. It didn’t bother me much for some reason… I focused on what I could hear of the situation. The vulgar man came over to me and put his hand on my head. I’d rather not transcribe verbatim the ultimatum he gave Bob, but in essence, he wanted me to publicly pleasure him, and Bob had ten seconds to convince me to do it. I wasn’t going to have any of this. I teleported to the other end of the next train car over and pressed the emergency assistance button. I could see into the first car from my current position.

“There’s someone dangerous on the train,” I said. The guy stared at me from the first car with wide eyes. He started walking toward the second car.

“Attention, passengers…” an automated voice began over the intercom. “A dangerous customer has been identified. For your safety, lease be watchful for threats to yourself and others as we work toward removal.”

“He’s on the second train car,” I told the operator through the assistance system. The guy was approaching me in long strides. Instead of attacking me as I expected him to, the guy brushed past me on the way to the next car. “Make that the third,” I said. “He’s trying to get away.” The train stopped at the next station, and a bunch of people got off. I kept an eye out for the guy who threatened me and Bob, but I didn’t see him.

I was a priest in a medieval town. I explained a game the townspeople liked to play to Nicole. One person would hide behind a wall and chuck explosives into the crowd. Meanwhile, a turtle shell was thrown back and forth between the bomber and representatives of the populace. I went over to an area divided into cubes of space with open ceilings. There were supposed to be portals to other worlds here, but I disabled them. Once I was behind the wall, I made a screeching sound recognized as the start of the bomber game. I lobbed a bomb into an unsuspecting group of people on the other side. The turtle shell came flying over the wall, and I sent it back with a mighty punch. I’m glad my knuckles didn’t break. Every now and then as the shell bounced between both sides, one of us slipped – usually me. The score was 5-2 before long. I knew I had to catch up. I used bombs to propel the turtle shell further and further away from the wall, theoretically decreasing the likelihood that it would land near someone who was paying attention. It always managed to come back. Once, the explosion itself seemed to fling the shell at my face… I wasn’t sure how that made any physical sense. The score was 6-2… One more point to the enemy would mean their victory.

I hovered in the air, flinging the shell with ease back at the public representatives. I started floating higher and couldn’t get myself to go back down. Eventually, I couldn’t reach the shell to prevent it from dropping into my small room. As it fell behind the wall, an announcer said that the gateways to the other worlds had been reopened. Her voice was somewhat robotic, but very different from Symphony’s. Glowing, purple pits appeared on the floor of the cube rooms below me. I descended to the ground near an apple tree and started walking around. Someone thought I was really a priest and tried to give me their confession.

“I’m just roleplaying,” I explained. He left me alone. Steve (from my second semester of physics) showed me this disgusting candy that was apparently too dangerous to keep in your mouth for more than ten minutes. It came as half of a sucker with the inside hollowed out. A toxic, pink dye coated the inside. Within seconds, it turned your entire mouth pink with the toxin. I refused to try it.

It was early summer, and a bunch of obnoxious, red bugs had flown north from Mexico to reproduce in our humid climate. Everywhere I looked, I saw them… They crawled on my skin – especially the arms – and my laptop screen. I killed them, of course, but there were always more waiting to occupy the surface of my body. Sometimes they bit me, too. I was really starting to lose my peace of mind with all these buzzing bugs around me. I read through comments on my dream journal. I noticed that most of new ones were from the same person… His avatar was one of those red bugs! I sighed when I realized all but one of his comments were obviously spam. I erased those. His semi-legitimate comment consisted of a series of images and an accompanying narration. He posted this on my “Your Dreams” page. The comment described dreams of American ships churning out swastika-branded cheese wheels. They created these on top of some kind of tower in the middle of the ship. A rotating blade cut the swastika shape out of the bottom of the cheese as it rested atop the tower. I watched this happen as though I was flying over one of the ships. I was confused when I noticed the blade was tearing up the enormous cheese wheel… The cheese became stuck to the blade and eventually clogged up the whole system.

The comment continued with a description of WakingNomad sleeping on the floor of a wooden shack. I saw myself on the floor, too, but I wasn’t covered by a blanket. Nomad burst aside, jumped to his feet (at this point, I realized he was naked, but he didn’t seem to care), and started shouting about the wonders of life. I slowly sat up. As my vision left the image, I saw this was the end of the comment. I decided I wouldn’t trash it. Unfortunately, as I scrolled down, I saw an advertisement for microwaves that I hadn’t put on the page… I realized he must have put something in the comment to cause this to appear. I temporarily marked it as spam while I scanned the comment text and removed the advertisement. Once this was taken care of, I restored the comment and replied, briefly explaining what I had taken out.

The dream jumped. My parents and I drove around a shopping center. It looked like the one on the way to Nicole’s school. Whenever we came to a store we considered stupid or poorly managed, we pushed a button on a remote control to change it to another store. We only left two stores in the whole shopping center unchanged. The first was a huge laundromat run by Janet Jackson. Even though my mom does all of her laundry at home, she seemed to like this place… We changed it a few times to see what would happen, but she eventually asked me to change it back, so I did. The second was a clothing store run by someone named Hyu Chan. I got the impression that he was meant to be the Hyu from Dreamviews. A sign posted on the door warned us that only Hyu Chan was permitted to drop the “Chan” from his name – so if I called him Hyu, he would be furious. The man had buck teeth and bug-eyed nerd glasses. My dad walked over to the suits and criticized them, instigating Hyu Chan’s rage. He asked my dad to leave. I picked up a brochure on Hyu and found his website (www.hyu.co.eu or something like that). It was essentially a fan site for the company he worked for. As Hyu Chan admitted in his self-published brochure, it was a bit strange for him to create his own version of the company website, but that was how he chose to express his pride in his work.

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.

I was told to record this as I would any typical dream, so I will – but I must note that it took place on the boundary between falling asleep and standard “dreams,” so I’m not sure exactly when I fell asleep during this or if I did at all. Rather than making a judgment, I’ll just categorize it as a threshold experience for the time being.

As I went to sleep, I spoke telepathically to the dream itself – the core from which dreams arise – and asked it to help me better understand myself and my intentions. The dream replied; it said that it would show me again as it had the night before, but I would probably forget. It implied that we had this conversation several times in the past, and I always forgot it. That’s a little embarrassing given how well my dream recall usually works, but I confessed that I rarely remembered much of the threshold experience. Even now, I’m sure I forgot some of it, but I remember the parts that were emphasized (I think). Before continuing, the voice explained that I would learn much of what I wished to discover through dreams. I felt that this would begin immediately.

The speaking dream showed me various scenes of shadowy versions of myself holding swords. Like mine, the voice explained, these were false swords. None of us could understand Apheri because none of us had truly attempted to. I tried to draw Apheri to get a close look at her, but the hilt came up by itself. What the…? I asked why, and the voice said I wasn’t fit to hold her. I had ignored Tegatus and Phaedra’s request, it said, by treating Apheri like a normal sword. It took me back to the room in which I defeated Lusark Decidies recently in another dream. I saw my body move on its own, cutting through zombie-like people with brightly colored hair. It seemed only natural to me that I was using Apheri in this dream.

“Are you cutting with Apheri?” the voice asked, getting right to the heart of my thoughts. I replied with a general feeling of agreement. I was using the sword I always carried, wasn’t it? What else could it be? “You miss the point. Any sword can cut. In this world, you can also cut. These are empty cuts. When Apheri cuts, she understands. She feels the cut and acknowledges it. You just cut for the sake of cutting.” These words, if you’ll pardon the pun, cut me to the core – at least, what I perceived as me. I was beginning to sense that “me” was just another version of something more important… I tried drawing Apheri again. The scene became a cavern with sinewy bones in the walls. I pulled up the bladeless hilt again. Cripes.

“What do I have to do?” I asked.



“Understand her. First of all, she is not just a sword. Would you like to hear Apheri’s story?” The voice repeated its question when I didn’t answer right away. I thought I knew the story. She was created by Tegatus, wasn’t she? I agreed to hear it and was whisked away to a small planet. “Small enough that a thousand people would exhaust its resources,” the voice observed, commenting on my thoughts. The vegetation was lush, the oceans were an unmarred blue, and the night sky was alive with starlight. I saw Apheri floating in the air above a hill nearby. I tried to run to her, but a hand stopped me. When I looked at the man guiding me, I saw that he glowed intensely. I couldn’t discern what he looked like, but it wasn’t important. I watched Apheri as he told me of her talent at channeling the life energy of everything around her – not stealing it, but thriving on it. She began to spin, and then she glowed with the same white light as my storyteller’s dream body. She transformed into a long, black staff. I’ll just draw it and put a picture in… Basically, the Golden Hexagram is circumscribed within a circle at the top of the staff, and there are two handles jutting out below the base of the circle for a handhold. The bottom portion removes to reveal the blade. When I say long, I mean it – this blade was much longer than I ever imagined Apheri could be, and yet, I could sense that this form was more familiar. This was my Apheri! And yet, the voice laughed and called me a fool for going so long without realizing I knew nothing about her. I would forget again anyway, it laughed. Embarrassed again, I resolutely announced that I would not forget!

“You said that last night,” it said. I felt a little less confident, but I refocused my attention and listened. Apheri was always intended to be the life-bringer’s sword, the voice told me. I was justly accused of forgetting the deep meaning of my own name and the language from which it comes. A bunch of symbols appeared in the air as the scene faded to darkness. They were like Daedric letters, but different… I recognized them faintly. The voice told me I would have to obtain Apheri both in dreams and waking. I might have to craft her myself, the voice said. Obviously, I doubted my ability to do so – I’m an electrical engineering student, not a blacksmith. It suggested that I make arrangements with someone more talented. I wouldn’t regret the cost, it promised. Linking the two realities was extremely important. I thought of something Reece Jones said in a video a while ago about a similar concept. Then, too, I knew I had to find Apheri, but I didn’t pursue it very far. My eyes began to tear up as I wrote this in my pencil and paper dream journal. What I feel when I picture my sword now is incredible. I can’t imagine using such a long sword… How would I even hold that if not for dream physics? The voice spoke again, warning me to focus. I felt Nicole stir in bed beside me, and I woke up most of the way. The voice urged me to focus again as I closed my eyes. Sadly, I don’t remember anything after that.

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 was slowly transforming into a robotic spider. My tongue was extremely sticky and removable. For some reason, I gained the ability to scale vertical walls with ease after licking them once. I used this ability to sneak into Nicole’s house through a window. This seemed to take place about five years in the past… Nicole and Jess were much younger, and they were still friends. They were sitting together in Nicole’s room. I crawled in and hissed awkwardly. That was my form of speech. Jess wanted to kill me and flush me down the toilet, but Nicole stopped her. I probably had it coming to me for letting that cat get flushed halfway down the toilet…

“He’s kinda cute…” Nicole argued. “I wanna keep him.”

“You want to keep that?” Jess scowled. Nicole knelt in front of me and gently stroked my head.

“Let’s teach him some tricks. Come with us, okay?” She and Jess went into another room. I followed obediently. They helped me correct my robot spider speech impediment, and I regained the ability to speak normally. I informed them that I needed to be at school at 8 AM, but I wanted to see Nicole before leaving. Nicole insisted that I could ride the bus with her. We started waling around outside. When I asked her about it, she admitted her bus driver probably wouldn’t let me ride to school with her… I was sorely disappointed; before I realized I wouldn’t be able to, I was enjoying a flashback to that giddy feeling of interacting with a crush. I tried to cling to that simple happiness.

“Well, at this point, I won’t make it back home to catch my bus… I need a ride one way or another,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me, “my mom will take us.” A bunch of people came out of the garage together. Everything smelled like smoke. Nicole smiled widely at them. “Oh, you were doing that thing!” she laughed.

“What thing?” asked her dad.

“That thing!” Nicole repeated. They still pretended not to understand (if they did understand in the first place). Mike and Eric were walking together. Eric mentioned something about being good at video games.

“You know what that means…” Mike said.

“Uh… No,” Eric said, shaking his head.

“You can reach into the fabric of the universe and bend it to your will! Space and time are your playthings! And rainbows? Don’t even get me started on rainbows. Wow. Just kidding, Eric – you can’t do that stuff.” Eric seemed confused. We continued looking for Nicole’s mom. I couldn’t remember what she looked like, so every time we saw a woman, I wondered if it was her. We decided to go in the garage, but Nicole went off on her own by the time we got to the backyard. Jess started laughing at me. She challenged me to destroy a glowing, black pillar in the yard. I punched it with all of my might several times, but I couldn’t break it. I continued into the garage. It was shaped like a barn. Once I was inside, I saw that they were on a platform near the ceiling. It took me a few tries because I was starting to lose my robot spider powers (it seemed to be caused by getting my tongue dirty), but I climbed up onto the ceiling and dropped down onto the platform. Something inside my body shattered. A console attached to my robot spider body sent out an error message.

“OV/OL,” Nicole read. She and Jess puzzled over what the error message could mean until a woman came up onto the ledge. She picked me up and sighed.

“Over voltage overload,” she said, explaining the console output to the girls.

“Oh no!” Jess cried. She seemed genuinely upset. I couldn’t figure out why. “We broke him!”

“Not to worry…” the woman said. “I’ll take care of it. You two should get ready for school.”

The dream jumped. I was my normal self again. Nicole and I lay on the floor in the living room (except it was my Oma and Opa’s living room). There was trash everywhere… Spilled drinks (grape soda on white carpet, jeez), half-eaten candy… I tried picking it up while Nicole and Jess played a fighting game. Justin was at Nicole’s house, so he played, too. He explained all of the unique headgears available in the game when I started watching. Nicole was playing as an incredibly powerful wizard with refined command of electricity. Scamper walked into the room and started eating food and toys left in his reach. I didn’t want Nicole’s family to get mad at me for things my dog did, so I made him drop the toys. One looked like Eric’s Guile figurine. A bunch of people had to leave again. I saw Beckman walk by. He complimented my talent for programming, and I took it to heart. Justin joked that Beckman seemed to be into me. I told Justin that I had a history of guys falling for me.

“Like Justin,” I said. I didn’t realize I was talking to Justin…

“Justin?” he asked, bewildered.

“Tynne. Serenity.” He fell onto his back in shock. Then, he started to cry.

“Serenity never gave me a chance…” he wailed. I hugged him to calm him down. After that was settled, I went into the kitchen to organize the refrigerator. I sorted the fruits with care. Nicole’s mom finally showed up. She asked if we were ready to go. I replied in the affirmative – just as soon as I was sure the refrigerator was in order.

My roommate was replaced with a guy named Alex. He had a black cat named Sylvester. We didn’t talk to each other much at first. One night, as I was trying to fall asleep, I heard Alex murmuring in his bed. He had a stuffed lion in his arms. I knew it was named Simba because he frequently talked to it during the day… The next day, he accidentally spilled a whole container of bleach on my bed, so I helped him clean it. I joked about him doing it on purpose. He also accidentally dropped a bag of chips behind the bed. I refused to pick them up. The residents of the connecting room, Sandy and Tyler, knew Alex from high school. They were dating. They hardly ever came over to our side of the suite, but Alex frequently went downtown with them to parties. Alex had to go somewhere, so I decided to take the initiative to clean up our messy room. I finally disposed of the bag of chips. It was empty… I wondered where the chips had gone. I also washed a bunch of dishes by hand in the bathroom. They weren’t my dishes, but I was still worried someone would be mad that I didn’t dry them off and put them away.

Standing in the doorway between our bathroom and the other room, I gave Tyler a creepy stare. He was watching the History Channel. Confused and a little concerned by my weird smile, he explained that he never goes to class on Mondays. He always just watched the History Channel to learn things. I wondered if I should be doing that… Apparently, I was in the same history class. Tyler had to use Alex’s computer for something, so he came over to our room. Shortly after, we heard pained whispers behind the door.

“Help me…” a voice wailed.

“Just a second,” called Tyler. The whine repeated. I realized the door was already cracked open. Alex poked his head in. “Wow, it’s just Alex… Prick.”

“You know you love me!” he laughed. Alex was amazed by how clean the room was. He started looking for his chips.

“I threw them away,” I explained. He reached into the trash, pouting.

“But floor chips are the best kind of chips…”

“Well, no one’s been eating said floor chips, so…” Alex looked up at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Dude, Sylvester’s been snacking on those for like a day!”

“Really?!” I was surprised I didn’t notice…

“Dude! You ate my donut?” Alex asked Tyler.

“Yeah… What of it?” replied Tyler.

“Nothing, just saying…” He stared sadly at the half-eaten donut in the trash can. I sensed that he was considering eating it. I decided to go to the bathroom, and Sylvester followed me in. The cat started unrolling the toilet paper while I was urinating, so I sent him away. Then he hopped in the toilet itself – before I could flush down my waste. “This cat is psycho…” I flushed it with Sylvester inside the bowl, hoping he was too big to get stuck. The cat ended up with his head and front paws sticking out of the bottom of the bowl. He was soaking wet and could hardly pull himself out… He managed, though. After shaking off his back feet, he trotted back into the room. Alex cracked up when he saw what had happened to Sylvester. I secretly wondered if the cat could talk… Tyler and I discovered a stuffed warthog that played recorded sounds. Although it takes us a minute, we realized they were all recordings made by Alex when he was a kid. He had kept this since he was a child.

I logged onto a Minecraft server and built a strange bridge. It went in loops and snaked around instead of following the most efficient path. I seemed to be limited to a fairly small area, but the buildings reached much higher into the sky than normally possible. After completing my bridge, I returned to the ground to prepare a new weapon. I wondered if I could make a crossbow… I tried a bunch of combinations of items with no luck. When I arranged five normal bows in the rough shape of a crossbow, I was able to make one. I sensed that, like in Ragnarok, I could refine the weapon if I found the necessary ore. I went looking for phracon to use on it. MadMonkey from Dreamviews walked up to me, and I thought he was going to kill me for my items, so I shot him three times and killed him. He didn’t lose anything, so he didn’t seem to mind. I wandered around a bit and got into a fight with another player. He had diamond armor, but I was still able to kill him. The problem came when his friends teamed up against me… They started using super powers – shooting beams of blue light at me, moving at twice normal speed, and absorbing my health, for example. I tried to activate my own super powers, but it seemed I didn’t have any yet. Lame! I decided I would log off before they killed me rather than lose all of my belongings. Unfortunately, I died just before I disconnected. I saw my stuff spill onto the ground before the client closed.

The dream jumped. I logged back onto the server in a safe area at the top of a gigantic skyscraper. I started jumping to increase my acrobatics skill (as though this was an Elder Scrolls game). I thought that if I leveled up my skills, I would be able to use super powers like the others. One of the guys I fought earlier mentioned my name in the chat.

“Nice fight!” I said to him. The people who killed me seemed friendly. The only one I didn’t get along with was the guy who attacked me in the first place.

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 went to the doctor’s office with my mom. Our doctor was an interesting woman with a voice and a personality like a man’s… Deep down, though, she still had that motherly instinct. She had a terrible habit of smoking in the hospital, which a blond nurse kept coming into the room to ask her to stop doing in front of us. It made no difference to her. The doctor explained that she only checked teeth on the first visit, so she had us each open our mouths and show her our teeth for three seconds. Once that was done, she took off her rubber gloves and shrugged.

“That’s it. See you next time.” Before we could leave, however, a white-haired man with glasses came into the room. He smiled faintly when he made eye contact with me.

“Excuse me, but I’d like to step in as this boy’s doctor starting next week,” he said. Our manly woman doctor put her hands on her hips.

“What? Why?”

“I think I understand why he’s here… Would that be alright?”

“Well, sure… As long as he’s fine with it, too.” Everyone looked at me.

“I don’t see why not…” I said. In truth, I just wanted to get away from this doctor’s smoke. Now that all of that was settled, we were able to leave the doctor’s office. I overheard my new doctor whispering something to the woman after we exited the room.

The dream jumped. We returned to the doctor’s office sometime later. My doctor was late, so the woman doctor took me into her room anyway. I noticed she wasn’t smoking… That was a good sign. She checked our teeth again, but she was a little more thorough this time. She paid particular attention to my teeth, and I thought that meant they weren’t doing so well, but she smiled after each of the three rounds of inspection. She only had one complaint.

“Try not to go so hard on your front teeth,” she said. “They’re in pain.”

“His teeth are in pain…?” my mom wondered in amazement. I understood what the doctor meant, but there was no way I could explain it to my mom. She lacked the experience to assimilate it. The doctor asked about my life and studies, so I explained my academic interests and lucid dreaming practice.

“I also work at an airport,” she said after I mentioned studying electrical engineering. “My job is to assess risks and input danger zones in the airport mapping system. We isolate areas with cones and what have you, then put the danger point in as a user under the protection platform with a timer for removal.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s a pretty complicated job sometimes, but I enjoy it.”

“That’s so good of you!” my mom complimented. “You’re keeping people safe at the airport.”

“Yeah,” I added, “and most people at the airport probably don’t think about…” My mom interrupted me, but I let her finish. Neither of us really listened to what she had to say. It’s not that we didn’t care, but it literally could not be anything important – we both understood this as a fact.

“Go ahead,” the manly woman doctor urged me after my mom was done speaking.

“Well, as I was saying, most people at the airport probably don’t think of it as dangerous. The ones who are terrified of airports are either scared of the people or the planes, and the people who don’t have that fear see airports as a fairly safe place. Without people like you, that wouldn’t be possible.” The doctor smiled. I almost expected her to give me a fist pump. The door to the room opened, and in walked my new doctor. I noticed he wore a white sword on his hip, but I didn’t say anything about it. The woman doctor started smoking again, and I covered my mouth and nose so I wouldn’t get a headache. Smoke gives me serious headaches…

“Oh? Are you smoking again?” my doctor asked. “When we met last week, you said you were going to stop that dirty habit…”

“It’s not me, it’s…” She trailed off as a red portal appeared behind my doctor. He drew his sword.

“It’s her!” A fancy, red car appeared beneath the huge portal. It drove out of the building and down the street. I saw it long enough to notice a woman with pale skin and fried, blond hair in the driver’s seat. Her eyes were as black as the night. Both doctors rushed to the front of the building, and I hesitantly followed them. My mom came along to tell me not to wander around the doctor’s office.

“We’ve got to do something…” the woman doctor said in a hoarse, choking voice.

“Well, that’s what he’s for, isn’t it?”

The dream jumped. I was in the basement of a store in the Imperial City of Tamriel. A bunch of women with bizarre, neon hair colors lurched around the building naked like zombies. I cut through their bodies with Apheri, and they dissolved into black shadows. I felt that this was all part of Oblivion. I wondered why there were still NPCs here, thinking that I’d deleted the mod that implemented them. I supposed their zombie-like behavior was the result of null dialog and a lack of AI presets; they didn’t know how to behave, so they just wandered around aimlessly. Anyway, once I destroyed most of these, I saw a girl sitting with her legs crossed on a rounded ledge built into the corner of the room. She was wearing a shirt, frilled black skirt. Her hands rested at her sides until I approached. Then she looked up at me and screeched. It was the woman who came through the portal at the doctor’s office! I saw her name for a brief moment – Lusark Decidies or something like that. Her black eyes seemed to suck me in, but then she transformed into a bloody heart. Her membranes attached themselves to the floor and the ceiling, suspending this pulsating lump of organic material in the air. I slashed across it, and she howled again as her blood shot out into the room. She transformed into a web of needles next. The area around her became a fireplace. There was some kind of weird, razor-sharp curtain attached to the mantle. When I rotated a wheel on the base of the mantle, this curtain was moved in line with the woman’s needle web. The whole time, electricity was shooting out of the walls at her for some unexplained reason. I heard voices talking in the back of my head.

“That final boss was boring,” one guy said.

“No way! The lightning was really cool.” I continued cranking the curtain wheel. The woman groaned at the pain. She shot needles at me, but I didn’t care. I was pretty sure I could survive if I just killed her quickly.

“You know, a lot of people compare her to Lady Gaga, but I don’t see the similarity.”

“What? She’s Lady Gaga’s oversoul. Didn’t you know?”

“I don’t think so…” I kept cranking the wheel, and the curtain got stuck on the corner for a bit. When I got it through, it started going toward the wall. If I could get it all the way to the wall, I would rip out all of her energy – I just knew this instinctively.

“She doesn’t try to stop you from finishing?” I asked the voices. The curtain was almost to the end.

“Sure she does.” A hand reached out of the web of needles, grabbing the curtain and crushing it. She was much more powerful than me; even turning the wheel at full force, I couldn’t keep her from jerking the curtain back. I put some more effort into it, but it was no use. I was losing. I heard the door of my room open and felt my physical body roll over. What would my roommate think if he saw me turning an invisible wheel in bed? I woke up.

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.

I was walking along some train tracks. I was some sort of duck… Joining me in my travels were a chicken and a cat. We heard a train coming, but we didn’t know which way to look until it zoomed out of a nearby tunnel and nearly flattened us! We waited for it to go back through the tunnel in the other direction – the tracks were set in a loop behind us – before walking through it. On the other side of the tunnel was the Dragon Ridge. The mountains were jagged and unforgiving, and some of them looked as though recent rock slides had buried sections of vegetation. The other animals turned into Nicole (the cat that was not a cat) and Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander (the chicken that was not a chicken). Nicole pointed out a heart-shaped rock high above us. It lay on the summit of a smaller mountain. We had to be close to Naven, she said. We climbed over a hill of loose rocks; they were so finely grained that Zedd got his feet stuck in them like quicksand. On the other side of the hill, we found a lone cottage. When we entered the building, I knew immediately that evil had made this place its home. The interior was an exact replica of my grandparents’ house. I sat down in the dining room with a sign that read “Yeah!” in bold, red letters. Before long, Voldemort entered the house. I was fortunate this time… He went straight to the back door and exited onto the patio. He came back in through the front door almost immediately after, went to the back door again, and… This time, he turned around. Our eyes met. He glided across the dining room with his black cloak billowing as though a violent storm was stirring up inside the building. His hand clasped the wand sitting on the table. Immediately, he fired a volley of spells at me. I repeated his words, tossing the same spells back.

“Expelliarmus!” My wand popped out of my hand. Crap. “Crucio!” I fell to the ground, effectively paralyzed. I didn’t feel any pain, though. Voldemort put a foot on my leg and stood over me with his wand pointed at my heart. He smiled. Slowly, he pronounced the name of the killing curse. “Avada… kedavra…” A green bolt of energy shot out of his wand and bounced off my body. Voldemort’s face contorted. “What?! Why can’t I ever kill you?!”

“Because love is forever, stupid,” I said. I shot him with the same spell several times in succession before he finally died. I was glad I was able to protect Zedd and Nicole from harm.