It was the middle of the TARDIS's night cycle, a time of muted hums and dimmed lights which occurred for roughly ten of every twenty-four hours. It was something the Doctor had long ago implemented to help his human companions maintain their circadian rhythm. The night cycle was when the Doctor shut his gob and got on with the things that needed doing between adventures, like seeing to the faulty spatiotemporal hyperlink disruption circuits or making sure his suit was freshly washed and pressed so that he always looked spiffy for whatever exciting, planet-moving catastrophe (or meeting with an important historical figure) next came their way. The night cycle was quiet and –
And suddenly, Rose's scream split the gentle silence, jolting him instantly to his feet. He was running before the scream had died away because Rose didn't scream. Well, not often. Well, sometimes there was a little shriek when something surprised her, and she did shout quite a lot now that he thought about it…
But this was different. This was a scream, full of fear and despair and so loud that it echoed through the TARDIS and left his ears ringing.
The Doctor's footsteps pounded on the grated floor as he ran. He skidded to a stop outside of her bedroom and threw the door open without hesitation, despite that he'd never… actually been in her room, while it was her room anyway, while she was asleep. Still, time to fret about that later.
Rose was tossing violently in her bed, trying to fight off some terrible foe. Her breathing was ragged and her skin shone with sweat. The Doctor seized her shoulders.
"Rose!" he shouted. She gasped and then went still, her eyes flying open. For a moment she stared at him, unseeing. Then, with a sob, she flung her arms around him and clung to him as if he were the only thing keeping her grounded. The Doctor gently wrapped his arms around her.
"It was t-terrible," she sobbed. "N-nightmare… h-horrible… I was s-so scared…"
"It's okay," he assured her. "It's over now." He held her for a while more, until she stopped trembling. Then he said, "What did you dream about?"
Rose was still and silent for a long moment. Then she drew away, her face going red. "It's… atch'ly, now that I think about it, it's silly." Her brow furrowed. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Rose," was his even, insistent reply.
"No, really," she said. "It's stupid. Just a silly dream."
"Well it was obviously scary enough for you to wake up screaming."
"Yeah, well…" Rose shrugged helplessly. When he leveled her with a flat stare, she groaned and buried her face in her hands. "Doctor, it's stupid. Really, it is. Nothing for you to worry about, I swear." He continued to stare, thoroughly unimpressed.
"Not leaving until you tell me."
"Fine." Rose settled back against the headboard. "I was… I dunno where, but in my head it was called Feldspar Rodeo Resort. It was like… a big purply-gold cave, bas'cly. With a stage. And a spotlight, but the spotlight wasn't on the stage, it was on the Queen." Some vague hand gestures helped clarify the setting.
"Which Queen?" the Doctor asked, since he could think of fifteen queens Rose Tyler had met.
"Of England." Seeing this was insufficient information she clarified, "Elizabeth I." After a moment's thought, she added, "But she looked like Margaret Thatcher."
The Doctor nodded dubiously. "Right."
"And I was on the stage. Singin' an opera song."
"I didn't know you sing." The Doctor looked at her, wondering why she'd never revealed this talent before.
"I don't sing! Can't carry a tune to save me life!" Rose smacked her palm on the duvet in her frustration and rolled her eyes. "But apparently, in my dream I could sing, an' I was singin' opera in – in, I dunno, Sanskrit or som'mat. An' I …" She frowned, remembering the terror of her dream. Even now that she was fully awake, there was just the tiniest sense that she'd been perfectly justified in her fear. "I forgot all the words."
"And the Queen got mad and sent soldiers after you?" the Doctor guessed. That would be a perfectly reasonable thing to happen in a dream, given the number of times it had happened in real life.
"No. She started dancin' with the music." Rose reflected on this statement for a while. "She was pretty good, atch'ly. But that's not the weirdest part."
The Doctor, trying to rid his enormous and impressive mind of the image of Maggie Thatcher dancing to a Sanskrit opera song, gave an indistinct hum to signal that she should continue.
"The weirdest part is that I was wearing a lilac chicken suit. Wif a pink floral scarf. And every so often I had to stick new feathers on it because they kept falling out."
The Time Lord stared at his human companion and became aware that she was just as confused by the dream as he was, maybe more so. She stared at him quizzically. He quirked an eyebrow. "So what, exactly, was so scary about this dream?"
Rose shrugged. "I dunno. It was terrifying at the time…"
He stared at her a while more and then announced, "Rose Tyler, you are one strange human. Go back to sleep."
And then he went and got on with those faulty spatiotemporal hyperlink disruption circuits.