"Never create from memory," you tell him. He's bright-eyed and idealistic and hasn't found the dark side of dreams, the half that bites. He's been shot in the head once, and has found delight in flinging himself off buildings and then opening his eyes, but he doesn't know about opening your head to lovely French projections in dark, form-fitting dresses, he doesn't know what it's like to throw yourself off a building not because it's fun, but because it's the only way to escape hell. He doesn't know about the things that await Deep Down. "Always create something new. You can take little things, like a street lamp, road patterns, but always mix them up beyond recognition."
"Why?" he asks, looking too young and too happy- dreams are just dreams, too him, he doesn't know that you can get into the dreams of people who aren't, who aren't young and happy, people whose minds have just fractured through and there are cracks to fall in through.
"It's the best way to-" and then your throat closes up and you can't talk anymore, just stare at him dumbly, think where am I... because suddenly you feel like you aren't here, you're back at a cafe, and there's a blond man telling you things you've never heard of before, and the world is hanging- hanging.
You clear your throat. "For example," you say, "You have a... a woman whose husband died. She misses him like hell, so she deliberately dreams memories, keeps them vivid and to-life. And her projection- I mean, her projection of him, it's taking on a life of its own, its own personality. And then... after a few years she does that, it starts showing up not only in her dreams, but shared ones, it starts following her into jobs- it gets in the way, it shoots people, and it fucks things up out of proportion."
He's looking at you consideringly, and for a moment you flounder, wondering what he's thinking. "Is that..." he says slowly. "Is that you?"
You must be looking at him with such an expression of surprise, his face changes to mortification. "Never mind, I'm sorry." he mutters.
"No, it's not, it's not me." you say, without any real certainty. "Anyway," you continue, hoping to get on with the lesson, the moral of this thing, "That's a pretty extreme example, but you get what you mean? If you start dreaming things up, it's the easiest way to blur the line between reality and dreaming, and you start dragging things in that you didn't mean to drag in. That's the crux of it."
He's still looking at you sympathetically, and you suddenly want to deck him, because- you don't know. You want to say, he had a happy ending- I mean, she, she, she had a happy ending- but your throat closes up again, convulses around the words, and you look down at the dream design you two are working on, and you clear your throat. Back to business.
"Now, back to how this relates to paradoxes..."
Mostly, you think about how it was a happy ending without you in it.