The loudest thing was the sound of his hearts, beating rapidly inside his chest. This indicated two things: that this was a dream, and that he was afraid.
Other than his hearts, he couldn't hear a thing. His body felt numb, and his vision was blurry. The walls around him were a bright white that hurt his eyes, and they were closing in on him.
The TARDIS was the only color in the room. She stood in the middle of the vast whiteness, and she was the only solid thing around him. He approached her.
Something was missing. It was a strange silence around him, not only the room but the TARDIS herself. There was no soft hum in his ears from the wood of her walls. Maybe it was his humanity that made her no longer his home.
He pushed open the door.
Inside, she was blue. The exact same size as the outside.
There was a moment of confusion, panic, and a strange, overwhelming sorrow. And then he woke up to Rose's soft image in the dark, her hand in his, and he was fine.
The second dream was nothing but the blurred, shadowy face of someone he knew. There were tears, and red hair, and begging, and so much knowledge in those eyes, that when he woke up whispering "Donna," over and over and so urgently that Rose had to hold him for hours, he already knew.
It was a broken connection with another universe.
The nightmares never really stopped. Sometimes he lost himself in the endless white, other times he was in real places, almost realer than the days he spent with Rose. In his dreams, he was not human. He was him. That was a great, terrifying relief.
He could feel more than he could see.
Infinity was endlessly white in his mind, and he realized that was when the Doctor was traveling. The TARDIS was a claustrophobic box of blue. She was rejecting him because he was human, his hearts sinking in disappointment again and again when she was not bigger on the inside.
When there was no infinity, it was always the sadness of goodbye, always the tear-streaked faces of the people he loved. There was no logical order. After all, this was the universe.
He counted the dreams.
Two dark figures waving. A goodbye on the street. Yellow hair in a pink hat. A wedding. A smiling salute. An old man. The Ood singing.
Then, the whiteness.
A streak of gold.
An overwhelming pain.
He woke up, whispering nonsense, pleading, sobbing. "I don't want to go. Don't make me go..."
"Go where?"
"Rose... I don't..."
"You're not going anywhere. Doctor- why are you crying?"
"He's gone, Rose."
"Who?"
He took a shaky breath. "Never mind."
Death and regret go hand in hand, and he had just died.
"I love you."
In this life, he'd say it so many times, his mouth would hurt.
She smiled. "I love you, too. Go back to sleep."
There were no more nightmares.