Perchance to Dream

"To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub."
--Hamlet, III.i.65
William Shakespeare

I sometimes think it was a cruel trick of destiny that granted me this power. What else could explain such irony—that the ghost of sleep cannot sleep, that the giver of dreams might never dream himself! For even the restless spirits of the Ghost Zone rest, and dream, if only fleetingly. All save myself.

Time out of even the dimmest memory I have worked, thankless, using these gifts in my hands to create some small order in this world of endless chaos. Yet even the smallest order is doomed to fail here; ghosts do not dream forever, and so my work is constantly undone. To see it undone again and again, over countless years is torture beyond your comprehension.

Few can boast such an existence as mine, stretched out across time from end to end. Clockwork, locked ever away in his ivory tower, is one; but precious few remain who have not devolved into nothing, mere shadows of former greatness. I know of the reign of the Ghost King not through tales passed down, but my own memory. It was I who cast the Sarcophagus of Forever Sleep for the Ancients, who merely provided its key. Work given freely and taken without thanks, once again! And I wonder why I am so surprised when I hear the new tellings, surprised to hear nothing of the role I played...

Even so, I have found eternity to have its certain advantages—the discoveries I have made! The Forever Sleep I have known and used ages against those reluctant to fall under my power. But even I had not found a way to bestow my own gifts, to sleep and dream as those countless ghosts did under my hand. At least, not until very recently.

All ghosts fall away into dreamland at my touch, lost to the mysteries of the subconscious. I had never considered what might happen should my hand rest on them a second time. I merely sought assurance on that first occasion, assurance that this ghost had fallen to sleep completely. Perhaps my hand lingered overlong on her; I shall never know for certain. The next moment, though, I had a taste, a glimpse of her dream in my mind.

What can I say but that it was glorious? The vision, the emotion, the simple everything—I saw places I had never seen or imagined, heard and saw things unfamiliar and yet—so familiar to the mind I drew them from. The emotion filled me up as nothing had ever before, almost fulfilling me. Another plane of being had been opened to me, the glory of that which I could never attain.

All that, in the space of a mere moment. Mere moment! My hand drew back from the shock of the experience, and only a lingering taste of her dream remained in my mind. I fled in fear, I am not ashamed to say, but also exhilaration, unsure of what had just occurred, but knowing it was a gift of my own bestowment.

It was then my experiments began. I did my duty, but I went further. I took their dreams, tasted the emotion within them—rage, joy, fear, sorrow. I saw dreams of every kind, and though I thought my hunger satisfied, I knew I yearned for more, more than the fleeting dreams of those short slumbers.

I cast the Forever Sleep. I laid my hand to the ghost's brow and took in the dream. It was long, but no different from the rest—full of emotion pushed to the extreme, images weirdly patched together—but it still held that mystery, that taste of the forbidden I so desired. It stretched on, ever shifting and changing, until it simply faded away into nothing at all.

Dreams are not simply manifestations of the unconscious mind. They are connected to the subconscious, to the very identity of the creature they belong to. Take too much—you take it all. What remained of the ghost before me was nothing but a formless collection of ectoplasm, mouth a gaping hole, eyes fused shut by the Forever Sleep. Pity and revulsion towards it I felt for seconds, but my shame and horror overcame it. I turned to leave it to its miserable fate.

It followed.

I attempted to send it away, but it persisted. It drew close to me, whimpering in whatever crude language was left to it now. Pity, pity and shame forced my hand. I allowed it to stay, following after me. It seemed there was little I could do to prevent it.

It did not prove its usefulness until later. I attempted to cast my sleep on a group at once, but one resisted and fled. My strange companion shot after the ghost and returned minutes later, a sleeping ghost in tow. Thus began my Sleepwalkers.

Time passed. I created more Sleepwalkers to assist me, and continued to drink the dreams of my sleepers. It had become an addiction, the sweetness of dreams. Even knowing the damage I caused I continued, for, I reasoned, did not some deserve it, for the generations of thankless work? Was it not justice?

I gained reputation; my name created fear in those who heard it. Tales true and untrue were passed around. Some reputation, even poor, was better than none at all, and my work continued. But with fear comes fearful reason—stay out of this ghost's way. Ghosts hid from me and my Sleepwalkers, and my diet of dreams grew monotonous and thin. It seemed my work stood all in vain, until certain whispers reached me.

I had long known of the other world, the human world, and of the gates that opened to it from the Ghost Zone. But now word came of a permanent gate, one that not only stood open constantly, but had thinned the barrier, making gates open more frequently than ever before. These rumours sparked in me a new thought—what of the humans? What of their dreams?

I made my mind and plan clear—I would journey to the human world, taste of a human dream, and see what difference existed. I journeyed to the gate—I passed through. Putting that first human to sleep was almost laughably easy. She dropped the work in her hands and fell limp like a puppet. But her dream—

If the first dream had been glorious, then this—there exists no words in any language to describe it. Such subtlety of emotion, such beauty--! This was not some fleeting vision of obsession, this was true dream! A gift among gifts, and all for me! I had been denied my own dreams by destiny or fate, but they handed me such tools as to take what dreams I chose. It had to be fate, I thought then, justice, some righting of the wrongs committed against me all these centuries—

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"Yes. Is that all?" The Observant leaned forward, squinting at Nocturne, who scowled.

"You know what happened next," he said, looking away. "Defeat at the hands of that child. And I had forgotten..." He glanced up at his interrogator again. "You caretakers of the Ancients' gifts now use them to protect the humans as well." He sneered.

"You ought to know, Nocturne," the Observant said. "Such a level of interference is not permitted on the other side. Why do you think Vortex was imprisoned?"

"Vortex was a power-hungry fool," Nocturne spat. "Was this not my due for centuries of work? A taste of what I could never have? Was it not mine, after all?"

The Observant shook his head. "I would not know."

Nocturne's scowl deepened, and he looked away.

END