Chapter 1
When I was little, my grandmother used to tell me that our family had a gift. That we could visit other worlds when we slept, we only had to imagine a door and walk through it. But we had to keep it a secret lest we attract the wrong sort of attention. That the Lord of Dreams didn't take kindly to little girls who did whatever they wanted in his realm.
My mother would roll her eyes and mutter about bedtime stories and how she was told the same thing when she was a girl. "You better behave or else the boogeyman will get you," and all that nonsense. She was an insomniac and so was I. There were no worlds when we slept, no doors, so we marked it down as just a way grandma would try to coax children into sleep and behave.
Two years ago, I finally started getting rest in what felt like the first time in my entire life. I chalked it up to a new medication I'd been switched to, but I felt wonderful. Vibrant, almost. As if someone had lifted a filter off my life and the world was filled with sharp colors again.
And then I started to dream consistently. It wasn't like I couldn't before, but they were frenetic, blurry, dark things. They never made sense. Now it was almost like stepping into a play, the people around me acting their parts and my surroundings changing in a whirl of backdrops and set pieces. Except I was aware. Really aware, not like I was asleep, but wide awake and able to comprehend everything.
It felt like when I would sleep, I would leave my world and awaken in another. Because even when I would wake up, I would never forget.
Our family had a gift. And when I finally bit my lip, unsure but curious, and imagined a doorway? It appeared.
I stepped through and my own dream fell away, changing into a whole new scene. Clarice, my downstairs neighbor, was dressed in an outfit straight from a ren-faire, chattering fox at her side. We stood in a dewy meadow, twinkling lights suspended in the air and little gnomes walking around and working. I blinked and when I looked behind me, the door was gone.
And so that's how it went. I didn't dream every night but when I did, I was able to leave my own dreams and visit others. I even learned how to wake myself up instantly if I walked into someone's nightmare. Above all, I remembered what my grandmother told me. Don't attract attention, don't mess with things, lest the Dreamlord finds you. That part I wasn't sure about, but so far she'd been right and I wasn't risking it.
I drank tea with a large gargoyle and the little girl down the street, all of us wearing feather boas. I ate popcorn and listened as the mailman showed and explained a movie he was creating on an old film projector, images burning into the film as he told it. I picked out books from a whole, never-ending library, titles I knew didn't exist, and read while a guy with a pumpkin head grumbled about construction and moved shelves around by himself. I even swam with reverse mermaids (human bodies with giant fish heads) and watched as the front clerk of my apartment tested out a submarine he built himself.
It was magic.
During the day, I was a normal boring data entry clerk, working at a big book publisher, going out in the evening with her boyfriend, scribbling the things she saw in a journal to maybe one day turn into….something. A book? A poem? Who knows. At night I walked between dreams, watching the people I'd met in the mundane world live out extraordinary adventures and scenarios. That was the exciting part, the part I enjoyed. I felt more alive then than when I was awake.
I think that was the problem. The dream world was so exciting and the real world was just so…dull. It started to get harder to wake up, to find excitement in everyday life where you had to make money and have a job and keep up with the mundane tasks of life.
Maybe it was my fault then. I hadn't been a very good girlfriend and I knew whatever brief spark Thomas and I had had was fading. Or faded. We'd been together for over a year but it felt so…routine. Dinner on Fridays, bar on Saturday, switching every other night at each other's house. It had sort of faded away into background noise. I couldn't explain that I was able to explore people's dreams. It was a part I had to keep locked away, but it was such a large part of me now.
He called it. Sort of. Not really, but his actions did. He called it by sleeping with someone else in my apartment, in my bed. My neighbor (Jeanette, not Clarice from downstairs) was mid-climax when I walked in.
I wanted to vomit right on the carpet, but the whole situation felt so far away. Maybe I was disassociating? Or it was shock. His frantic curses and the sound of explanations echoed in the back of my head, distant and muffled. I don't remember saying anything, reacting really. I shrugged off cajoling hands and ran into the bathroom, locking myself in there and ignoring Thomas' pleas to talk. The "Baby, this didn't mean anything" and "You've just been so distant" echoed around me.
I'm not sure how long I stayed there. Hours, maybe. But when it was finally quiet and I couldn't hear any rustling, I left the bathroom and he was gone. The bed was still rumpled, sheets spilling onto the floor and lamp tipped over. I wanted to set the whole thing on fire.
Finally, the small burning of emotion rose. The numbness was beginning to fade. How dare him. How dare him! In my fucking bed?
I ignored my phone as another text came through, going straight for the kitchen cabinets. My hands shook with barely contained anger, tears streaming down my face as I stabbed the corkscrew into the top of a wine bottle. I didn't want to feel this. Sure, I wasn't crazy about Thomas and wasn't even sure if I loved him, but that fucker still had the utter audacity to fuck another woman in my bed?
My hands reached for a wine glass, paused, and then angrily grasped the wine bottle by the neck as I began to chug straight from it. I wasn't a big drinker, didn't really like it, but Thomas liked to go out with his buddies and I liked people watching to see if I would be able to walk into any of the other patrons' dreams that night. Alcohol made it more difficult to be careful in the dream world and made it easier to slip into a nightmare by accident, but I didn't care. I was exhausted and wanted to turn my brain off. I wanted to sleep and escape reality and the fucked up mess of my life.
And when the first bottle didn't work fast enough, I started on the second. But as the fogginess of sleep hit me while laying on the couch, I knew I had definitely overdone it. The alcohol hit my bloodstream late and I was way more drunk than I intended as I slipped into the world of dreams.
I was in a garden at night. A fountain flowed in the middle, the flowers chatting with one another, and the frogs sang jazz instead of croaking. The fountain was flowing in the opposite direction, the water going from the pool up into the spout. Everything was slightly discolored and misshapen. Oh, I'd definitely drank too much.
Groaning, I debated plopping my butt down on the soft grass and staying safely in my own dream for once. I could relax here, listen to the frogs, wait for the alcohol to burn off and for my emotions to calm down. But as the floor shifted unevenly beneath my feet, I looked to the right at the door that had appeared nestled amongst the trees.
And I said fuck it, almost as if I knew what would be on the other side.
That can happen sometimes. Thinking about a person too much can make that door take you straight to them. I knew better, but I could feel the echoes of opening up a very similar door earlier and that made the anger run fresh.
It was the bar we went to on Saturdays. The lights were dim and there was that slight smell of old spilled beer, but the place was practically empty. Practically. Except for the two people at the bar, a robot bartender cleaning a glass in front of them. The sticky wood boards creaked under my feet as I watched Thomas flirt with a literal faceless blonde, her mannerisms mirroring laughing but no sound coming out as he continued to brag about something.
His hand caressed her bare knee and my fists clenched as I watched. The anger was white hot, coursing through me like lava and smoke and the sharp edge of glass. I wanted to slap his hand away and shove him off his chair. I wanted to scream in his face, the opposite of what I did in reality. Scream how he was a self-absorbed piece of shit, a mediocre person whose idea of fun was dick measuring at a bar with his old college friends who hated him. I wanted to throw all that anger I hadn't felt earlier, was too numb to feel properly, at him now where I felt a tiny semblance of control.
My hand grabbed an empty glass from the bar before I could think and I threw it, watching it shatter against the wall and fall to the ground in a sprinkling of glass and stars. Thomas jumped and turned around and the faceless woman turned as if to look at me if she had eyes. I froze, the alcohol slowing down my thoughts as I stared down at my empty hand. I threw it. I broke something in someone else's dream. I broke a rule.
"Babe, hey-" Thomas stuttered, stumbling to stand up with a look of surprise and confusion. Adrenaline coursed through me and before I could think, I grabbed an empty beer bottle and threw it as well. The shattering satisfied something deep inside of me. Fuck him. Fuck everything.
Thomas jumped as I continued to grab things and threw them crashing to the ground, a rush of release and rage and joy flooding me. "You are such a selfish," crash, "disgusting," shatter, "piece of shit and I hope, "a bar stool toppled, "that getting your dick sucked off was worth it all."
I couldn't stop. Not even as the faceless blonde rushed out or the robot bartender got a broom out and attempted to pointlessly clean up the mess. Thomas cringed and shielded himself as glass shattered around us, my hands grabbing whatever I could find to break. A part of me knew this was not what I should be doing. Don't create or destroy in someone else's dream, don't disturb the dreamer, don't cause a scene. But I was so angry. Not even fully at him, just in general. Angry that I had let this shit-head stay in my life so long, that he had cheated in my home, that in my waking mundane life this was the grand adventure I had to deal with.
I was breathing hard and may have been crying but it was hard to tell. Thomas was backed into a wall, cringing away from me and arms raised to protect himself from the damage. I stared down at my shaking hands, at the floor that was wavy and pulsing like the waves and looked up to survey the damage only to freeze.
There was a man sitting in the far corner of the bar, half hidden in the shadows.
I couldn't see his face, but I could feel him there like an ominous cloud rolling in from the ocean. Foretelling a storm. He was decked in black, from what I could see, with a long peacoat hanging to the floor, legs stretched out from under the small bar table and fingers like alabaster thrumming slowly across the tabletop. His posture gave off the fake perception of lounging, relaxation, but I knew better. Each thrum of his fingers was like a war drum. From the shadows masking his face, I could feel his eyes on me like flames licking at my skin. I could almost see twin stars peering out from the darkness, setting me on fire.
I broke the rules. I broke the rules.
My heart leapt in my throat, limbs frozen like a deer staring into the blinding light of a coming car. Panicked, I quickly mumbled under my breath.
"Wake up."
And then I was jolting awake, the command throwing me startling into the waking world. The darkness of my apartment met me and the voices from the tv I had left on when I passed out on the couch pierced the fog in my ears. My heart was thrumming and even with the brain-jarring migraine coming on from the early onset of a hangover, I could vividly remember the man with the star-like eyes staring straight at me.
Don't attract the wrong sort of attention.
The Lord of Dreams doesn't take kindly to little girls who did whatever they want in his realm.
That couldn't have been him. No, that was just from the stories, right? I hadn't ever come across anything about an actual Dreamlord in the two years since I started exploring the dream world, but then again I had been trying to be careful. But grandmother had been right about everything else so who's to say there wasn't an actual Lord of Dreams. And if so, I most certainly had attracted his attention.
I groaned and fell back into the couch cushions, knowing there wasn't going to be any way I'd risk going back to sleep. Sighing, I grabbed my phone and blinked at the dozens of missed calls and texts from Thomas. The alcohol was fading and despite the panic I felt at getting caught, I did feel slightly better after breaking everything.
With a few taps of my fingers, I blocked Thomas' number and deleted everything off social media. A year of smiling photos (half-hearted smiles on my part), gone and dust in the wake. He was a mistake, something to fill the void and time and stave off the numbness of a normal life after being able to escape to an actual dream world. That was the downside to my nighttime adventures. It was hard to be excited about the real world.
I sighed and pushed myself up. No time like the present to start gathering all his junk to leave it in the hallway.
Either he or the garbage men could gather it in the morning.
