Beach Day

11: At Least We're Dreaming

Sleeping is always a chore. It's hard to get there. It's hard to stay asleep; it's hard to wake up in a way that isn't paralyzing like it is half the time. The only good part about it is dreaming— or, rather, knowing she's entering the Dream Realm and talking herself out of nightmares. It doesn't work most of the time, but sometimes it does.

Whatever the case, Tiff isn't the world's biggest fan of soft pillows and sugar plums in her head. It's a period of time where she can't do research and she can only do what she wants half the time. The nightmares don't help the situation, when she can't shake them.

She sleeps anyway. It's important, and she has learned that she doesn't operate well when she doesn't get sleep at all. The body must rest. With any hope, she'll have a good night— devoid of dreams, just darkness.

She should have known. More than anything, she should have known that she would dream.

She knows what's happening. It has been this way since she first entered the Dream World consciously. She projected her consciousness into the fucked-up-fairy-tale-forest, got diarrheaed on by a spider woman, and immediately started knowing when she was dreaming after the fact. It would seem that walking the dreams of others makes it easier to stay cognizant in her own. She isn't as good at this as Eddy, but she has gotten better.

There's no denying it; there's that distinctive near-purple haze. It's an impossible-to-ignore quality that will make it harder to remember later. From what Tiff has been able to tell, that's just the nature of the realm. It's the reason, along with the nature of the human brain, that makes some dreams so hard to recall.

Not for Tiff. She always remembers. Even when it would be better to forget.

And she knows she's dreaming again when she ends up in the wicker basket for the umpteenth time.

It's a cage she knows well. This dream has recurred off and on since March. It goes the same way it always does: she appears in the wicker cage with the water rising up to her waist while she can only crouch or sit; her family, friends, and peers stand by on the shore, faceless and judging her for her crimes; and Peepaw Zacharias lists off what she has done and condemns her to death.

Yawn. She has seen this more than a dozen times. She knows he's just listing off things she feels guilty about, like letting that Lewis clone die, giving Lewis a second chance that allowed him to betray the group and try to end the world, or going into a rage and stabbing Oneiron the Nightmare King to death after he tried to kill Kepler. She already knows she feels guilty about that. She doesn't need to shake and cry and piss her pants about it.

The pants are non-literal. As she always is in this dream, she's wearing the weird linen slip again. For some reason, that's what her brain associates with her doom and execution. Cringe. That's the only word for it: cringe.

This is stupid. This is her dream. She can wear what she wants. The dream can be molded in her hands like wet sand. She can wear something else.

She taps her leg and molds the fabric through the threads of dream magic under her fingertips. There isn't really a way to explain what she's doing. That's the thing about the Dream World: it's finicky and intuitive, and it's hard to understand why she can do the things that she can do in here. She has tried to unravel it— has scrawled it out with pen and paper, with whiteboard and ink— but the only explanation she has found is that it's a dream, dreams are inherently moldable, and the wider plane in which they exist is fertile with magic and whimsy.

Whatever the case, she does it. It's wet sand and she pokes her finger deep down into it. A tank top and jeans, just like normal, appear where they should have been in the first place.