I Dreamt of Her In Passing

Beneath the skin of the world, behind the eyes of mankind, and under the spell of sleep, the realms of Dream were changing, and under their mercurial, starless skies, the Keepers brooded on the future. There was a cataclysm on the horizon, like a restless Dream at the edge of waking, and in the shadowland where Nightmares brewed, something wrong was stirring.

Saneth was a Dream Keeper in the commission of the Dream King, and in this realm, he was the steward of mankind’s darkest fears. Though it was his role to tender to them, cater to the Homunculi who mocked human form and to the phantasmagoria which made up the fabric of Nightmares, the purpose of his station was not to engender suffering, but to try and help Dreamers overcome the limitations of their trauma and terror. Currently he stood at a window in one such barren Dream, letting his fingers drift to the amulet he wore on his breast; a heart shaped pendant whose spirit always reminded him of his living love. Its power inured him against the rending forces of Nightmares, enabling him to serve his purpose as the Dream King had bid him do.

The world outside the window was obnoxiously bright: sourceless light gleamed on emerald grass and jade tree leaves, practically plastic in their artificiality. It blared from salt-white sidewalks and obsidian black asphalt in the typical surreal contrast of a Dream-state, but the straightness of the lines, the shortness of the grass, the planar uniformity of the unbroken grid lent it a rigidity that hurt Saneth’s mind. Once, he’d stood at this window and gazed out over a roaming countryside where briars which twisted and curled with wicked thorns had embraced jagged stone and thick, impenetrable woods, and silver streams winding through bogs of biting insects. Ancient roads had carved their way through it all, and where once they’d led to dark woods and forked paths, they had been replaced with dark alleys and dead ends where a wrong turn only took Dreamers into a bad neighborhood, which Saneth found banal.

The Dream King himself had set hands to steer countless sleeping minds to steel themselves against the Lion, the Ape, and the Spider which would have seen primitive man huddling in the hollows of trees, and had picked Saneth from a Nightmare of falling ash at the end of the world to help temper the courage of a growing body of Dreaming souls. Once, human civilizations were isolated enough that a horror from the cold north could be filled with different terrors than one from the tropical south, where jungle kingdoms might rise and fall untouched by an empire which conquered its way across the great steppes. Over time, as in the real world, these borders faded and the unique identities which flourished apart began to Dream of colonization, indoctrination, and elimination: a newly forged ambition to homogenize the human experience by snuffing out differences fell in line behind an iron cross, and with it came these crawling, labyrinthine buildings and industrial corridors.

This building was old, but not so old as to have established its prestige, so the world it occupied ate at the edges of it nihilistically. He turned to retreat deeper within, to a room that was queerly undefined with a sort of lucid transparency that lent itself to habitually unoccupied space. Despite the richness of character such a derelict setting should have, the mind glossed over in favor of more familiar fixtures. Vague details in his periphery gave him the sense of moldering waste, but the tepid, dusty smell of the room made him feel its abandonment at a primal level. Every door he passed as he strode down the dim hall beyond coursed with an invisible gust of tangible dread that reeked of a classic theatrical fear. Here were proper Nightmares, the kind cobbled up by mad butchers who found human flesh to be an enticing medium and human minds a curious paint. They hadn’t yet accounted for what freedom would mean to the still-broken monsters of Frankenstein’s various laboratories. Like the house they inhabited, though, these belonged to an abandoned past. Stepping through a broken door frame led him into a derelict hospital building, with steel doors hanging ajar and water pooling on the warped checkered tiles of the floor.

The War had changed everything, with Nightmares of steel, oppression, and brutality on a scale unmatched by any of the riots of historic conquest. Old Wars had carved their way through the sleeping world in their own style, changing the faces of the Homunculi that represented invaders and conquerors, but the innovation of warfare had stayed close cropped to slung stones and bladed edges for a long time, and when its nature began to change the contrast was so stark that Saneth hadn’t been sure what was going on: bloody tools and sharp edges seemed to disappear, to be replaced with fire and explosions; tanks and cars and zeppelins had killed off the dragons and demons, and the briars had become wrought of iron, rust, and blood, bordering trenches filled with lonely death. By the end of The War the landscape of the realm of Nightmares had changed entirely, eschewing the classic medieval landscape for a slowly fading mire of blasted out pits and cold, endless hunger. The people who Dreamed these things into being did so with such stark clarity that the Homunculi had faces, voices, and eyes that wept: these Nightmares were not imagined terrors, but memories, Nightmares lived and now relived with each sleep that chanced to Dream, many of them in institutions like the one he now traversed.

He turned another corner, now finding himself in the clean, albeit still foreboding hall of a darkened school. Where the previous theme was steeped in the identity of a warped expectation of healing, the school was stratifying with an increasingly diverse set of castes, tribalism, and idol objectification, a great experiment in violent indoctrination to a social role whose scars would carry far into adulthood. A cold glow and the whispered hiss of low static spilled from a room filled with budding technology, catching Saneth’s ear and drawing his attention within. At the end of the room, something new and dark was growing: it twisted the lenses on shelves of dusty cameras, and tangled wires so that they bowed and pulsed with a heavy rhythm. To the minds of those who Dreamed of it, it was an open-ended possibility, with an infinite set of potentials, and the silver lining of a good Dream only beginning to brood over its coming horrors and abstractions. The will behind it had a cold sterility, an Otherness, like the lawns and roads outside, that made him uneasy.

As he watched, the formless thing expanded, reaching like ivy across the room, transforming everything it touched with ever increasing speed. Saneth recoiled with dawning horror as it touched each Nightmare, connecting them and those who Dreamed them, blurring the wall between real and imagined. Newly connected horrors hardened, growing bright and chromed, plastic and artificial, filled with naked vulnerability and agoraphobic loneliness. Beneath it all, angry, xenophobic, isolationist outrage. As the twisted Dreamscape washed over him, he gripped his amulet for protection from the storm. Saneth wasn’t sure its protection would be enough. He blinked, it seemed, and everything changed, although in truth years passed in the living world.

Saneth had thought that the changes wrought by the tide of world war were startling, but that had not prepared him for what crawled out of that dark and alien abyss, and the transformation that had come with the tools it brought to bear. The charge Saneth had been given to care for was no longer a place of abstraction where vague horrors stacked up into shadowy, hidden terrors, nor was it a place of ambiguous symbolism or undetailed mystery. It seemed everyone, everywhere, had begun to endure the same fear of some budding apocalypse, to the point where some of the most prominent terrors involved going to work, doing one’s job, and coming home having made no meaningful progress. Existential dread underpinned everything, in many cases seeing hunger and thirst replaced by an unparalleled depth of loneliness which was only made more poignant by the fear of interacting with other human beings. The human race had begun to fear their individual selves at a personal level, both fear of the stranger, and fear that one was the stranger. Rousing from a daze, Saneth came to a stop at a hard-edged door backlit with spiritless light, and stepped through to find a broken Dreamer.

They stood, staring at an image of their greatest horror—their own reflection—replete with body hair, a pudgy, doughy chest, the cellulite, and the painful, diminutive masculinity that had begun to rot from their own loathing. The figure in the mirror had not in any way resembled the Dreamer, whose form, imperceptible to themselves, more closely showed the ideal she wanted to be. The ambiance of the Dream festered with pain, agony, self loathing, and the impacted reinforcement of a world that had an unprecedented insight into that agony, yet filled it with more and more, until it overrode her identity. Nevertheless, this creature shone with a determination and will that, while toxic when turned on herself, had the power to bend the reality of the Nightmare realm into stunning form.

Perhaps it was his sense that the world he’d known was gone, replaced with something simultaneously more efficient and rigorous, and less wholesome to the purpose of what a Nightmare is meant to serve—growth and courage in confrontation—but Saneth felt in that moment that his role had become moot, obsolete, while she, this beautiful titan of a Dreamer, was on the cusp of transformation. Absently, he touched his locket, trying to recall the person whose memory it embodied, and found that it had faded in his mind. His own heart was broken, and his time was up: no matter what the Dream King may have had planned for him, this realm was being consumed and overrun by something more powerful than a Dream Keeper could hope to keep at bay. Not one like him, at least.

Terror unlike any he could remember clawed at him as it dawned on him what he planned to do: this world was not one he recognized, nor one he could adapt to, and it would take someone born within it and saddled with the power to bend primal human fear to their will to ride out the coming storm. He’d not done much, simply taken off his locket, placed it about her neck, whispering that what she saw was not who she was, that a Nightmare held no power if you could see your own heart. The mirror changed, and by the time she finished taking in her true, unmarred reflection, he had gone. He had given up his power as a Keeper, passing the mantle to an unsuspecting Dreamer. With nothing to hold this new Nightmare of pointlessness at bay, darkness finally settled over Saneth, pulling him down, dragging him unwilling into restless sleep.

San started awake, his heart pounding in his chest. He sat, at a desk, in a bland, featureless room, a hundred other shapes occupying desks just like his own. They stared into too-bright screens, which exuded a sense of failure, of outrage, of fear, and of oppression. It was only Tuesday, and he’d nodded off, dreaming that he’d been someone important, during a video call which he’d forgotten to mute. He did not know it, as he did not know himself, but this, too, was a Nightmare: Saneth’s own, and as he left the part he’d played behind in the rapidly fading past, he fell all too easily into the dark, hollow lockstep that consumed the world of Dreams.

In the darkness, IT murmured a cool, low hum of ruthless satisfaction.