“It’s nice,” I said, feeling SUPREMELY awkward as I looked at Damien’s haggard face, the circles under his eyes somehow even more pronounced. I wondered if he’d kept himself up all night in anticipation and was about to ask when—

“Right, let’s get to it,” he said, abruptly walking over to the couch, throwing himself onto it, and closing his eyes.

And that was that. The niceties were over and we were getting straight to the point. And that was where the straightforwardness ended.

The moment I dove into Damien’s head, I knew something was wrong. Most dreams are fixed locations—a classroom, a magical land, a grocery store, outer space. Everything from the mundane to the fantastical, sometimes one location through the whole dream, sometimes rapidly changing. They usually have blurred edges—like a video game that hasn’t fully rendered—but each location is at least coherent.

This was … not. More solid than the flashes of images and emotions I got from him when we were both at the AM, but no easier to grasp. It was a cornfield, long stalks stretching into the sky, but also the woods, spindly branches hanging over my head, scraping my skin, ocean water lapping at my feet. A patchwork of nature, not a beautifully constructed place crafted from imagination, but a jumble of memories and feelings clashing together to make an unnavigable maze.

“Damien?” I called out. Other than calling out Aaron’s name in those first few dreams, I don’t typically announce myself, instead choosing to familiarize myself with the materials in front of me. But I didn’t know what to do with this.

There was a sound. A crunching of leaves, a wave breaking against the shore, the rustle of wind through cornstalks. I spun around, trying to find the source, only to discover that everything had vanished. I was suddenly in a motel room. This, at least, was comprehensible.

I started to wander around, looking for the seams of the world, looking for anything out of the ordinary that I could use to construct something that might comfort Damien. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to change—the dream so far had been frustrating but not a nightmare.

It was like just having that thought brought the nightmare along.

The ground shook, the motel bed falling through the floor before I’d taken more than a few steps. It became a grave, a pale hand clawing its way out, a tall man pulling himself up from underneath, crawling toward me with skeletal arms. I thought fast—the floor had swallowed up the bed, maybe it could open up and take this corpse away with it. I centered my feet, imagined the floor underneath the crawling man opening up and then it did, taking him into the black, but it just kept opening and soon I was falling too, down down down down—