So when I woke up inside Dream High School, I expected the beats of the story to follow the same path they always have. Except … I wasn’t rushing down the hall to class. The hallway was busy, instead of the usual eerie emptiness of a school hallway five minutes after the bell has rung. This time, it was bustling, full of people I only vaguely recognized. Not the kind of recognition where you can place their name, or even remember their face, but the kind of knowing that prickles the back of your neck, speaks to something deep in your lizard brain.

And then: the humming. That faint inhuman chorus that I heard in the black space. A dream that now makes a lot more sense to me given what happened next.

Just as before, a familiar figure was in the distance, just down the hall, on the other side of a sea of people. My brother stood, not in the strange, still way he stood in the void space, but like he was himself, in school. Backpack slung over his shoulder, looking down at his phone, a slight smile on his face like he was texting one of his dumb high school friends he’s since lost touch with or flirting with a new girl. I just watched him for a moment, as he slid his phone in his pocket and started to walk down the hallway. That was when I noticed the hallway was different than my usual Nightmare High School. It was wider, more spacious.

That was because it wasn’t mine.

“Aaron!” I called out, like I somehow subconsciously knew I was in his high school. Like I wanted to ask him how he made the hallway wide.

He didn’t respond—why would he have? Should he have? If it had been my dream? UGH okay I am getting way ahead of myself.

I called out. He didn’t respond. So I started to walk toward him, but there were so many people and just the feeling of being back in high school with all those people who never liked me and never even tried to like me, I was starting to get overwhelmed, like this was the anxiety dream I always have, but with a different flavor, the crush of people creating the claustrophobia, not the narrow hallway, and all I wanted was for everyone around me to go away so I could talk to my brother, for them to just vanish into thin air and then—

They did.