“You were dreaming.” I breathed, the pieces finally clicking together in my head. “That’s where we are. We’re in your dream.”

There was a long pause, completely silent. But the silence was wrong. If we had been in our living room, we would have heard the sounds of the street, birds chirping, the house creaking. People think they know what silence is, but dream silence—the silence manufactured by a sleeping brain—is a kind of pure quiet that is impossible to describe.

“What?”

“What were you dreaming about before you saw me?”

“Rose, I—I’m awake, I have to be awake. Why do I feel like I’m on drugs?”

“That’s just what it feels like at first,” I said, remembering the way my brain felt like Technicolor jelly the first time I lucid dreamed and how that feeling was impossible to imagine again the moment I woke up.

“What what feels like?” he asked. He was beginning to panic. His voice was doing the thing it did when our parents were away for the weekend and we broke an antique vase while playing “the floor is lava.” I’d been convinced that we could glue the vase back together (I was wrong) and Aaron was convinced that we’d both be grounded for a year (we weren’t).

“Lucid dreaming,” I answered as calmly and authoritatively as possible.

“Rosie, what the fuck is going on?”

Before I could answer, the floor turned to lava.

And then I woke up.

I was surprised to find that it was already morning, the dream still ringing in my head, clear as a bell. I just lay there for a second, serenely turning the dream over in my mind, examining it, before the full weight of what had just happened hit me like a truck.

I bolted up in bed like I’d just been shot through with adrenaline and burst out of my room, only to find Aaron already marching down the hallway toward me.

“Uh … Rose?” he demanded.

“Yeah, so…”

“What…”

“That’s never happened before…”

“Did you…?”

“I think so? You remember…?”

“Yeah … and then the floor…”

“Turned to lava. Yeah, that definitely has never happened before.”

I have a lot of questions. But at least I have one answer: looks like I’m Atypical after all.

community/TheUnusuals post by n/thatsahumanperson

So … anyone ever heard of dreamdivers?

December 22nd, 2016

Dear Mark,

The one upside to being trapped in this hellhole: whatever they’ve got me hooked up to is letting me sleep, dreamlessly. You wouldn’t know this, because I was always the one who was up first, the one who barely slept so that you could, choosing instead to keep an eye on the motel door, through the venetian blinds, out the windshield, wherever we were, to keep us safe. A lot of good that did. We were doomed from the beginning—manipulator versus mimic. It was always gonna go sour.