I walked into someone’s dream and it was … it was like that blank canvas at first, like it is when I dream myself now, but then the canvas started to come to life. The AM volunteer—a younger doctor I think—started to dream about a plane, for some reason. Initially, it was just a boring old plane—cramped seats, stale air, too many people. But then I remembered how I got rid of all the other high schoolers in Aaron’s dream, how I had a thought and they just vanished.

I half expected the simple act of remembering I did that to send all the plane people away. But apparently things are a little bit more complicated based on the person. And I started to feel that. There was something familiar about Aaron’s dream. Not just the high school setting, or the fact that he was there, but the feeling of his dreamworld felt like a place I’d been before. Maybe it’s because we’re genetically related, maybe it’s because he’s Atypical too and this doctor wasn’t.

It took me a few more minutes—seconds, an hour, who knows, time moves very differently in the dreamworld—to clear the plane, but I did it, watching each individual person disappear in front of my eyes. For some of them it took longer—if I let my concentration slip, they wouldn’t disappear or they’d fade away unbearably slowly. I didn’t see the doctor himself anywhere, but that had been the case for most of these tests. I guess that’s part of why this guy volunteered—apparently he rarely dreams about himself and rarely has nightmares. People’s brains are wild.

There was something slightly morbid about watching random strangers disintegrate into nothing, knowing that I was the cause. I had to keep reminding myself that they weren’t real. Well, maybe they were real people in real life—images of people the doctor actually knows instead of truly random dream conjurations—but they weren’t real here. Nothing in dreamworld is real, which should be scary, but it’s incredible. There’s no consequence. I asked the doctor if he’d felt anything when I vanished all the plane people and then the plane and he just said, “Oh, I was dreaming about a plane?” because he didn’t remember a single thing about his own dream.