“We don’t go into other people’s dreams. We just run into each other.” He pauses to hand me one of the beer mugs our server has just brought us. “Ookini. Anyway, here’s the way my grandfather explained it to me. He was way more poetic than I am, and I’m drunk right now, so bear with me.

“Just like when we’re awake, we all share the same plane of existence: I’m sitting here, you’re sitting there, that man is standing way over there by the door, those people who just left are, I don’t know, going to their families who live an hour away, over ‘there,’ halfway around the world, your family is ‘there.’ We might be close, or far, but basically, we’re all in one wide expansive place — this city, Japan, Earth — and it’s the same when we dream. It’s all one big place, we’re just in different parts of it, at different times, but ninety-nine percent of people don’t know it. We think that we’re asleep, in our beds, not going anywhere. Okay, so maybe physically, yes, our bodies are still there — but ‘us,’ when we dream, we go far, far away, and we all go to the same place. But since we forget most of our dreams, or we don’t even realize we’re dreaming, when we come to it’s like we never left our beds. You with me so far?”

I nod. In my head, my sober voice tells me this man is deluded, but Drunk Cybelle finds this to be an interesting conversation. “Go on.”

“Okay. Ninety-nine percent, that’s what I said, right? Well, then you have that one percent. Or maybe more, or less — whatever — and they know they’re dreaming. They realize it all of a sudden, like, ‘Whoa, shit, I’m dreaming!’ But it’s not something they can hold onto. They still get sucked back into thinking it’s all real, and they just keep going along with it. It’s just a fleeting moment and poof. That’s it. Back to slaying dragons and showing up to work naked.”

“That’s another thing I wanted to ask you. Do dragons and monsters and stuff exist in this ‘other’ world, too?”