Umberto didn’t respond to my note. I guess I wasn’t too surprised. Elissa never interacted with the notes I left in Tommy’s game; it was Tommy doing so, though he thought my responses were coming from Elissa at first.

I went down to start my lesson. It wasn’t Minda, who apparently just deals with the new people coming in, giving them their shielding training. This was a man who asked me to call him Doug. He had three other students who were at different stages, so each of us were getting individual instruction at intervals with the others. There was also a woman, Lisa, who was monitoring the ones who were dreamwalking. When Doug came to speak to me, he said he’d visited with Umberto when I wasn’t here, and made sure he was making the shield correctly.

Little by little I’m figuring out how these characters work. Doug could say that, because he was an NPC designed to have dialogues with players. Umberto couldn’t, because he’s a player character who does just what the player asks for, though it’s clearly possible for him to take some kinds of actions during time the player isn’t here to move the story forward, and there were details of the interaction with Doug that wouldn’t be possible if I wasn’t dreamwalking into the game world the way I was doing. You could say I’ve moved the story off track.

I was asked to read a bunch of theory next. I read this slowly and carefully, comparing it with both my very limited experience in the kind of dreamwalking they do here in the tutorial and in what I have been doing in my real-life dreams. They recognized multiple levels of dreamwalking.

• At the most basic level, it was for viewing only. In this case you would be incorporeal in the dream and you could visit real-life locations and what they called collective dreams, in the present or in the past. This matched one of the kinds of dreamwalking I can do.
• The second level was dreamwalking into a construct. The construct has to have certain properties, and this is what I did in the tutorial. Those are basically robots that the machinery of the tutorial projects the student’s image onto, so it looks and feels like the student and makes them more comfortable for their first dreamwalking experience. It’s possible to bring items in or out of these dreams, and that is what happened with the object the construct acquired in the tutorial. I hadn’t encountered this, or had I? Did the player characters of video games constitute constructs? It might explain why only player characters, and specifically already created player characters in existing sessions could be entered.
• The third level was dreamwalking into a sleeping, dreaming person’s dream. This level was limited to taking the first-person position, basically experiencing the same dream that the sleeping person was experiencing. Whatever sort of body the person was dreaming themselves to have would be your body for the dreamwalk.
• The fourth level was dreamwalking into a wakeful person. At this level, you would not have any control, or be able to acquire items, but you would experience the sensations of that person.
• The fifth level was dreamwalking into a collective dream. They had an elaborate way of describing it, but it was clear that this was my equivalent to dreamwalking into a fictional world. You would occupy one of the characters and be able to control that character, and bring items into or back from the dream, but only “unimportant” characters could be so occupied. Essentially, extras. This was how, for instance, I’d occupied a random Pigwarts student.
• The sixth level was controlling a person’s dream. This was comparable to the third level, but you’d be able to direct the person’s actions within the dream. And this only applied to the dreams of people without the ability to control their own dreams, but that was true of most people who had not learned dreamwalking.
• The seventh level was dreamwalking into a sleeping, but not dreaming person. The only kind of dreamwalk possible in this case was controlling the person’s body. So this was like when I had occupied Tommy’s and Becky’s bodies. Again, transfer of objects was possible.

And there were more levels possible, but they were so advanced that they didn’t rank them. Dreamwalking into a dreaming person, not into their dream but controlling the body. Dreamwalking into a wakeful person and controlling their body. Dreamwalking into major figures in collective dreams. And doing some of the other types of dreamwalks at a great distance could also be considered to be among these advanced levels.

There were other concerns also. As was true for me, these dreamwalkers had to be asleep to dreamwalk. And they had to be able to control their dreams to be able to direct them into a particular instance of one of the scenarios they had listed. It was possible for the sleep and the dream to be induced, which happened in the tutorial, and within that induced dream, the tutorial machinery directed me on how to control my dream and go where I wanted. We were expected to learn how to do all that without the special machinery, and I was guessing this wasn’t a problem for me, but it wasn’t a given that just because I can do that in dreams within my own body that I could do the same thing when Umberto was dreaming.

And there were other practical considerations. You needed to be in a place where you weren’t likely to be woken up (dreamwalkers were a bit tougher to be roused from their sleep than other people, but they could be roused out of their dreamwalks), and most importantly you need to make sure you don’t need to go to the bathroom, because your body will wake you from sleeping for that purpose equally as well as it does for anybody else.

That, I decided, is why Umberto had to go to the bathroom. It’s a part of the game. It probably wasn’t a part of Death March 6, and so Elissa never did it. Games don’t have to reflect reality, and they can reflect exactly as much of reality as their designers want to, and I’d already experienced games which had different levels of accuracy in terms of various aspects of reality.

When I indicated I was done studying the material, Doug came over and questioned me briefly, and then started setting up my dream control lesson. I was going to get induced sleep, but no instruction, and just aiming to control the dream and not dreamwalk. But even before that, I was asked to go to the restroom and eliminate all that I could. Remembering that I was in a man’s body, I took Umberto into the men’s room to do that. When I got back, he had me lie down on a slightly inclined bed, and he fit a device over my head.

“Before I turn this on, I need you to raise your shield to the highest level. Because the machine will be inducing your dream, it will be able to record it for us, but exactly what sort of dream is induced depends on what is in your mind, and how you direct it is entirely up to you as well. You will write a short report about the ways you directed your dream and one of our instructors will compare that to the recording of your dream to determine your level of control.”

“Doug, remember me? I’m the one who is dreamwalking into this body from afar because I literally cannot avoid dreamwalking whenever I sleep. I don’t know whether that will be true here or not, but I want to point out that I may dreamwalk during this lesson. Where should I go if I find myself in such a state?”

“Oh, right. Can you stick to level 1 and just view something intangibly?”

“I should be able to. I have directed my real body’s dreams into that sort of dreamwalk.”

“Be aware that there are parts of this facility that are shielded from viewing in that way, in fact, most of it. Anywhere else in the city, or tourist sites anywhere else in the world should be fine.”

“OK. Shields going to max,” I said as I did so and got comfy in the bed.

As far as I could tell, I was immediately coming to the menu of dreamwalk locations, and I went into viewing, figured out which world from among the ones at the top of the list was this one, and then picked something. It was a retired warship that had been turned into a museum. It was in another part of this world where it was nighttime and the museum was closed, but that didn’t hinder viewing in this way one bit, so I explored the place and made note of where I went to write it down later.

After a while, the machine brought me out of the dream, and I wrote my report.

As I turned it in, Doug noted, “That’s quite a bit more than I usually get from students in this lesson. I’m sure you showed exquisite control and you’ll be able to skip to the next lesson next session. But it does take time for someone to verify that, so you are done for today.”

I took Umberto back to his apartment, and left his body, but since I still had some time left, I went to visit Tommy. He had left me a note:

Would it work, to bring something out that I had brought into the game and left there? Apparently it survived being there. And, I just remembered, my lingerie survived. I guess it's only game items that can't survive coming back to the real world. Would I use it? Heck, who knows. It could be useful.

I switched over into the Death March 6 game, arriving in a setting which looked entirely unfamiliar because Elissa was outside with the sun shining, and I found the dress in her pack. Before I left, my curiosity had me check one other thing as well. Since I’d somehow never removed Elissa’s panties during all my sessions and clothing changes here, and I had thought about it recently, I had to check. Sure enough, Elissa had no openings of any sort between her legs. It was all smooth flesh. She could not possibly had gone to the bathroom, nor could she have had sex with Colonel Bongardo. The game didn’t model those bodily functions.

A moment later I was back in Tommy, carrying the dress, and I wrote:

And by this time it was actually time for me to get up.

---

The next night, I couldn’t find Umberto’s game. Thinking he may have messed up the hole, I popped into one of the other abandoned games, this one a female character, and went up, completed the tutorial, and talked to Minda.

“Hey, Minda, it’s Sarah. I couldn’t get into Umberto. Could you have someone check if he’s messed up the hole that lets me in?”

“Oh, Sarah, I’m sorry. He messed up the other way. One of our enemies got into his head and took his body over, and he ran amok in here. We ended up having to kill Umberto to protect the facility.”

I hung my head down, partly in mourning, and partly in shame that I’d gotten Umberto killed, most likely, by pushing him beyond his abilities.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Did you want to start again with this woman?”

“Actually, no. I’ve got a better idea, and I’ll try to get back here in a day or two.”

I spent the rest of the night sightseeing in view-only mode, mostly in World of Dreams’s world. There were many elaborate and beautiful sites that I’m sure were included to give game players interesting things to see.

---

The next morning I asked Mom for a favor.

“Mom, can you get me a copy of that game, World of Dreams?”

“Do you think the game can help you with your real dreams?”

“Yes, actually. But I was piggybacking on another player’s game session and the players there learn early on to block out dreamwalkers. So I only had access to the characters of players who quit really early. This left them really weak in terms of being able to block people out, and the character I was in got his mind invaded while I wasn’t there to shield him, and my own school’s staff ended up killing him to protect the school.”

“So you’re going to create a new character from scratch?”

“Exactly. A character who won’t be weak in the least. My intent is to make her as powerful as me.”

“That sounds like a plan. And this is exactly the kind of way we can support you, so yes, I’ll do it.”

I came home from school to find a copy of the game waiting for me. After dinner, I started the game. My goal was to stop and save the game at the earliest possible point, with the character defined as little as possible, and go into the game in my dreams, overriding the normal character creation rules to create a powerful character who would be able to manage my abilities and shield the way I needed. In Tommy’s game I was able to override some of the normal rules by dreamwalking in, so there was a chance it could work here too.

It turned out to be possible to save from the character creation screen, but I had to do a couple things. I had to decide she was going to be female before I got a save option, but I hadn’t yet specified her appearance. At the point of saving I was also required to name my character, so I named her Sarah, but that was all I defined.