Herren was there as the leader to introduce me into advanced training, and I got my new room and all. But it was advanced training in name only, because the first thing there, intermediate trainers I’d worked with before were back, putting me into practicing level 3, 4, and 6 dreamwalks properly, using the isolation of the privacy chamber to let me hover on the edge of sleep.

At first, I only managed to do these dreamwalks properly when I was dreamwalking into game-Sarah. It was harder to achieve the appropriate level of sleep through the computer interface, which felt artificial in this regard. But eventually I did. I spent about three weeks at this level before I had finally passed all these tests to the point that they officially graduated me into proper advanced training. At this point the intermediate trainers turned me over to Herren once more.

Herren exclaimed, “Welcome to advanced training, for real this time, Sarah! I have waited a long time for this.”

“Waited for me personally? It’s been what, a couple months?”

“No, I mean that I’ve waited for someone like you to come along. I created World of Dreams because it took me twenty years of playing around in various video games and in the real world to fully understand my powers, and I hoped to be able to help other people like me, if there were any other people like me.”

Aha! I realized Herren is a real person, someone else dreamwalking into the game. I’m not sure it explained their unusual appearance, but it at least explained why they might have a unique character.

I replied, “Well I thank you greatly. How much more training is there for me to master to catch up to your 20 years?”

“It’s hard to say, since I’ve never actually had any other students get this far.”

“What? The advanced training was a myth?”

“No, regular game players do get to enter advanced training, and there is another staff of trainers who help them in the in-game war with dreamwalkers from another country, the ones who caused Umberto to get killed. But those trainers are just game characters, as are the enemy dreamwalkers. As the only other person besides myself who’s ever been able to dreamwalk into player characters here, you’re going to be my personal student from now on.”

“So Herren is a character you dreamwalk into from our real world, just like I do at night?”

“Yes, Herren is a game character I dreamwalk into, and will be the one you interact with, as long as you are comfortable with her intersex state. In real life I am a man named Hiroshi Yamamoto.”

“Why did you choose an intersex character?”

“I didn’t, originally. Herren was supposed to be a female character named Helen.” He enunciated her original name carefully, showing that he was able to pronounce L, unlike some Japanese speakers with lesser command of English.

“Helen, of course,” I replied, realizing that I should have figured that out.

“But when I tried a female character, this is what happened. The same thing happened with other female characters, in some cases worse, with me looking completely like a guy except where it counts. And I was never able to stop it from happening. I stuck with this character as a reminder to work on that, but working on it never helped. I decided that while she’s this way she couldn’t be Helen, and changed her name to Herren, intending to change it back when I solved the problem.”

“I never had any trouble like that when I dreamwalked into male characters or men in real life.”

“I didn’t have this sort of trouble in real life, only in game characters. But I hated being a woman on those occasions when I dreamwalked into a woman. This is a good moment to bring up my moral code.”

Hiroshi paused, and as it was clear I was about to get a lesson, I said, “I’m listening.”

“Avoid taking over people in real life, since in most cases it’s impossible for them to consent to what you do with their body. If you do, stay in them only for short periods and don’t take advantage of them. I could have easily used dreamwalking to cheat and steal my way to a huge fortune, but I was convinced that they’d trace the money back to me and send me to jail even if they couldn’t figure out how I did it.”

“I was equally cautious of dreamwalking into real people. I haven’t been doing it long enough to have considered all those consequences, but I was wary of violating their privacy or stealing from them.”

“Good. As I said, I hated dreamwalking into a woman, but I also realized it might be valuable to know how to pass as a woman, and I resolved to break myself of that particular prejudice. So once I created the game, one of the first things I did was to create a female character to dreamwalk into, with the intent of passing as a woman here in my own private world. But this happened. I’m too powerful when I dreamwalk into female video game characters, and I’ve never been able to dreamwalk into a female character properly.”

“She looks like a normal woman when you play her through the computer interface?”

“I don’t actually use this character that way anymore, so I don’t know. She might be permanently stuck this way. But I did early on, as I was still building and testing the original game back then, and she did revert to a normal female shape back then.”

“How much of the game did you build yourself?”

“Most of the school and the city it’s located in. I have other programmers who deal with it now, as well as designers who built the many other beautiful settings you can dreamwalk into.”

“Do you think that this indicates that you’re a more powerful dreamwalker than me?”

“I wouldn’t say that. You dreamwalked to other planets and games on those planets. I could never do that. We are each stronger in different ways.”

“Thank you. So what do we do next?”

“You probably shouldn’t come to training through the computer anymore, or we can do it only to talk and plan. That was good for your learning up to this point, but I think now it will only hold you back, and you will learn more by coming here by dreamwalking into Sarah. The game character Sarah, I mean.”

“I have referred to her as game-Sarah myself, so if that helps you, use it.”

“I want to learn from you, too, and understand how your power differs from mine. I never experienced the menu interface you once described, and if it’s possible for you to do so, I’d like you to mock up what that looks like. I have a virtual video game studio which is in a different game I can let you into.”

“That sounds good.”

When we ended our talk, I logged off the game. Before long, I had an email from Hiroshi that let me download and install the “game” containing his development studio on my computer, a much smaller game than World of Dreams. The character designer let me save the game before finishing designing my character, so I exploited the same loophole of saving the game here and them shaping my character from within the dreamwalk.

---

That night, I forced myself to sleep a little early, found the new game to dreamwalk into, made my just-like-me character there, and met up with Hiroshi in the studio, who was also using a character designed to look like himself. I had figured out that because he had spent 20 years learning how his power worked in other video games before he made World of Dreams that he was going to be older, but he was a lot older, maybe about 70.

He explained to me how the studio worked. Basically one person was in charge, and anybody else present was an advisor. Once I had game-Sarah in the command chair, though, I was free to jump in and out of the dreamwalk, looking at my menu interface and then drawing parts of it in the studio. Hiroshi was amazed with the complexity of this thing that I had apparently built completely in my head to manage the places I had available, especially where I pointed out that certain lists seemed to go on forever. This entire night’s session was devoted to me building this in the studio and discussing it with Hiroshi, and what his experience was like, which was pretty much like mine when I skipped the menu. We could both just aim somewhere and go there, but he lacked the ability to get a list of everything available.

---

So the next day I excitedly told Mom about it.

“Mom, it worked!”

“What worked, honey?”

“In World of Dreams, I got through a bunch of levels of training and met the guy who created the game, who has a power like mine.”

“Oh, that game I bought you? It was made by somebody who does the same thing you do in your dreams?”

“There are some small differences, but basically yes.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“He’s going to help me learn even more now in private lessons.”

“Private lessons? What is that going to cost?”

“He’s not charging me. He’s learning from me as well. He’s never actually found anyone else who can do what we do, and he’s happy just to be together.”

Dad was less happy when he heard that the guy who was happy to be together with me was a 70-year-old man.

“Dad, it’s not like that! If he wanted a date, he has more than enough ability to go date a supermodel using an equally handsome male body. This is about two people in the world, the only ones who can do what we do, learning how to do it better.”

I met Hiroshi in the computer game version of the studio that evening, and he had tried to depict how it was for him, but it was almost like a comic book. He gets multiple ideas in his head (literally drawn in thought balloons in his depiction in the studio) and he picks one and goes there.

---

That night we started the advanced training for real. It consisted of us meeting in World of Dreams or the studio only to plan where we were going to go, and then going into some fictional, game, or real-world dreamwalk together, as two people in the same scene, learning to recognize each other if there were other people there besides us, and exploring what we could do. We tried to split our time, half of it helping me learn and expand my limits and looking for ways to get around them, and the other half working on his limits. That meant that some of the time I dreamwalked into male game characters while Herren dreamwalked into female characters, always unintentionally turning them masculine in some way. I figured out a way to show Hiroshi where I was going when we went to other real worlds, and he was able to get back to those worlds on his own afterward.

I did start to worry about what Dad had said, though Hiroshi had never made any advances, and one night asked him about it. He reassured me he didn’t need that, and that he did in fact sometimes go on virtual dates through other games, dates he could enjoy better than ones in his real body at his age. Because I had asked, he invited me to one which was an adults-only game. I turned down his invitation to that game, but his point was clear. I’d seen the ways normal games, including World of Dreams, prevented the players from seeing nudity. It didn’t take much to imagine what the adult games would be like. Dreamwalking into the characters allowed me to bypass the nudity rules even in the normal games; I assumed in the adult games I’d experience full-on sex.

So we had lots of happy, clean fun the rest of my time in high school, and we learned from each other what we could. I could never solve his problem with Herren’s body, and he was never able to help me figure out how to sleep without having to dreamwalk somewhere, but we explored a lot. Hiroshi was happy to have someone else he could direct to a specific game or fictional world and go explore there together.

Hiroshi showed me how to detect dreamwalks, though the only ones we were ever able to detect were ones of other players and NPCs within the game. There weren’t any in the real world. We even tried looking in other video games we visited together, but in most cases those characters usually weren’t capable of doing the check, and the few times they were, in games where characters had significant mental abilities, we detected nothing but each other. Likewise, it did not work to dreamwalk into another person and detect dreamwalkers near them; that person wouldn’t have the ability, even to detect.

One question we solved was how had I ended up on that far-off world in that particular game when I started. Herren never actually experienced random dreamwalks, and was never able to help me to simply not dreamwalk in my sleep. His first dreamwalks were visits to the fictional worlds of stories he knew, the kind of things he might ordinarily dream about. He realized his dreams were too real, and that he was controlling his character in the dream. He soon learned to direct his dreams, and learned to dreamwalk into games, into real-life people, and viewing remote settings past and present without inhabiting a character.

I had long since come to understand that the reason I jumped from game to game at first was that those were short, often single-session games. The game ended, either while I was playing, leading me to be immediately thrown out of the dreamwalk, or between my visits. If I refused to choose a destination, dreamwalking took me to where I was last, assuming the game session was still going, the person was still alive and reachable, etc. and otherwise it took me to a random destination. Really random, across all the possible destinations of the same type as my last walk, in all possible worlds and games. Which made it overwhelmingly likely to be on one of the other Earths. I was able to test this by intentionally joining a session of a short game, and then not choosing a destination at the start of the next night. I ended up in random games on random worlds.

At one point I asked Hiroshi about the size of the school. “It’s publicly stated that there are millions of players of World of Dreams, and the school is simply not big enough to hold millions of people. Where are they all?”

“Sarah, there are two reasons for that. The original game was only in Japanese. When we added English, and later other languages, we made copies of the school with everything translated to the language you selected, implemented on separate servers. Players can switch languages at the login screen, but we make them wait when they do so in order to move their account to a different physical server. In the admin area there are portals that allow administrators to move between these servers without having to log out and wait; this is possible because the admin accounts exist on every server.”

“OK, and the second reason?”

“The second reason is that we archive inactive accounts. Unless your character dies, which usually only happens to beginner players who cannot maintain their shields, your account basically lasts forever, but we stop maintaining it and just archive the state of the account after about a month of inactivity. From the perspective of us dreamwalking into the game, those players cease to exist and their rooms are freed up to be given to others. As a result, this building contains about 25,000 active US English accounts. The Japanese server has about 50,000, and other servers have another 60,000 combined. The other several million accounts are archived and they will have the same delay if and when they ever log in again as if they had changed languages. Most of these players played until they got bored with the game, or reached the limit of their abilities and saw they were not going to progress further, but some people come back to it, occasionally years later. Over 2000 of the currently active players have previously been archived at least once.”

“That makes sense. Thanks.”

Although I declined Hiroshi’s offer for virtual dates, I did continue to date in the real world, but only once with Brad after I started advanced training in World of Dreams. I’d found him progressively less interesting anyway, but on that date, Brad tried to drug me and I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention because he succeeded. The drugged state was asleep enough to start me dreamwalking. Once I found myself unexpectedly doing so, I realized immediately what must have happened. I found Brad and took control of him, and found the evidence, an empty drug packet, in his pocket. I am not sure how he expected to get me out of the place we were in unnoticed, but I had him drag my body up to the bar and “accidentally” drop the drug packet right in front of the bartender, who intervened and called police. In Brad’s body, I sat and waited until they arrested Brad. I observed through other people as my body was taken away and examined to confirm what he’d given me. They put me in a hospital room for the night, and I dreamwalked into Mom just for a moment to tell my family what happened and that I was safe, and then I went on with other dreamwalking until a normal wakeup hour. Naturally, that was the end of Brad as a boyfriend.

Word got around at school about what happened, though they told different variations of the story, in some of which I resisted the drug enough to grab somebody’s attention. So I got a lot of looks but few invitations for dates. The other girls set me up with a couple guys but none that I felt interested in dating a second time. One rather timid boy named David did manage to ask me out, and I stuck with him simply because he wasn’t too grabby or pushy, and that way I could truthfully tell other guys (and girls trying to set me up with other guys) that I was taken. It did mean I sometimes had to push him a little. It was only through my asking that we eventually had sex, after also getting the approval of both sets of our parents. But I can’t say I was really all that much into it, and I didn’t push him into doing it a second time.