I had a bunch of weird dreams last night. In one I was a man wearing overalls who jumped a lot. In one I was flying a spaceship, and in another driving a car. In real life I’m a 15-year-old girl in high school and I haven’t even started driving, but I didn’t have any trouble in the dream. But those were more normal dreams. The dream played out and I experienced it.

The last dream I had was different. I really felt like I was there, in the dream. I was a male athlete, not a super-built bodybuilder type, but still strong with good ability to run and jump and throw. I had just barely started dating a boy my age named Brad, but I could have easily imagined in the future having a boyfriend like that. In this dream I was that guy. It felt strange to me to be a guy, but I didn’t have any trouble doing it, and in some ways it actually felt good. I was running and jumping and living in that body. It was so realistic! I could feel the breeze on my skin, and when I was close to too many of the guys, I could smell the sweat. I could hear the shouts and grunts some of the guys made when they jumped or threw things. I could feel the impact in the sand when I did the long jump. I could feel my athletic cup holding my junk in place, junk that I didn’t have in real life.

I was part of a group of similar men. We were practicing track and field events; maybe it was the decathlon. There was a trainer at each station explaining what it was we were supposed to do, and I wandered from one to another in no particular order, practicing them, carrying a small gym bag with me that had a hand towel, a water bottle, and a few other things in it, and enough empty space for the clothes I was wearing, that I would put in a marked area while I was practicing there. There were running and hurdle events and also some throwing and jumping ones, and the lanes of the track were divided into two sections. On the inside of the track they were doing the short run and hurdle events, and on the outside they were doing longer runs where you needed to make one or more full laps.

The stadium we were in was initially empty, but some spectators started coming in, and by the time maybe a tenth of the stadium was full, they told us practice was over and to head to the locker room. I thought that meant I was going to shower and see all the other guys naked, and I didn’t know whether to be excited or scared about that. But that didn’t happen. It seemed like as soon as we got in there, they were lining us up to enter the stadium again, in alphabetical order by surname. A panel I noticed on my bag said McCaffrey, so I figured out that was this guy’s name and I got into line when called. As we got in line, they handed each of us a small card which had a schedule, with no times but just the sequence in which we were going to do the events, which fit into a slot on our gym bags on the other side of the bag from the one with the name.

When we did reenter the stadium, it was full of spectators. I went around and tried my best at the various events, but I had only had the one little practice session and didn’t do very well. I was OK with the running, with the power in that body; in fact, I won one heat. But the throwing and jumping events required more specific skills I had barely practiced. While I had no problem throwing and jumping, I wasn’t doing it optimally, which was what was needed here. At the end they announced the top scores and which people qualified to move on. I didn’t, and the dream ended then, so I still didn’t experience the showers in the locker room. I don’t remember any more dreams before I woke up.

I went on with my day, with nothing unusual happening.

---

Bang! Bang! Somebody is shooting at me!

I hid behind a wall. A boring, gray stone wall. I had no idea where I was, but everything I could see in any direction in the dim light here was made of the same gray stone.

At this moment I realized I was armed. The large pistol wasn’t even holstered; I was carrying it in one hand. I couldn’t remember ever shooting a gun before, not in real life, though I had done so in video games a little, so I wasn’t sure why I had one. Nevertheless, I did. It seemed real enough.

I heard footsteps approaching, and backed a few more steps from the corner along the wall I was hiding behind, keeping a close eye on the corner. The steps got closer, and finally the thing which first appeared around the corner was a gun. I ducked and he shot over my head. I aimed and fired the moment I saw a body there, and the body slumped to the ground.

The body was wearing some kind of military uniform. Then I realized that I too was wearing a military uniform, but a different one. I’m not a member of the military! What was going on? I wondered whether it was another of those dreams. This time, I was a woman, though an older one than I really am. I don’t think they let women into combat here, so it must be a dream. Not that I actually wanted to do something like this.

I went back to the place from which I had shot this man, sat down on the ground, and waited. More footsteps, another gun around the corner, another shot from me, and another body, in same uniform as the first, fell right on top of the first.

This happened a few more times, and then it seemed like no more came, and I eventually fell asleep there.

---

I woke up in my own bed, in my own body, and in my own clothes, not a military uniform. That horrible shooting thing had all been a dream. A nightmare.

Summer was winding down, and while Dad was at work, Mom took me shopping for school stuff. Most of it was boring, but I did get some new clothes, which would have been fun if I wasn’t restricted to school dress code, which instead made it only kind of OK.

Brad called after dinner. His family was still on vacation in California, and it was before dinner time for him. They were going to be flying back tomorrow, and I couldn’t wait to see him again.

---

I was back in the gray stone maze again. Not in the same place as last night, because the pattern of walls I was looking at seemed different. But part of the same place, definitely.

I mostly hid and waited, like last night. But I realized I was pretty hungry, which made me think about the box I had noticed standing neatly near one of the walls on the other side of the space I was in. It looked like a box of crackers.

I ran across to get it, and managed to get there without anybody shooting at me. There was a bottle of water standing next to it. I thought that might be good to have, so I holstered the pistol to pick up both items. This spot was not sheltered the way the other spot was, so I ran back to my former location.

It was indeed a box of crackers. That was all I could say about it. It didn’t have any particular taste or anything. Before I knew it, I had eaten the whole box, and drunk what was labeled as 1 liter of water. But I felt better.

A few more shooters came and I took them out.

---

What was it with this dream? Two nights in a row in the military.

Brad was traveling today, and he texted me from the airport to keep me updated. His family couldn’t get a direct flight, so he was changing planes in Dallas, and between that and the time zone difference, it was going to be late when he got home, so I wasn’t going to be able to see him tonight.

I couldn’t really think about anything else, though, so I pretty much wasted the day.

---

The shooting again.

I was starting to get more confident with the gun, so when I was feeling hungry again, I ventured on out into the maze. I shot several guys without hiding and waiting for them, but I wasn’t seeing any more food.

Finally, when I was shooting one guy, I took two shots but for the second shot, the gun just clicked. It was empty. Fortunately, I had killed the guy I was shooting at with my first shot.

The dead guys all had guns, so I went to the last two I’d killed and picked up their guns. They seemed identical to what I was carrying. When I actually thought to look for it, it was easy to spot the small window that showed the number of bullets left. None of the guns had much ammo, but some of the men had been carrying full spare clips of ammo. I figured out how to eject the empty clip from the gun I was carrying and reload it with a full one. There was a small button on the bottom of the handle which released the empty clip. The new one slid right in.

This gave me the bright idea to also see if any of the dead guys were carrying food. I found two boxes of the crackers and one bottle of water, and ate one box and drank the water.

I was tired of this, though, so I found another safe looking spot and sat there, holding the crackers in one hand and the pistol in the other. I felt hungry and wanted to eat the crackers, but I don’t think I actually did it.

---

I woke up again, realizing I had been in the weird stone maze shooting people in my dreams for the third night in a row. But something was different this morning. I had the box of crackers in bed with me!

Weird. Some generic crackers, I guess; the box just said CRACKERS on it. I opened it and pulled out a cracker and ate it. Kind of bland, but not stale. Pretty much a generic cracker, I guess. Almost anything else I could eat here was better, so I closed the box back up.

I spent the morning preparing myself and Mom took me to Brad’s house, where I had lunch and then spent the afternoon with him. We spent a lot of time talking about his experiences in California. I wished I could have gone with him but Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me.

---

This time, when I realized I was in the maze again, as soon as I had a moment where nobody was shooting at me, I stopped to take stock of myself.

My body here was similar in size to my real body, but more muscular. Maybe if I worked out a lot, I could look like this. I wore a camouflage jacket and kind of longish shorts. I might be an inch or two taller, and a cup size bigger in the bust. I wore a belt with a holster for the gun I had been using, which had slots for four clips of ammo, three of them full. But I was also carrying a small backpack. In the pack was a dozen more ammo clips, two of the boxes of crackers and a bottle of water, an amulet apparently made of bronze and jade, a small bag of gold coins, and a notepad with attached pen. I flipped through the pad but it was blank.

I went on with the running and shooting. I was getting better with the gun and using it more. I ran out of bullets again, and reloaded with a spare clip. I found and ate one more box of crackers and found and drank one more bottle of water. Now that I had learned to recognize the clips, when I found two more during my run, I stashed them in the backpack. And like always happened, at one of my resting points, the dream ended and I woke up. I’m not sure if the dream actually lasted longer, but I know I did a lot more instead of just sitting around in a corner.

---

What’s that, four nights now?

While I was getting dressed, I realized something. I had left the box of crackers on top of my dresser yesterday morning, but I didn’t remember seeing it in the evening and it wasn’t there now.

I searched the house and asked Mom about it. She said she hadn’t been in my room while I was out and hadn’t seen it. But I was sure it was there.

I spent a lot of the day with Brad again and forgot about the box.

---

It happened again, the fifth night in a row. This was getting really weird.

I forgot about the crackers while I was out with Brad again today, but in the evening at home I remembered. I decided to try an experiment. If I could bring crackers from the dream back home, it served to reason that maybe I could take other crackers there. I took a box of real crackers from home back to bed with me, and, remembering how hungry I was in the game for the crackers that I ended up bringing home, I went to sleep with the thought of having these tastier crackers there with me.

---

Sure enough, I arrived in my dream holding the box of crackers. The dream-me was hungry, so I ate the whole box. While the other crackers had not tasted much like anything in the dream, and tasted bland in real life, these tasted like they should in the dream.

The backpack now had only one other box of crackers, three water bottles, and 9 clips, along with the amulet, coins, and notepad. I had noticed that the contents of the pack and my location changed between dreams. After about a week of coming here every night, I had this epiphany: If this was a real place I’m traveling to, which I was assuming was true since the crackers were real, it must mean I was animating some other person’s body, probably while they were sleeping.

I went on as usual, but when I sensed I was coming near the end of my run, and found one of those convenient resting points, I got out the notepad. Clearly whoever I was possessing during these dreams lived when I wasn’t here, so maybe I could leave them a note. I wrote on the first page “Dear alternate body, Hi! I’m Sarah. I’m a high-school student from Atlanta.” Then I stayed there with the pad in my hand, hoping this body’s real self would notice it, since the pad appeared to have not been used.

---

Tommy finished his homework and went to his room and started up his computer, and as soon as it was ready, started up his latest favorite game, Death March 6. I hope I can figure out why my character is doing things between sessions and how I can learn to control it, he thought to himself while the game loaded. Once he noticed this was happening, he jotted down the stats at the end of each session and the start of the next. He learned that Elissa was playing about 5 or 6 hours a day without him, and running forward at twice his pace, but apparently at the expense of not shooting stuff. She was missing a lot of potential XP from doing that. She fired at about 1/5 his rate, but she hit more often, 72% to his 49%. Bullets weren’t scarce, though. She should shoot more, even if it meant she missed more.

When it did load, he noticed first that his character was once again in an unfamiliar place. This time, though, she had something in her hand which wasn’t her gun. He examined the item and found it was her notepad. Tommy thought, Oh yeah, I remember that notepad in the pack. It seemed like it should be important somehow, so I kept it, but I haven’t found a use for it yet. When he looked again, he noticed there was something written on it. After a moment, he figured out how to read the notepad, and the image of the page filled half of his screen, with a reduced view of the world on the other side. There was a very short message apparently hand-written on it.

She’s a high-school student, huh? You mean I’m sharing this character with another player? Tommy thought. Weird. I’m not sure I like the idea, but now that I know this, I should write her notes and maybe we can help each other learn something.

When he entered his note, it came out as typed letters on the page, rather than handwriting. He didn’t see a way to draw on the pad, as would have been required to hand-write the note like Sarah had. He wrote back below her note on the same page:

He put the pad away and continued his game.

When I next returned to the dream, I pulled the pad out of the pack and was glad to see I’d established communication. But I was confused by the content of the message. “Dear Sarah,” the message began. “I’m Tommy. I’m also in high school. I named my character Elissa.”

So somebody responded, but it’s somebody else who visits here like me and not the girl herself. And it’s a boy. Being a girl here might feel strange to him.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t identify with the body as much as I do, and gave her a different, female name. I’ve always just considered her my dream self and if I had to name her, she would have just been named Sarah. But now that I know, I can call her Elissa too.

The message continued, “I live in Fardhop, in Gyllaria. Where’s Atlanta? I’ve never heard of it.”

He lives in some country I’ve never heard of. He knows English, apparently, but he doesn’t know major cities in the United States. What the heck?

“Are you enjoying Death March 6? You shoot well, but you should shoot more and run less.”

What?! Enjoying it? Does he think this is some sort of game? And how does he know how I shoot? Is he watching me?

And I noticed another weird thing. It looks like he typed the message to me, on an old-fashioned typewriter where there were small defects in the shapes of the letters. Every lower case e has the same small notch missing from the top. My Dad has one of those, but except to show me what a typewriter is, and to let me play with it, and once to fill out a printed form, nobody’s ever really used it, since we have computers with printers that can write things more easily. Where would Tommy find a typewriter in this place, and why, when there’s a pen attached to the pad? And how would he type on the paper in the spiral-bound notebook anyway? Something doesn’t make sense here.

The first page of the small pad was now full, so I flipped to the next page of the pad and took up almost a whole page with my reply:

I put the pad away and got moving, thinking about trying to shoot more, and watching not only for food and drink but for ammo clips. If I shot more I was going to need to pick up more of those.

At my last rest stop of the night, I found three of those gold coins in a corner. It wasn’t something I had been looking for, but it’s obviously money. Tommy had about 50 of them in a bag in the backpack, so I’d figured they must show up somewhere, but this was the first I noticed any. I held onto one to see if I could bring it home, stashed the other two in the bag with the others, and squeezed in a little more on my note:

---

Tommy read the note. He was excited that Sarah wrote a lot more. But now he realized that he’d made a mistake. Sarah isn’t really another player, he thought. That “Atlanta” thing should have been a tip-off. She’s the real Elissa... except the real Elissa doesn’t really live in this place, but somewhere else, and she’s been cursed into coming here in her dreams. And naturally, just at the point I started playing. And it’s not a game for her. Do I fess up that I am playing a game, or should I pretend that I’m coming here the same way she does?

Oh, and there’s a weird aspect of this curse that lets her take stuff out of the game, or at least she thinks so. She really did find two coins, though. My G.P. has been at 54 since I killed that boss three days ago, but now it’s 56. He searched the area but didn’t find another coin anywhere nearby. If she found three coins, she really did take one with her, somehow.

Tommy couldn’t think of any way to explain being able to see her shooting statistics without admitting he was playing the game, so he wrote:

It filled two pages of the notepad. Tommy thought, It’s fun to have this role-playing element. I wonder how detailed the A.I. is. It does seem like Sarah really responded to my first message, but I bet they’re looking for certain words and phrases. There are only so many ways to say where I’m from, and they found that and included it in Sarah’s reply.

---

I awoke from my eighth night in the horrible place I had learned was called Death March 6, holding the coin in my hand. It was heavy for such a small coin. I thought it might be real gold. I knew gold was heavier than most other metals, and it looked right, but I couldn’t really tell.

Then I realized: “Aha! Evidence! Now I can tell other people about the dreams and they can’t think I’m completely nuts, because I have the coin.” I examined it more closely. It didn’t look like any coin I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t from Gyllaria, that place Tommy said he was from. It said “Dystrophania” and had a face of I guess their president or king or whatever they had there on one side. The other side simply had the words “One Gold Piece.”

I showed it to Mom and Dad in the morning. When I tried to explain where it came from, they were worried about me, but since I was OK, they said we’d talk about it in the evening so I wasn’t late for school or Dad late for work.

I took the coin to school, and asked my chemistry teacher how I could determine if this was real gold.

“Well, for starters, we could weigh it, estimate its volume, and from that compute a density.” A high-precision scale said it weighed 8.316 grams. Its diameter was 25.1 mm and its thickness was 0.91 mm. This gave it a density of about 18.5 g/cc. “This is slightly less dense than pure gold, but gold in coins traditionally is alloyed with a small amount of silver, which is a lighter metal, because pure gold is very soft and the silver helps make the coins more durable. There are few other metals this dense, and none of them look like gold. So it’s probably real gold. It doesn’t look like any gold coin I’ve ever heard of, though. ‘One gold piece?’ Who writes that on a coin? It looks like something from a game, or would if it didn’t seem real.”

“Yes, I thought it looked like it was from a game, too. Thanks,” I replied as he handed me back the coin.

“Keep in mind, if that coin is real, it probably has about 7.5 grams of gold in it. The price of gold has shot up lately, to nearly 60 dollars a gram, so that coin may be worth over $400. Keep it safe.”

Wow. $400 for this coin, and Tommy had about 50 of them. I’d have to figure out if there was something I could buy here to help Tommy cheaper than he could buy it in the game. But for now, I’ll just bring in some extra food. I took two boxes of Cheez-Its to bed with me. Still crackers, but infinitely better tasting ones.

I tried to bring it up in the evening, but something more important was going on and my parents forgot about it.

That night, when I entered the dream, I found Tommy’s reply on the notepad. I thought it was weird that it was a game for him. He thought I was cursed somehow to be spending my dreams there. Do people in whatever the heck world he’s from have real curses that can be broken? Later it seemed like he thought I’m a character in the game. Weird, though, that for part of the message he’s trying to explain things to me as if I was a real person. Maybe he’s used to really realistic games in Gyllaria. Wherever that is.

Over the course of the night, I ate one of the boxes of Cheez-Its and stashed the other in the pack. And I wrote:

---

Tommy read Sarah’s note. She says she’s not a game character, but I would expect her to say that, to make me feel more inspired to help her. It’s not necessary; I’m already planning to do that. The money thing is more interesting; stores are few and far between here, so maybe I can use her as a sort of mobile store. And it sounds like the money goes a lot farther for her, a much better store than the ones here! I could never get anything for a single gold piece in the stores here, much less a lifetime supply of food. I spent almost all of my gold before entering the maze, and I have found so little here that I am wondering if that was a mistake.

Also interesting about the taste of the crackers. Are these any better for Elissa than the ones some of my enemies drop? Tommy had Elissa eat them, but the effect seemed the same as the normal crackers.

And North America? I’m in North America, but obviously not her North America. Tommy wrote:

---

I brought more crackers and drinks the next night, but Tommy’s note indicated they would only help me. Well, still somewhat useful.

Tommy apparently lives in a different North America. Instead of the United States, he only has New England. And New Spain which I assume is his version of Mexico. Was the American Revolution different there, or maybe it never happened? That’s probably right, and I guess due to that, Canada and Mexico were also not inspired to separate. And New Russia is probably just Alaska, which his New England was never convinced to buy, though they either bought out or forced out the French. I wonder what else is different. Interesting that he thought New Russia was not a nation but New England and New Spain apparently are. Did they separate from their European homelands but for some reason kept their names?

So he wants first aid supplies, bulletproof armor, and sexy clothes. Well the first is easy enough, and I can probably give up some of my clothes. I bet bulletproof armor is expensive though. What’s that stuff cops wear? Kevlar, I think. There must be some place that sells that stuff.

Meanwhile, I went on with my night here. I found one new coin, and tried to take three more to add to the one I had, matching what I found so far. I wrote to him:

---

Tommy returned to the game to find Elissa back down to 54 coins. Then he read her note. When at a safe spot in the game, he copied down into the notepad some events from a history book:

I managed to come back with the 3 coins to make 4 coins total. I took them to a gold buyer and got a total of $1830 for them. I bought some first aid kits, and extra supplies of the kinds I think Tommy might need. Gauze bandages for covering wounds and antiseptic to clean them, forceps to extract bullets, and alcohol to clean them. This only cost a tiny portion of my money.

At a military surplus store, I bought a kevlar vest and a kevlar jacket. I couldn’t find any kevlar pants, but I was hoping I could fashion the vest into a skirt. They were also able to supply special scissors capable of cutting kevlar and extra-narrow but strong needles that could be used to sew it. The lot cost $1200. Elissa already had a decent helmet and boots. I bought a jacket one size larger than would fit me to ensure Elissa’s arms and boobs fit into it.

I spent the evening working on the dress. I cut the shoulders out of the vest, inverted it, and sewed it to the bottom of the jacket, making a sort of bulletproof dress. Mom helped. It was the first time I’d managed to talk to her about the dreamworld since the morning I showed the first coin.

“Dad and I haven’t forgotten. We talked to a psychiatrist, but she said that as long as the dreams weren’t causing you to harm yourself, and as long as you are clearly able to distinguish the dreams from the real world, you’re probably fine.”

“And you believe me, even with me bringing back coins from the dream and selling them in real life?”

“Well, the reason we came to you tonight is that we want to set up a camera to record you in your sleep. This stuff should be a good test; you’re going to take this stuff into the dream and leave it there for your friend, right?”

“Yes, that’s the idea.”

“So we’ll set up the camera tonight, and I’ll watch the video tomorrow and confirm that at some point it just disappears, and that you didn’t just get up and hide it. I’ll share with Dad where it happens.”

“OK. I’d like to see it too, since of course I haven’t seen what it looks like here when I leave stuff behind.”

“Sure. The software we’ve got with it will let me cut out a small snippet of the video. I can even email it to you.”

“OK.”

Because the fabric was made of many layers, the sewing was difficult, but we got it done. It wasn’t pretty, but it should work. For sexy clothing, I took my second-favorite nightgown and a bra and panty set that went with it. The bra was decorative and mainly meant to provide modesty under the nightgown which would otherwise reveal too much, so it didn’t matter that Elissa was bigger there than I was. Well, she’d jiggle, but that was fine in the circumstances these clothes were likely to be used.

I hoped I could bring all this stuff into the game, in two big bundles that I held while going to bed, but if it didn’t work, I expected that the remainder would still be at home for me to try again the next night. I didn’t cover up with sheets when I got into bed in order to let the camera do its job.

It worked; I got into the game with everything. I stripped down to just Elissa's panties and put on the sexy clothes I brought, to confirm they would fit. They did, so I put them and most of the other stuff in the pack. I got Elissa dressed in her uniform again and had her wear the bulletproof dress over her other clothes.

Tommy’s note to me today was just the history. Interesting. My guesses were largely right with no American Revolution, and a lot of the rest of the history including both World Wars happened largely like it did here, but Germany developed the bomb first and so World War II was way worse than it was in my world. But that was the distant past. I had to survive tonight, which the new supplies made a lot easier!

So after a while of killing enemies, I stopped and camped in a protected spot. In my note I explained what I brought, as well as the new loot I collected as Elissa tonight.

---

Wow, Tommy thought upon checking the backpack’s contents and reading Sarah’s latest note. She got all this stuff, even a full freaking bulletproof dress, for three gold pieces. That’s consistent with what she says about being in the real world, but totally game-breaking here.

Tommy had Elissa try on the sexy clothes, and checked her stats in them. Yes, these would probably work for what I expect to need to do.

Then he had her put on her uniform again and the dress. Elissa looks like she’s wearing a sack, but if it stops bullets, this will be awesome. Less hiding, more shooting, faster progress. Good thing she knows how to put this stuff on by herself. I’m not sure I could manage the manipulations to get her into the clothes. Unfortunately, I never get to see her changing. But I understand they didn’t want to make it a porn game.

And Sarah found the map. It shows a side-quest that would actually let me earn the GP to buy the sexy clothes, but now I can skip that. With Sarah’s loot, I can skip right to the guy I’ve got to have Elissa romance secrets out of.

---

The next evening, Mom emailed me the video, showing how the bundles I was carrying vanished when I brought them into the dream world. She wrote in the email, “You’re all clear. If you need our support for something, just ask. But I don’t know who can help with what is actually happening to you.”

There was one other thing I was curious about, which was how time passed in our respective worlds. It sounded like Tommy was on Earth in a parallel universe, but who knows what it was like where Elissa was. I was willing to go without my watch for a little while, and wore it to bed, intending to take it into the game and leave it there.

Once I got into the game, I read Tommy’s latest note. Three thousand, he says! I guess that’s a war zone economy for you. Besides the star, he had marked out our entire course through the game, with the parts I played in red. About half the time I had been doubling back into territory he’d already covered. Now I would know where to go.

He was right about the enemies being tougher, but the bulletproof dress, combined with looking ahead on the map to guess where enemies might pop out, made my progress not too difficult. In fact, I reached Bongardo’s office after what I could now measure was about 4 hours. Compared to the recent nights, I estimated I was about 3/4 of the way through my dream, so the whole time I would spend here was 5 to 6 hours.

Before approaching the office, I switched into the sexy clothes. As predicted, he was very welcoming of me dressed that way, and invited me in. Now Tommy had said I needed to charm the secret out of him, not overpower or kill him and search for it in the office. Unfortunately, all my charm seemed to be doing was getting me closer to his bed, which was in a second room behind his office.

Since it seemed that was the only way, I let him take me in there. I thought I was going to have to have sex with him, but we got under the covers together still clothed, and he kissed and groped me for a little while, and then he fell asleep. I wondered what I was supposed to do for a bit, but pretty soon he started murmuring things in his sleep. I wrote them all down on the notepad. It was a puzzle! The first letters of the seemingly random words he spoke in his sleep spelled out a set of directions, which repeated once it was finished. After about a half hour of listening I had the full set of directions and had traced them out on the map.

I left him there, after searching his office. There was a bag of 12 gold pieces, a bunch of ammo, and a sturdier pair of boots that somehow fit Elissa. I took them all and found a campsite nearby, but far enough away that I hoped Bongardo would not find me. Since my time here was nearly through, I recapped for Tommy.

---

Hmm, a watch. That’s interesting, Tommy thought. More interesting though is that my helper completely spoiled a puzzle for me. Is it possible she’s not really a game AI, but actually a person from another world who’s somehow gotten cursed into visiting my game? That’s really weird, but it’s possible.

Tommy looked online for any other indication of Death March 6 players having an AI assistant helping them, and specifically for getting this puzzle spoiled by one. There were plenty of sites which did spoil that the initial letters spell directions to the jade cross, and even the answer spelled out. There were three possible locations, and there were bad traps on the way to the two wrong ones, so you did need to get at least enough of the words to identify a unique part of one of the three paths.

Furthermore, there was no mention of the words being needed again anywhere else in the game. Tommy thought, One reason for the AI to spoil this puzzle for me is to get the words written in my notepad so I will have them for some later puzzle. But there isn’t one, and one player mentioned finishing the game with a blank notepad. It must be that Sarah is real.

So as Tommy moved toward his next goal in the game, he marked the time for Sarah.

---

I guess it wasn’t too strange that Tommy’s time zone was similar to mine. He’s in North America on his Earth. I brought home my clothes at the end of the next night.

We went on like this for several weeks, through a new quest or at least a step in a quest every day or two. Elissa never needed more of my special help by buying more stuff in my world, though I brought in more crackers for me to eat there. Eventually, one night, I killed Trazillia, who I understood as being the next-to-last boss in the game. She dropped an amulet and a big sack of money.

In my real life, I got back to dating Brad. I’d had to tell him no for a while because this thing with my dreams was getting too crazy, but once it started feeling routine, I was able to see Brad again. Even so, I felt like what was happening in my dreams was more important than Brad right now, and I was distracted during our dates.

---

While reading Sarah’s last raid log, Tommy paused the game and looked up this amulet on a spoiler site. Hmm, it’s just called Trazillia’s amulet, and it doesn’t seem to do anything. People are calling it an unimplemented bonus item. It certainly isn’t necessary to win the game. Nor does Elissa need all this gold. She has everything needed to kill the last boss and escape, without the loot Sarah just found. There isn’t even another place for Elissa to spend any of it, unless she backtracks a long way. But maybe I can help Sarah. She doesn’t think there are real curses in her world, so maybe it’s just in her mind, and all she needs is some encouragement.

---

“He wants me to keep the amulet and all the gold, wow!” I thought. “We have thousands of gold pieces. Probably two million dollars worth of gold. It’s a good thing Elissa is so strong, because I wouldn’t even be able to carry it all.”

I got moving toward the last boss, didn’t reach him, but camped close by, slightly early, and packed up to bring home the amulet and the gold. I needed something to carry it in just to hold it all. So as not to steal Elissa’s backpack, I took a pack from one of the guys I killed, put everything in that, and brought it home with me.

---

Well, she took me up on my offer, Tommy noted. The pack wasn’t anywhere near Elissa’s carrying limit, but it’s a lot lighter now.

Tommy set up for the final battle, an epic fight that took most of his 2 remaining hours in the game tonight, and won. This got Elissa the key to the gate which let her out. There was still a trek out of this hellhole which would have to be done later; Tommy had read that it was about 15 minutes of actual gameplay and more than half an hour of cutscenes.

---

Well, I got it. The backpack containing the amulet and all the gold was in bed with me when I awoke. It was, in fact, more gold than I could pick up at once. It was only because the body I had in the dream was so strong that I was able to keep going in that place with what had become a very heavy pack. I put on the amulet and wore it all day, as it was nice looking. The gold I shoved under my bed, in its closed pack.

When I got home from school that day, I found that the backpack was full of tiny holes and the gold had diminished to half of what I brought back. When I examined it more closely, it looked like individual threads of the fabric had vanished. Where missing threads crossed other missing threads, holes were visible. The remaining coins were intact, but it wasn’t clear where the others had gone; the holes were not large enough for coins to fit through.

But this didn’t happen to the amulet, nor to the coins I brought back with me previously. What was the difference? The most obvious difference, I decided, was that I kept the other things with me while I left the gold at home. I bet these things I bring back are sustained by my connection to the game somehow, but when separated from me they start to collapse into whatever this is. Hmm, if this happened to the coins I sold that guy, I’d better not go back there any more. He’d be pissed. But I turned the camera Mom had used previously onto the remains of the backpack to watch any further decay.

So that night, I went to bed still wearing the amulet. Instead of awakening in the game as Elissa, I found myself facing a sort of menu, like on a computer, except seemingly floating in the air before me. Select Destination, it said, and there were two choices: Elissa in Tommy’s Death March 6 game, or New Destination. I chose New Destination. This opened another level of menu in which I could choose a new game, a real-world location, or other. Under real-world locations, there was a long list of choices with cryptic names I didn’t understand. But opening them up showed they were some kind of codes identifying different Earths. The next level of each menu was the continents and you could drill down into the countries, regions, cities, and eventually specific addresses and people. The first world on the list had Gyllaria in North America, and apparently because I had visited his game already, the first one at each level of the menu led right to Tommy. I hoped, anyway.

And I awakened in a strange bed. I was a boy! I took in my surroundings. A stereotypical high school boy’s room. Some sexy posters (no nudes), some car stuff, some sports stuff. And a computer, with shelves full of games and other software around it. The Death March 6 box was there. Does this mean I’m in Tommy’s body? There was some strange feeling about it, different from the other times I was in a man’s body. As I approached the computer and bumped the back of the desk chair I realized what it was. Tommy had an erection! I didn’t know if he had it from his own dreams or if I had caused it, but I chose not to invade his privacy more than I was already doing, and ignored it.

The computer was only in sleep mode, not locked; I awakened it and found the Death March 6 icon on the desktop. Among the games I could choose to continue playing was indeed one for a high-level character named Elissa. Rather than play it, I closed the game, and instead left Tommy a note on paper.

I took Tommy’s body to the bathroom, and looked in the mirror there. He was pretty handsome. Not a typical gamer geek. The erection in his underwear was still obvious.

I put Tommy’s body back to bed. I wasn’t done for the night, though. I found myself in front of the menu again. I could continue to use the amulet to visit other destinations. There seemed to be three categories of visitations I could make. I could visit games. I could visit real-world locations, including other worlds, but unless I traveled to the other side of the Earth, I arrived at night. The third category, simply labeled Other in the menu, let me do a kind of viewing. In this case I wasn’t in any body at all, just watching the world as an intangible ghost unable to interact with things. This allowed me to visit well-known places around the world, past or present, day or night, and even well-known fictional places. I visited the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Niagara Falls, the Louvre, Julius Caesar’s Rome, Pigwarts, Ankh-Morpig, and several other places, some of them for only a few minutes, before my alarm pulled me back into my world.

Oh my, Tommy thought upon awakening. What did I do last night? I kind of remember getting up and walking around, and yet, it didn’t seem like I was doing it.

While getting dressed, he saw the note next to his computer. Wow, Tommy thought. The amulet really works! Or more likely, Sarah’s gained control of her powers but just needed to be encouraged to visit other places, which was what I hoped for by lying to her about the amulet.

Tommy was distracted by this in school all day, but that evening, after finishing off the short final escape from Death March 6, he wrote a real-life note for Sarah at the bottom of her note.

---

The next night, I started by possessing Tommy again. I read his note, put him back to bed, and found my way into his neighbor Becky. “Kind of cute?” he says? She’s a major-league hottie. I wonder why she stays inside.

I found something for Becky to cover up with for going outside, as her bedclothes were indecent. Then I found Becky’s phone, and called Tommy.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Tommy, it’s Sarah.” I whispered. “I’m in Becky. Or somebody in your neighborhood anyway. She’s more than cute; she’s a serious hottie.”

“Yeah, that’s Becky. Can you get out of the house?”

“Yeah, nobody else is awake here. I’m at the front door. I’ve got Becky’s keys. She has keys, even if she doesn’t use them, and I confirmed they lock and unlock this door.”

“Okay, if you’re looking out the front door, my house is to your left. And the coast is clear here, too.”

“Be there in a few seconds.” And I ended the call.

I went to Tommy’s house, and he had the door open for me when I got there. We crept inside quietly and he led me to his room, where I took off the long coat I was wearing.

“Tommy, it’s so awesome being able to meet you in person... even if I’m not entirely myself.”

“It’s great meeting you, too, Sarah. And I am so glad that my long effort in that game paid off for you. So how well does that work?”

“It’s awesome, Tommy. I can go literally anywhere in my dreams. Bad news, though. That gold I took, it partially vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Yeah. I think that the stuff I take out of the game isn’t really anchored to my world. As long as I keep it near me, it’s fine and passes for the real thing. When it gets separated from me, it starts to vanish. I left it under my bed, and after a day at school, the coins were half gone, and many of the threads of the backpack disappeared as well, so there were many tiny holes in it. After another day, there wasn’t enough backpack to contain the coins and only about a hundred coins were left. Tomorrow I expect it will be completely gone.”

“That’s too bad, but it explains why some coins came back to Elissa,” Tommy replied.

“Oh, and thank you,” I continued, as I grabbed Tommy, hugged him, and kissed him. He kissed me back passionately, and ran his hand up under the filmy top I was wearing and started fondling my breasts. Er, I remembered, Becky’s breasts.

Tommy remembered that at the same time, and pulled his hand out. “I think that we should stop here, Sarah, to avoid invading Becky’s privacy too much. We didn’t ask her permission to do this.”

“Yes, you’re right, Tommy. I was about to say the same thing. Maybe you’ll be lucky and she’ll come back to visit you as herself and you can feel free to go further with her when she’s in control of her own body.”

“Yeah. When I woke yesterday morning, I vaguely remembered what you did in my body. Becky will probably have some memory of this too.”

“I’ll see if I can influence her in the right way. Anyway, I think I’m going to go explore the power of the amulet some more, but I’ll come visit when I can.”

“I need to confess one thing,” Tommy said. “I lied to you about the amulet. It was an unimplemented item in the game, something the game designers meant to do something with but apparently never completed, perhaps for another phase of the game which was dropped. It doesn’t actually do anything. Your control of your powers is simply due to you gaining that control on your own.”

“Really? It seemed like it opened up a game-like menu of options for where to travel. But thanks anyway. Good night, and see you some time.”

Tommy led me back downstairs, and I crept silently back to Becky’s house, unlocked the door, entered, re-locked the door, and went back to Becky’s room. Before I put Becky to bed, I wrote her a note:

And then I climbed into Becky’s bed, closed her eyes, and then I was in my own bed again, briefly, with the menu in my head. And then the menu collapsed and I realized it was just a way of organizing my thoughts. I could go anywhere, directly, without browsing through the immense hierarchy of the menu, but I could still bring up the menu when I wanted to.

But I had had rather enough of this, and tried to ignore it and just sleep. That didn’t work. A couple minutes later I found myself back in Becky again. I switched over to Tommy instead, and when I left him and tried to just sleep again, I ended up back in Tommy again. It looks like if I don’t choose a place to go it just takes me back to the last place I went. That must be why I kept going back to Tommy’s game.

But since I couldn’t not do it, for my next stop I chose Pigwarts again, but using an option I just noticed to do so as a real-world visitation in the present instead of a viewing.

I went there, entered some random Hufflepuff student, and did manage to find one of the professors there to help me. Except she really couldn’t. She found another professor more knowledgeable about dream magic, who still didn’t know.

“I can see that you are some sort of spirit possessing this student, but in a way which is totally unfamiliar to me. The kind of dreamwalking magic I am familiar with allows you to enter the dreams of other people, not have dreams in which you take possession of the bodies of other people in real life.”

“Sorry to trouble you, then. I’ll get this student back to her bed and go try some other world.”

“Wait, some other world?”

“Yes, your world is a work of fiction in my world. But I’ve got some ability that lets me enter these fictional worlds for real.”

“Well that is really remarkable. I can see that you are really a spirit possessing this girl, and not just a student making up preposterous stories. But I’ve never heard of spirits coming to visit from outside our world. I’m sure there are many people here who’d love to have you visit them so they can learn more about your world.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m really looking for somebody who can help me understand why I can do this, and how I might keep it from happening automatically. And I think you’ve confirmed for me I’m looking in the wrong world.”

And then I really did walk away. I put the girl I’d possessed back to bed, and l then I moved on to see if they could help me in Central-Earth, which was a challenge because the magic users there are spread across the whole world, and one person can’t just lead me down a hallway to refer me to another magic user. But I could pop out of the world and into somebody else in the right place. After several attempts, though, it seemed to me that they’d never seen anything like this, either.

Then it was time for me to wake up in my real body, so at least I was able to stop dreamwalking.

The coins were indeed all gone when I returned to bed for the next night. Oh well.

I tried an idea I’d thought of during the day. What if I dreamwalked into myself? Could I... get up and do things while I slept? Would that work? Would I wake up tired as if I hadn’t slept? But I couldn’t seem to do it, and when I called up the menu, after finding my Earth (I assumed; it was the one labeled with “Earth” rather than some weird code) and drilling down to my address, I wasn’t there. So that answered that; I can’t occupy my own body. Mom’s was available, and that might be an interesting solution. I could talk to her about that. But except for a moment to prove it was possible, I didn’t do so tonight.

Instead, I went into several other worlds, both from written fiction and from games, where there was magic, spiritual possession, or similar things, but no one could help me. What I was doing wasn’t like anything the magical people did, and the spiritual possession people had never seen an inquisitive, intelligent spirit. They were haunted by ghosts, phantoms, and other dead and undead beings who liked to take over bodies, but they hadn’t experienced that a live, sleeping person could possess other people. I even went to Unseen University in Ankh-Morpig, though the way that place was portrayed, I didn’t expect anything useful to happen there. And it didn’t. All I managed to do was get several wizards to engage in magical duels after misunderstanding one another, and after the fourth time I gave up.

There was a game I’d heard of called World of Dreams. I thought that was an interesting name, and if it’s the dream aspect I should be focusing on, it might be what I need. Although it’s pretty popular, there weren’t many sessions available I could join. I could see many thousands of games in progress of other similarly popular games, but there were only a few dozen of these. Poking into several, I found that all the characters I had access to here were just starting out. It looked like they were those who quit early on and never really played. So I picked one who had literally stopped before even the first mission, and started playing. It looked pretty interesting and relevant. The players were learning how to control their dreams, do things in their dreams, and retrieve objects they encountered in their dreams.

There was a tutorial, but there wasn’t a live person there for me to interact with. It was a recorded message, along with recordings playing in my character’s mind inside the dream. But it allowed me to take this character into a game-dream (a dream within a dream!) and complete the simple mission there, to retrieve a particular object. Unlike my dreams, this character was still himself in the dream, the same person he was outside the dream.

For the game’s second mission, I had an actual person to talk to. She was supposed to be showing me how to use the item I retrieved to protect my own dreams from being invaded by other dreamwalkers. This was a big hint! If all the characters maintained such protection for the rest of the game, then maybe that’s why I can only access ones who are just starting, but furthermore, it means they are doing the same kind of dreamtravel that I do!

In order to avoid simply being thrown out of the game here, I had to interrupt this process. It was clear in the other games that, by actually living as the game character, I wasn’t restricted to the flows designed by the game’s creator. So I asked, “Minda, could we make this so that I can keep everyone out of my dreams except one specific person I want to allow in?”

“That’s a more advanced version of this, but yes, it’s possible. We usually start with the basic version, though.”

“I’m afraid I need to, though. Because I’m already controlling this man remotely by dreamwalking into him and only the beginners here are open to me, so I assume what we’re about to do would lock me out.”

“That’s really advanced dreamwalking. I haven’t even gotten to that level myself, but we have some people who know it. The fact that you aren’t really here explains why an advanced dreamwalker is coming to us in the body of a beginner student, so thanks for explaining. But I will need to get approval before I show you this. We need to make sure you are not one of our enemies trying to infiltrate us.”

So the lesson was put on hold. I was made to wait there, and Minda went to find whoever could approve my training. There was some sort of probe of my mind while I was waiting, presumably from someone involved in this approval. When Minda returned, she was followed by 3 other people. Two of the followers stood on either side and took stances that made them look ready to attack, but they did not attack. The other follower was the only one who spoke.

“Who are you, really?”

Well, they know. I have to level with them if I want them to help me.

“I’m a girl from Atlanta who has developed the ability to visit other people, during dreams. It happened involuntarily at first, and later I gained the ability to control where I traveled. I’m hoping to find someone who can help me understand the ability more.”

“Atlanta. Where is Atlanta?”

I guess this game’s set on some other world. I replied, “It’s a major city in the southern United States, in the state of Georgia. It’s possible that doesn’t exist in your world, because I’ve been traveling to other worlds and fictional ones to find someone who understands.”

“Other worlds? Fictional worlds? And you’re able to not just read the mind, but actually control the body of this man? You must be the most powerful dreamwalker who ever lived! But it does agree with what our mindprober said. He is in too much pain from the attempt to probe your mind to come here himself, but he said that your mind was open but you were too far away to reach, and that the only way he thought this was possible is if you were not on this world.”

This man, whose name I still didn’t know, and Minda spoke in whispers for a moment. Then it was Minda who spoke.

“I will give you the lesson you asked for, both to help you protect your real-world mind, though I think you are safe from anyone on this world, and to protect the mind of this person you are occupying, whoever this poor soul is whose life you have taken over. But after this we will need to interview you in detail to learn who you are, even if it is so foreign to us we have trouble understanding it, so that we know who it is that we are training, before we can give you any additional training.”

“Thank you. That is very reasonable. And if you learn more about who I am, you may be able to help me better.”

The others left, and Minda pulled up a chair to put in front of the one where I had waited for the group earlier.

“Before we start, I want to ask about your time limit. Since you are dreamwalking yourself, you probably have some limit after which you must return to your own body. We will need at least an hour for the lesson.”

“Good call! I visited several other places before coming to your world tonight, and I did the tutorial here. I probably do not have an hour left.”

“Fine. Then we can start whenever you arrive tomorrow.”

“Sure. I guess that means I need to get this guy home, though I am not sure where home is for him.”

I could just leave and let him go home, but since I planned to keep using him, I decided I should learn where he lives. I checked his pockets and found a wallet. Apparently I was Umberto Gonzales. I had an address, which I had no idea about, but Minda helped me with directions. I got him home, to find he lived alone in a small apartment.

By the time I got there, I really needed to pee. This was my first time peeing as a guy, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Interestingly, I had never peed as Elissa, either, in a month of 6-hour-a-day visits to her body. Did that mean that she never peed? That the game took care of it for her? Probably no way for me to know, so I let the thought pass.

After that, I spent some time looking around the apartment, trying to figure out who this guy was. It looked like he was dedicated to trying to get into the dreamwalking program, but he hadn’t been able to do so on days before I came. I wasn’t sure if all the player characters were made that way, or if this meant that whoever had started this character had failed the tutorial and was required to repeat it until he did it successfully before he could go on with the game. About the time I thought that, I felt myself falling out of this world and back to my own bed.

---

I decided to do some planning. In particular, I needed to set up a line of communication with this guy whose body I was using. I hadn’t seen any note paper there, but I took a pad and pencil to bed with me. I left it in his room for now to test whether it would survive the day, and went back to the dreamwalking place. Minda was there waiting for me when I arrived.

There was a man with her. She introduced him as Ken. He was the mind probe guy who suffered pain trying to probe my mind yesterday.

“I am here to probe your mind again, to see how well you are closing your mind back on your world. I have two advantages this time. By being physically closer to your presence in this world, the overall distance to your real mind will be reduced. And I’ve taken some drugs to make me less susceptible to that sort of pain. They don’t actually decrease the effect on my body, so I’m wearing this small device on my arm to warn me if I am in danger of doing harm to myself. If you hear a high-pitched screech from it, it’ll mean I have to stop probing you, and it probably also means you’ve succeeded in what you are here to do today. Don’t let it break your concentration, though.”

“OK. What do you need me to do? I brought the object I got from the tutorial mission.”

“That talisman serves as a focus for beginners to direct their thoughts. You are probably strong enough that you don’t need it, so I’m going to skip it for now. Keep your mind open, and let me probe you.”

He did nothing visible, and again I felt something small in my mind.

“OK. I can see that you are there, but nothing more, due to your distance. Minda will lead the next step.”

Minda explained to me how to close my mind, but asked me to do this with my mind in the real world, not Umberto’s mind. After a bit of explanation and trying, I was able to close my mind in the way she described and Ken confirmed my mind was closed while Umberto’s remained open.

Minda continued, “Now for the next step I want you to picture your own mind, Umberto’s mind, and the connection between them.”

This was not at all obvious and took a lot more explanation, but eventually I was able to get the mental image Minda was steering me toward. I rebuilt the shield around Umberto’s mind while leaving a hole where the connection to my mind came in. Ken confirmed that Umberto was now shielded.

Then they had me drop Umberto’s shield. Ken established an ongoing connection to Umberto’s mind, and Minda explained how I could see that in addition to my previous visualization of Umberto’s mind. Then she had me make a shield around Umberto’s mind with holes for both me and Ken, and Ken confirmed he still had his connection while Minda confirmed that Umberto was shielded to her.

Finally, Ken dropped his connection, and Minda had me drop Umberto’s shield and then rebuild it, leaving both the holes again even though Ken wasn’t connected. Once I had done that, Ken confirmed that he could still connect to Umberto and Minda confirmed she couldn’t.

Minda said, “Lesson passed. You will need to construct a shield like this around Umberto’s mind, leaving only the hole for yourself, and help Umberto to memorize it by keeping it up continuously. Once you enter our facility proper, Umberto must remain shielded from our enemies at all times. In addition, keep up the shield around your own mind in your own world to protect yourself there.”

“Does the shield need to be maintained when sleeping?” I asked.

“Yes, in a way, but practically speaking, no. The shield doesn’t have to be actively maintained at every moment. If you don’t intentionally tear it down, but just stop thinking about it, it decays slowly over time. But that’s a very good question, and exactly what I was going to describe next. You should raise the shield to the highest strength you can before going to bed, and since it decays more slowly while you sleep, it should keep for several hours. When you are living here, we constantly have people looking for unshielded people, so if your shield falls in your sleep, someone will come into your head and wake you, and you can reset your shield that way. With the level of shielding required to pass the tests you have, you should at most need to be woken once in an 8-hour night of sleep, and practice will get you to the level where you don’t need it at all.”

After we finished with a few more details about shields, there was the long interview promised, and I told them frankly about who I was and my experience in Tommy’s game and visiting other worlds after I learned how to control where I went. There were a lot of questions about Earth as they looked to see if they could catch me in a lie, but ultimately they were satisfied.

They took me through the doors into the main part of their facility, but pretty quickly they handed me off to a man named Pat who showed me around the place, or at least the parts I had access to now, since there were still parts off-limits to me. He finally showed me to the dorms where their students in training live.

“You can treat this as a permanent thing. You can move out of the place you are living now and move your stuff in here. You might move to another room later, but you’ll still have a place here. The landlords around here are used to this arrangement and you shouldn’t get any hassle over it; if you do, tell any of your supervisors here about it and we’ll straighten it out.”

So the rest of my day involved packing up Umberto’s few belongings and moving them. The notepad survived, and now I was able to see a faint connection from it going back to my world. So when I was done moving, I left Umberto a note.

I didn’t eat as Umberto yesterday, but all the work moving had made his body hungry, and since I was still here I went ahead and ate. I wasn’t sure yet if they didn’t eat meat on this world or if it was just that Umberto was a vegetarian. But he had sliced bread, some (apparently shelf-stable) sauces, and a variety of fruits and vegetables, some of which were unfamiliar to me, so I sampled several things and eventually made a sandwich with some of them.

---

The next day I finally had the chance to catch up with Mom more fully.

“Hi, Sarah. How’s it going? I saw your recording of the bag of coins. They disappeared slowly over the day with nobody coming to steal them or anything. Are you still visiting the game in your dreams?”

“I am still visiting games, but there have been some changes.”

“Good changes, I hope.”

“Mostly good, yes.”

I caught her up on how Tommy’s game finished, how Tommy helped me get control over where I’m going (but how I still can’t keep it from happening), how I tried to get Tommy and Becky together (I should check up on them), and how I’m seeking help in a dream-related game that apparently involves a kind of dreamwalking that might be compatible with mine; at least the same technique blocks both abilities.

“OK. I’m glad that’s going well. Mostly well, anyway.”

“I did want to ask you one thing. When I discovered that my control doesn’t extend to not dreamwalking while I sleep, I had the idea to dreamwalk into my own body. It didn’t work, though. It seems I can’t do that. I could see you and Dad and the rest of the neighbors as targets, though. I tested dreamwalking into your body, just for a moment, and stayed there just long enough to confirm it was really you. I wanted to ask your permission to do that, though I am hoping the training I am in now will give me the ability to simply not dreamwalk when I don’t want to, so I don’t need that.”

“Hmm, that is an interesting request. Let me say, if it’s an emergency, if you are in a situation where the forced dreamwalking is causing you trouble and you need a safe place to go, then do it. But I wouldn’t want you to do it regularly. I wouldn’t want you occupying my body every night. If it comes to that, I will help you to find someone else who can be your regular buddy.”

“OK, thanks, Mom.”

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.

In my dream that night, I found my game and entered it, finding myself in a weird, featureless body which was waiting for me to define it. I was a vaguely woman-shaped cloud. I wasn’t able to move the body, but I could basically see it from any angle. On the computer I would have been choosing colors and sizes for aspects of my body, but here, after a little experimentation, I just forced my own body image onto the character, and she became a virtual clone of me.

And then I was in the game, in her apartment which was similarly spartan as Umberto’s had been, except of course with female clothes in the closet. I took off the default clothes, put on something nicer, turned on my shield with the me-shaped hole, and went down to the dreamwalking school.

Once I got past the tutorial, Minda was there.

“Sarah!” she exclaimed.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Nobody else walks in here with a shield like that who isn’t one of our staff.”

I grinned.

“Just wait here while I get the staff to OK it, and I’ll advance you up to where you were with Umberto.”

The same group who had OKed my initial training showed up, but this time they seemed overjoyed to see me. One of the two guards said, “I have never seen anyone here put up such a strong shield. It has to be her,” and the others looked at him as if he’d just said something so obvious it didn’t need to be said.

They approved my enrollment and the slight skip of lessons, and I informed them, “I’ve set this up so I should be able to train more hours a day now, sometimes as this Sarah,” pointing to the body I wore here, “and sometimes as that Sarah,” pointing up to the sky. “But I’m that one now.”

They didn’t seem to doubt in the least that I was capable of this after what else I had shown them. The main follower replied, “Well, we’re here 24/7, and each student goes at whatever pace they are able. We thought we’d skip you over a number of other lessons as well, but feel welcome to ask for the complete lesson any time you think it might help you to understand something.”

They quickly moved to the step of checking me into a room, this time in a different wing which was occupied by only women, and I gathered my clothes and the few other personal belongings the game had created in my character’s apartment and moved into the dorm. And I spent the rest of the dreamtime that night showing a different group what I could do in a sort of extreme advanced placement test.

---

The next evening, as I played the game for real from my computer for the first time, I repeated those tests. I had to learn how certain computer controls translated into game actions, but I picked that up quickly and showed that my character was as strong when I was playing her through the game as she was when I had a direct conduit into her mind.

The instructors at this hour were different, but at the end of it they said, “It seems you are just as strong in this form as in your other form. So we’re going to skip all the beginner training, except where you wanted more info.”

They did actually read through all the lessons, just in case I wanted more info on something, but they just told me what I would be expected to do in each one rather than asking me to do it. There weren’t dreamwalks beyond what they had described earlier as level 1 and 2, and I actually only ended up asking for clarifications of a couple things to help me reconcile their ways of describing tasks with how I had accomplished or knew I could accomplish the same thing.

When I had no further questions, they (with a brief ceremony) announced my graduation to intermediate training. This took place deeper in the facility. They added me to a list of people who had access to the section where this took place, handed me off to a different crew of trainers, and I got a new room within this section. Incidentally, the beginner room had come with a set of uniforms which I hadn’t actually put on today, but they said those were “beginner robes” and I should leave them, so as far as clothes, I was only gathering what had been in the apartment.

I didn’t actually do any of it this first partial day, but they explained what I would be doing. It was basically level 3, 4, and 5 dreamwalks, which meant either viewing a specific dreaming person’s dream, viewing and getting the sensations from a specific person who was awake, or dreamwalking into a collective dream (which I knew as a work of fiction) and playing the role of a minor character within that dream.

For the level 3 and 4 dreamwalks, they had a group of people in the city who did not work sensitive jobs who were paid to be continuously monitored by equipment and available for people to dreamwalk into. They worked, and as a result slept different hours, so there was a reasonable chance of finding them in any desired state at any hour. When it came time to practice these dreamwalks, one of the trainers would identify a suitable candidate and direct me mentally to that person. If there wasn’t a candidate available, they would direct me into a level 5 dreamwalk.

Since there was time remaining which wasn’t enough time for an actual dreamwalk, I took game-Sarah to her new room, raised her shield again so high that even if she ignored it, it would last until my next session, and let her be. I hoped she’d finish unpacking my things since I expected to stay in this room a bit longer before I joined the game again, but I had no idea how much of a real life the characters here had when I wasn’t running them - what Umberto did might only have been backstory.

I visited Tommy. His brief note said thanks again and that he had finished out the game. So I went to Becky. She had left me a note also.

I guess it hadn’t happened yet. I added below it.

There was one thing I hadn’t managed to do yet, and it was what was supposed to be my next lesson: To enter someone’s mind and only view their dreams, or if awake, what they were doing at the time. I picked some people at random both in Tommy’s sleeping time zone and in mine, but in every case, I was consciously awake when I arrived there. I left them in their beds so as to disturb them less, but surely one of those people was dreaming and I should have been able to see their dreams.

So I returned to my own body, as it was starting to be a reasonable waking time.

---

In the morning I thanked Mom and told her it seemed to be working.

In the evening, I went back into my game. I was pleased to see that game-Sarah had in fact put everything away on shelves, in drawers, or, for just a few things, hanging in the closet. It looked like I imagined my room would look like when I went off to college, if I lived in a single room and had brought the bare minimum of belongings along. I decided that the way she had dressed herself today was fine.

To prepare for as long a session of dreamwalking as I could, I sent game-Sarah to the bathroom, and got to see what that looked like for game players... which was nothing. She went in and closed the door, and I was staring at the door for a couple minutes before she came out. I had just done it, myself; now I knew next time to have her go while I did. Having Sarah change clothes from the computer was the same way. There was a walk-in closet and I got to go in and browse through all the clothes and select what I wanted her to wear, but then she closed the door to change. But with that done, I decided I was ready, and headed down to the next lesson.

One of the trainers went off to locate a target for me as soon as I arrived, and I told the other that I had made myself bathroom-ready. I climbed onto the provided bed and waited. A few minutes later the trainer who had left returned and told me today I’d be doing a fourth level dreamwalk to view what a man was doing. I was to stay there until I figured out what goal he was trying to accomplish and then drop out of the dream. They would wake me up from the induced sleep when I did so.

But when I went into the man, I realized right away that I had gone past viewing and had taken control of the man entirely. He had been walking somewhere, but I didn’t know where. Using the man’s body, I shrugged and gave a sigh and then I dropped out. The trainers understood what had happened.

One of them stated, “You went too far and took over the man’s body completely.”

“Yes, I know.”

The other asked, “Is this something that happened in your dreaming before you came here?”

“Yes. In fact, always. Whenever I have gone into a living, real-world person I have taken over control of the body completely.”

The first trainer suggested, “Tell us about all the kinds of dreamwalking you have successfully performed.” She handed me a pamphlet listing the dreamwalk types mentioned in the study materials earlier, but with briefer descriptions.

“I’ve done 1st and 2nd level dreamwalks here, and also from my real body, if dreaming into and controlling a video game character counts as a construct. It was like the description of the construct in that I could only enter via player characters and not other characters in the games.”

The trainers had confused looks.

“Do you have video games here?”

They shrugged. Of course they didn’t. In a world where you could remote-view the world, past and present, and it was considered a level 1 ability, why would they ever develop video games?

“OK, never mind that. It’s a type of construct they developed in my world that allows the majority of people who don’t even have basic dreamwalk powers the ability to control a construct via a device, but I can bypass the device and control the construct directly.”

“Ah, yes, the constructs do have a physical control panel we can use. Go on.”

“Besides that, I can do level 5 dreamwalks where I control a minor character in a collective dream. I haven’t managed to control important characters in such dreams. And I’ve been able to do level 7 dreamwalks where I control the body of a sleeping person. I don’t know if they were dreaming or not. But I don’t think I ever dreamwalked into a person who was awake until now.”

“But you dreamwalked into Umberto and this Sarah and did so from a great distance. And I think you said you had done some of the other dreamwalks from a great distance. Multiple kinds of advanced dreamwalks.”

I wanted to explain that I considered these to be type 2 dreamwalks into the constructs in the World of Dreams game, and since the game was in my world, I didn’t even consider them long-distance, but it appeared that way to them, and of course they did not realize they are characters in a video game. But I had done long-distance dreamwalks into Tommy and Becky, taking control of their bodies, so I decided they were right for the wrong reasons and let it be.

“Do you have any other strong dreamwalkers who have trouble not taking over the person they dreamwalk into while attempting level 3 and 4 dreamwalks? I asked.

“That’s a good question. It certainly doesn’t apply to me, but we may have someone here like that,” the first trainer said.

“Not me,” the other said.

“I’ll go find out,” the first said, on the way into the deeper level of the facility where I was not yet admitted.

Meanwhile, the second trainer started me on a level 5 dreamwalk, explaining some sort of story they had there related to people on sailing ships. A third trainer arrived, a woman smaller than me, who was going to go into this dream together with me as another minor character, while the second trainer monitored us from outside the dream.

We were playing the roles of new recruits on a sailing ship, so we got the beginner training on how to manipulate the sails to carry out orders. Someone else was going to be giving those orders, so we were... just doing something they probably used constructs to do in this world in real life, if they did it at all. I could see the attraction, though. It was an opportunity to participate in an era from the past. And it was also an opportunity to inhabit a strong man’s body. And both of us were indeed in strong men. I had never before been in a man this well muscled, though our more experienced crewmates had even larger muscles, no doubt from a lifetime of hard work on the ship (or at least, so the story would have it).

We went out on the ship and had spent maybe half an hour sailing when we were both pulled out of the dream.

The first two trainers were there waiting for us when we awakened. My dream-partner gave a report.

“Sarah showed excellent control of the dream character. She had no trouble at all adapting to the role. I was in an identical body and even with my dream experience, Sarah was more tightly bonding to the character, and able to pull with more strength than I could.”

“Thank you, Clarissa. I think that’s all we need from you today.”

Clarissa left, and the trainer who’d gone off looking for a suitable more advanced trainer started an explanation.

“I haven’t found anyone with the problem you describe, but I’ve put the question to the advanced training team. While we wait for a response, there’s another lesson I want to accelerate you to that I think will help you a lot. We usually let dreamwalkers train here for about a month before we give them this, and some of the ones who never advance beyond basic can’t do it, which is a good indication for having them stay in basic. However, we expect the ones who complete the basic skills quickly to always be able to do this.”

When he stopped, I asked, “What is it?”

“It’s about inducing your own sleep and dream states.”

“Oh, that sounds very useful. It’s been my estimate that after I go to bed it takes up to two hours before I enter the dream state.”

“That’s actually a little longer than usual, but maybe it’s because of the strength of the dream state you are entering.”

I didn’t actually get to induce the dream state that session, so I had the usual delay switching over to controlling game-Sarah via a dreamwalk. And when I got in, they had switched off to another group of trainers, but they were able to continue where I’d left off. This time, I did get to induce a dream state in game-Sarah. They had directed me to go back to that same ship story once I got into a dream, and I did visit the story, though I didn’t go out on the ship because I didn’t stay there long. The rest of the session was about going into and bringing myself out of dream states, and learning to do it more quickly.

---

For a good while after that, I practiced inducing dreams a lot in real life. I found myself able to get to sleep quicker and into a dream much quicker than before, giving me more dreamwalking-into-game-Sarah training time.

Remembering how Tommy had looked at Elissa’s reports from the computer game, I found similar reports I could look at from the computer game about game-Sarah’s activity. It looked like she did just the minimum while I wasn’t there. She maintained her shield and she took care of menial tasks like putting away my items after I moved. I was able to isolate some things by logging statistics at the beginning and end of each of my game sessions and in the morning after I woke up. A few things had 24-hour charts, like the level of her shield, nutrition, tiredness, and a hardiness statistic which was similar to HP in some games but included a significant mental component. And these basically showed that she reupped the shield to about 90% of the strength I set it to when it fell to 80%, she ate 3 meals a day if my play session didn’t include one, and she rested most of the rest of the time, slowly reducing tiredness and regaining hardiness. She really didn’t do anything else.

At one of the sessions, an advanced trainer named Herren showed up. I can best describe them as being of ambiguous gender. They had broad shoulders, beard stubble, muscular arms, and a flat chest. But they had a female-sounding voice with a Japanese accent, and the entire bottom looked female in the shape of the waist, hips, and legs, to the extent these parts were visible when their loose dress fell against them.

They tried to explain to me how to dreamwalk into someone at lower strength so I only viewed and didn’t fully take control of their body. It was a lot like trying to tell me not to dreamwalk while I was sleeping. My body just didn’t do that.

It was actually in one of my real-life practice sessions that I figured out how to limit my dreamwalk strength. After I had good control of inducing my sleep, I discovered that if I kept myself at a minimum sleep level, where I was so barely asleep that the slightest noise in the room would wake me, then my power level in dreamwalking was reduced to a level where I wouldn’t take control of the person but only view their dream or wakeful activity.

Once I figured that out I was able to try to take this style of sleep into the game. It didn’t work while playing on the computer because there were footsteps of other characters and other noises that woke me up. In the sessions when my real body was asleep, I was able to explain to my trainers what I needed. In the advanced level of the facility, they had privacy rooms for dreamwalking that were meant for higher-level dreamwalks.

They couldn’t let me into that level until I had passed this level of training, but they agreed to exempt me from this requirement since I had shown the ability to do more powerful dreamwalks, and let me complete the requirements regarding level 5 and 7 dreamwalks.

So it was just three days after this breakthrough that they passed me on to advanced training, and I got to move all my stuff again, conveniently disconnecting from game-Sarah to let her put it all away.

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.

I was a freshman in college when I heard the news on TV that Hiroshi had died. They called him video game entrepreneur Hiroshi Yamamoto, who clearly had to be the man I had been dreamwalking with for the last three years. Sure enough, he was present neither in World of Dreams nor in the studio. So I figured that was over and I was on my own now. I’d learned a lot; enough to be dangerous, but I wasn’t planning to use my power to steal, kill, or worse. I still hadn’t actually achieved my primary goal, to be able to turn it off, but being able to direct it and with so many ways of directing it basically ensured that I could always go somewhere safe.

A couple days later I received an email from Hiroshi. For a moment I was excited to think maybe he had survived or faked his death or something, but the email put a damper on that. It was a dead-man-switch message, one sent out automatically after a computer system detected his absence.

But the message went on to say that in his will he had left me control of his company. The email itself provided his passwords to log into his World of Dreams account and access Herren. He invited me to go in and modify her shield so that I could dreamwalk into her. She had complete admin access and Hiroshi wanted me to use her to run his company! The next day, one of the company’s lawyers, who was serving as Hiroshi’s executor, called me to say the same thing. The company wasn’t sure how this was going to work, and neither was I, but apparently they were at least partly aware of the special thing we had in common.

I told him that I felt like I needed my own lawyer right now, and he responded that it was reasonable for me to hire my own personal lawyer since he and his team were the company’s lawyers. At the same time, I had a controlling interest in the company (or would, when the will was fully resolved) and if I wanted not to participate in any part of the arrangement that Hiroshi had set up without my knowledge, I was free to appoint someone else.

But I wasn’t looking for a way out. I needed to find out if there was something specific Hiroshi was doing that required our advanced dreamwalking ability, or if all that was needed was for me to be here to monitor for others with comparable ability. I asked if it was going to interfere with anything if I simply took a few days to figure it out, and he said it wouldn’t.

I talked to my parents first, who were even more surprised than I was to hear that I had inherited Hiroshi’s company. But Dad said he’d try and find me a good lawyer, figuring that, given my inheritance, I could afford it.

I talked to people at the college next. The people I talked to knew of the existence of dreamwalking, that I’d promised not to use it to interfere with anyone here, and nothing more. Most people at the college didn’t even know that. Now I had to explain a lot more, and they were most worried that it was going to take too much of my time and I wouldn’t be able to complete my classes, but they also said they could be flexible. If I needed extra time to finish some assignments, that was fine. if I needed to drop one or more classes, I could do that too. And of course I still had no idea about the time required.

---

Dad came back the next day and put me in contact with two lawyers. One primary lawyer specializing in inheritance and tax issues, and a second lawyer in Japan who would help me deal with the ramifications of owning a company in Japan, and the requirements that imposed on me. That made sense: Two different lawyers for two entirely different aspects of different countries’ laws.

So I had each of them join me in separate remote meetings with different groups. The tax lawyer was with me in a meeting with the executor and another lawyer representing the company. This was surprisingly simple. Hiroshi had left me all his stock in the company, a lot of money, and a small box of tangible items. The executor was holding all the money in a temporary account for me, because there was a significant estate tax owed to Japan, but he could use some of those funds to send me the small items.

My tax lawyer had explained to me before the meeting that there were two kinds of taxes relevant to this situation: Estate tax, which was a tax against the estate itself paid by the estate before the assets could be transferred to heirs, and inheritance tax, paid by the heirs if they live in places imposing such a tax. Both taxes had a significant threshold before there was any taxation at all, but this was well above that. Fortunately there wasn’t inheritance tax here in Georgia, so I only had the estate tax. A complication was that the company was privately owned, so it was going to need to be appraised to establish its value. And if I did need to sell part of the company, I couldn’t simply trade it in the market, because there wasn’t a market for this; I’d have to seek out a private buyer.

So when I came to the second meeting with my Japanese lawyer and the company’s leadership, I brought up the fact that I might have to sell part of the company to pay the estate tax and that I needed to have the company appraised. This naturally led into a discussion of just what the company consisted of. It was a small company. The company lawyers I had met were not employees of the company, but of a law firm the company retained. The company employed a few programmers, a development manager (the leader representing the company at this meeting) who had reported directly to Hiroshi, a techie who managed the company’s servers, and a combination HR/facility manager. They used a marketing and distribution company who helped sell the software for a cut of the price, and two designers on contract who designed the beautiful world settings Hiroshi was so proud of. They only had the one product; Hiroshi had never been interested in making anything else. The design studio was just a product Hiroshi had purchased licenses for.

Although it meant my inheritance was smaller than I had thought, this was actually good in a way. It meant that the company would be worth less money and my estate tax would be less. And it meant that Hiroshi wasn’t managing a huge staff and whatever job he was asking me to do was likely to not be too crazy. I asked the manager to work with the company’s law firm to hire an appraiser to establish a legal value for the company.

So this left me wondering what Hiroshi wanted me to see in his admin interface. How much was there to manage, really? The manager logged into the game using his admin account and showed me, using a screen-share within our meeting, where I could access reports on player activity and skill levels, and lots of other things, and basically told me to go in and have a look.

---

These meetings had taken place in my evening, in order to happen in working hours in Japan, so I logged into Hiroshi’s World of Dreams account after the meeting ended to set up Herren for my own use. There was something clearly wrong with the character, though, because the game displayed some kind of error where her breasts should be, though she hadn’t looked that way when I was logged into game-Sarah through the computer and Hiroshi was playing Herren.

I dreamwalked into her that night to see just what was going on. And what a shock! She had absolutely enormous breasts, so much so I had to rebalance myself to keep from falling over, and she had busted out of her clothes. That must have been the error; the game was programmed to not display naked female breasts no matter what, but she didn’t fit in her clothes.

So I went into the admin room the manager had showed me. The first screen let me choose the language for the interface and it was apparently available in all the languages the game supported. So I went in and explored. One of the databases I could access there held the character records. Indeed, it was possible for me to edit all the character attributes which were ordinarily locked after character creation, and Herren’s breast size was off the scale, well beyond what was normally available, with an alert next to the value indicating the range normal users are allowed to select. I switched them down to a reasonable size and found my body updating immediately, which was rather disturbing but relieving. Herren’s clothes were still torn, though, so I went back to her quarters, removed them, and found something else from her closet to wear.

There was a stack of documents in Herren’s quarters. They seemed to be Hiroshi’s personal notes, but they were in Japanese. I didn’t see a way to translate them here, so I ignored them for now. I went back to the admin interface and studied all the reports in detail. There were reports on all kinds of things, such as player logins and advancement. There was even a report showing outside access to the game via dreamwalk. I wasn’t sure how Hiroshi had managed that, but there were no accesses to any accounts but mine and Herren’s in many pages of logs. If I looked years back into the records I could find Umberto and that other girl I’d dreamwalked into once.

The logs included accesses to the other sites for other languages. In the other sites, the only dreamwalks into any characters were into Herren. I found the room of portals to the other schools, which I looked into briefly. It was implemented on a hub-and-spoke model; the Japanese school was the hub, and had a large room with portals to every other school, identified by the language name written in that language above each portal. The others just had a single portal in this room leading to the Japanese school. Hiroshi had visited them all sometimes, but not often, as all the logs could be read from the admin room of any of them.

Another thing I found in the logs was Umberto’s death. I hadn’t ever heard of player characters dying while the player was offline since then, and I was curious how it had happened. It turned out that Umberto’s player logged back on, but not having been able to build the shield before, he was still unable to build the shield, and got taken over during the game. He witnessed Umberto’s death and “game over.” That was indeed a normal game occurrence, and just about the only way for the player to lose the game. At any other sort of failure, they could keep trying until they learned, though some players might reach the maximum of their abilities.

---

I brought the stack of Japanese documents home. Here, I could use Google to translate things for me. It wasn’t perfect, but it translated most things well enough for me to figure it out. I ended up printing out copies I saved of Google’s translations and taping them to the side of every page, so they became these double-wide Rosetta-stone sort of pages, and took them back into the game. It became my nightly dreamwalk project to read the documents, learning a fair bit of Japanese as I did so. As I figured out the inaccuracies in the translations, I wrote in the correct translations by hand.

This left my days to go to classes normally, and occasionally internet calls in the evening with the company. The week after my first contact with the company, the appraisal of the company came in, and Hiroshi’s estate could be resolved. The taxes took a good chunk of Hiroshi’s money, but I had what became a bit over a million dollars left once it got converted to dollars. That wasn’t set for life in my age, but it helped.

There were some other money matters that got resolved as well. The company paid Hiroshi a dividend every year, which was how he had the money that had paid all the estate taxes. As the owner, that income was now mine, but there was some paperwork that needed to be completed, and I established a permanent bank account in Japan, and hired an accountant to handle both the taxes on that money and my personal taxes in the United States. This additional income made the difference; with it, I really was set for life, if I didn’t waste it frivolously or need massive funding to support whatever I was doing.

The papers were indeed Hiroshi’s notes on every aspect of the game. Eventually I found a history of the game among them, which explained the money situation, among other things. Hiroshi wrote:

I started dreamwalking before there was such a thing as video games. I mostly visited fictional worlds, and sometimes visited real people or without a body I just viewed places, which could sometimes be in the past. It was quite a while later when there were video games developed enough for me to visit them, and at first they only had short sessions, but pretty soon, at first as standalone PC games, long-form games developed which created virtual worlds I could visit in the guise of a character.

When I started building World of Dreams, which was initially called by a Japanese name that translated into English as Sleep-Space, I privately hired a programmer to make it as a work for hire. That gave me a basic working game, and I worked with him to make it as realistic a simulation of dreamwalking as I could.

But it needed a lot more to be a game I could sell, and I wanted to sell it so that it would become well known enough to attract any other possible dreamwalkers. So I formed the company, and initially I was paid as an employee like any other. This was when the designers were hired to build the beautiful fictional city-scapes, which replaced views of real-life Japanese locations which made up all the scenery before that point. Once we were actually able to sell the game, I earned a royalty for the core parts of the game I owned myself. Also, by this point, I could dreamwalk into the characters in the game, and I helped adjust whatever didn’t match between the gameplay and what I could really do.

The English version came next, along with a multi-server architecture to support different versions of the game. I discovered that the direct translation of the Japanese name into English sounded like a porn game to English speakers, so the first actually released English name was Dream Master.

It was only after the English version had been out for a while that the company had earned enough money to buy my share of the game outright. After that, once the company accumulated money again, we changed to a profit-sharing model. I, as the owner but no longer a significant active contributor to the game, earned a fixed dividend provided the profits were enough to cover it. The excess is divided among the employees to reward them for building a successful game.

After this time, the employees managed the game themselves, and I only gave them advice. There were several releases over the years on different platforms and sometimes under new names, but it’s basically all the same game, and in fact players on different platforms log into the same servers and play in the same game world. Servers are added when needed; the English and Japanese versions each use several rack-mounted servers.

Another paper told the story of how Herren had ended up the way I found her. Hiroshi was bothered by how Helen didn’t have any breasts when he dreamwalked into her, and he used the admin console to try and fix it, but even when he pushed her bust size beyond the maximum players were allowed to select, to the largest setting he could enter through the admin interface, it didn’t help. He had apparently never bothered to turn the size back down.

The box of physical possessions turned out to be mostly other games Hiroshi had owned physical copies of, and passwords to online games. Just as I had bought a copy of World of Dreams to make my own account to dreamwalk into, he had bought his own copies of games he frequented. It was often out of necessity for Hiroshi before he met me, because he only had access to his own game sessions and those of people he had dreamwalked into until I came along and showed him other ways to find targets. These games included all the super-sleazy adult games where Hiroshi went on virtual dates, which, while dreamwalking, seemed like real dates complete with real sex. I visited them and they were mostly what I thought, more like prostitutes than actual dates, ready and willing to date you anytime and do anything you wanted.

I avoided visiting those any further. I still hoped to find someone in real life. In high school, I had dated Brad until the time he drugged me, and then mousy David, but since coming to college I hadn’t dated anyone. I would, again, in the future, but I felt like I wasn’t ready, for some reason. It was different for Hiroshi, who was old by the time he encountered such games and may have considered himself too old for real dating. Either that or he just got addicted to the quick thrills.

But Hiroshi had been too closed-minded in thinking that games like that were the only way for him to have virtual dates and virtual sex. Any fictional world where people went on dates and it was implied that people had children in the usual way was a place where I could do so, just by finding out when two characters were going on a date and then being there at that time, and I had my choice of which side of the date to participate from. And it was a realistic date with someone who acted like a real person, not a yesman or yeswoman who was just going to do whatever you asked. I proved this by attending the Pigwarts spring formal, and a few other events, alternating whether I did it as a man or as a woman. I actually liked it as a man more, which worried me a little.

Once I was through with the papers, I did visit other games, only occasionally coming back to World of Dreams to keep an eye on what was going on and watch for more real-life dreamwalkers.

All along I had continued checking in on Tommy and Becky periodically. It wasn’t long after I finished with Hiroshi’s papers and belongings that I saw that Tommy and Becky were planning to get married, and now that I knew how to dreamwalk without completely taking over a person, I could attend silently by watching it through any of the guests, while still experiencing it as clearly as if I’d been there in person. In the week before the wedding, I left each of them a small wrapped gift along with a note telling them how I’d be watching. And then I watched, just like I said, though nobody knew whose eyes I looked through and only Tommy and Becky knew I was there at all.

---

I wanted to continue Hiroshi’s quest to search for other dreamwalkers. But my reasons were different.

Hiroshi was idealistic. He knew he could do something unique, but powerful, and limited his use so as to not draw too much attention. He wanted, more than anything else in the world, to find a friend who could do the same thing, without exposing the friend to the world, either. Sadly, by the time he did so he had only a few years of life remaining, but we enjoyed our time together. And by making me his heir he had exposed me a little, but the world quickly forgot me, much as the world had said “who’s that?” upon news of Hiroshi’s death.

But I know my ability is dangerously powerful. I can dreamwalk into anybody on Earth. I tested it with brief dreamwalks: I can control them all. It wouldn’t matter who was president, prime minister, premier, or dictator, because I could control whoever it was. I chose not to, to avoid getting in over my head in situations which are too hard to control, as Hiroshi and I both did when we were together. But if two people can develop this ability, others could as well, and who’s to say they will be so scrupulous? That is the best way for me to use my ability, to detect other dreamwalkers and protect the world from bad ones.

I looked to see if Hiroshi or I existed on other Earths, using the way I had transcended the menu interface to search all worlds at once, but there weren’t any. Then I realized that if there were and if they had the same abilities, they’d be shielded, and I couldn’t find Hiroshi when he was shielded, so the same would apply to our counterparts. Also, if Hiroshi had died on other Earths I wouldn’t see him.

But I found ways around that. The developers confirmed that they didn’t themselves practice those techniques, and I could look for and dreamwalk into their counterparts. To the extent that they existed on other Earths, they weren’t working on World of Dreams. They mostly worked on other games, instead. World of Dreams itself didn’t exist in these worlds. My family didn’t shield themselves, but the only ones I could see were the ones from my Earth. Either they didn’t exist at all on other Earths, or all my counterparts had taught all my family members to shield themselves. I had actually tried teaching them once, and when they failed, I dreamwalked into each of them and was unable to bring up a shield. So I assumed they didn’t have the ability and that their counterparts, if they existed, likely wouldn’t, either.

I could find copies of any famous person on dozens of Earths, perhaps thousands of them, all of those worlds similar to my own. But Hiroshi and I and some of the people close to us were unique. Clearly, unlike in the fictional World of Dreams where it was common enough that millions of people had at least minor dreamwalk abilities, in reality dreamwalking was an incredibly rare ability, and I wasn’t certain it had ever developed for real on any other world. But I made continuing Hiroshi’s work my quest.

Hiroshi’s remote dreamwalk detector within World of Dreams turned out to just be the advanced NPCs watching for their enemies to dreamwalk, the same thing he and I did, but on a larger scale and done by game characters. Both shielding and detection were abilities he developed after he was able to dreamwalk into the game, by having the game characters learn to shield against and detect him, and he learned the real-world equivalent by having the game characters teach him when he was dreamwalking into Herren.

The game had tuning parameters which regulated the strength of game characters’ dreamwalk abilities. Hiroshi had set those carefully, allowing the strongest in-game NPC dreamwalkers to visit any part of the fictional in-game planet, and no more. Player characters could also only go that far unless they were being controlled by real-world dreamwalkers. That override could take place during character creation, as I had done with game-Sarah, or as the game adjusted to the behavior players exhibited. But even so, Herren and game-Sarah had never actually been strong enough for the game characters to dreamwalk outside the game. When Hiroshi and I did our travels together, we met in the game and agreed on a target to go to, which we did from our real bodies. While investigating this now, I temporarily set Herren's skill to the maximum possible. It still wasn't possible for Herren to dreamwalk anywhere other than World of Dreams, though she gained dangerous levels of power within the game, obliterating the mind of an NPC from a story she dreamwalked into within the game. After that happened I immediately set Herren back to her original dreamwalk strength, but whenever Herren dreamwalked into that story she controlled that body as well as the one she dreamwalked into.

I think Hiroshi realized the same thing I did: While to anyone outside the game the NPCs just seemed like sophisticated programs, when you dreamwalked into the game, those characters seemed as real as any other people, and definitely did things beyond what their programming covered. If we could dreamwalk into the game, it served to reason that a sufficiently strong game character could dreamwalk out of the game, discover our real world, and all hell would break loose. Even though I hadn’t been able to do so on maximum, who’s to say what might be possible if you weren’t already dreamwalking into the character but natively there?

For this reason I rejected the idea of making more powerful dreamwalkers in the game, ones powerful enough to dreamwalk into the real world. The idea had its attractions: Program them to visit every sleeping person just long enough to tell whether that person had the ability to detect dreamwalkers in the real world, then keep an eye on those people to see if they ever dreamwalked, and/or use them continuously during their sleep as dreamwalk detectors. But the risk of rogue NPCs causing havoc was not worth it.

So I had no real-world mass dreamwalk detection ability. The only things I could do were to keep the game going (hoping to draw in dreamwalkers like me who wanted to learn more about their ability), keep dreamwalk detection going around me when I was in the real world as much as I could (to catch random dreamwalkers), and watch the news for weird things happening that could be the effects of dreamwalkers.

I learned how to keep my dreamwalk detection on continuously, any time I was in the real world or even in other games when I had a character with some mental abilities who could do it, just as I kept my shield up. In fact, I avoided games where I couldn’t do those things, as not having them made me feel vulnerable. And I wasn’t too surprised not to find a single dreamwalker except for characters dreamwalking within World of Dreams itself.

The work on the papers and other ideas had brought me near the end of my freshman year, and that was the time to plan next year’s classes and, ideally, to declare a major. Since I couldn’t progress on the goals within dreamwalks, I tried to figure out what classes would help me in other ways.

I wanted to learn computer science to better keep up with what the developers at my company were doing. I wanted to learn physics, to see if there was any way to explain what I was doing as a real-world phenomenon. I wanted to learn biology, or chemistry, or medicine, whatever would best help me to understand my brain. I wanted to learn psychology, which included the study of dreams. I wanted to study literature, so I could find more relevant stories to probe into, or to figure out how to write my own.

When I spilled all this out to my adviser, one of the few here who knew about my dreamwalking, he replied, “There’s no way you can fit all that into four years, even if you take summer classes.”

“I have no need to do it in four years. I have both the time and money to devote to this.”

With that, he set up a plan for me to do a physics and psychology double major with computer science and literature minors over six years. He figured I’d get enough chemistry from the requirements of the physics degree, and enough biology from the psych requirements, except he was going to have me take two upper-level biology classes about the brain that were normally only available to majors, but he felt sure he could get me an exemption to enroll in them when the time came. Biology, he pointed out, was a broad subject area and I only had a limited interest there. And he explained that a doctorate in medicine or psychology would probably be a way to learn about the brain in more depth, but I should do that after my bachelor’s degree.

Detailed scheduling would have to wait, but we worked out a loose plan for me to take the classes over 6 years. My summers would be important breaks from all the class pressure, except this first summer he had me enroll in an intensive Japanese class to learn the language properly and not just the assorted written vocabulary I’d learned from Google Translate.

When I told my parents my plan, they were surprised, but supportive. They already knew I wasn’t going to be normal, and they felt that devoting a portion of my inheritance to studying more subjects was a fine thing to do. A lot of parents would have worried, among other things how they were going to pay for it, but between the inheritance and the annual income that came from the company, I could afford it in a way few other college students could.

I dedicated myself to the classes during the long semesters after that, allowing myself to relax and actually have some sort of social life in the evenings and weekends, apart from occasional meetings with my lead developer. Overnight dreamwalks covered a variety of different areas. Keeping an eye on World of Dreams only needed short visits a couple times a week, so I devoted two full nights a week to exploring new games and worlds from fiction, and others revisiting interesting dreamwalk destinations I’d discovered, or do what I called “immersion” to help me learn Japanese more with those light dreamwalks that only observed people rather than controlling them, by just observing people in Japan doing ordinary things.

One of those interesting games provided me with a way to turn some overnight sessions into “study hall”. I was able to make copies of texts I brought in and leave the copies there, and either do extra study in my sleep to help with difficult concepts in class, or do independent extra study.

---

The summer after my sophomore year I started trying to put it all together. If I could actually explain dreamwalking, or even a part of it, I might be able to use that knowledge to... do what exactly? Something even more insanely powerful than I could already do, but dared not?

I realized that I hadn’t really thought through this. I wasn’t sure what my goal really was. Maybe that was part of what I had to figure out. But I started a list of ideas, however outlandish, and though I was tempted to cross out some of them as impossible, ultimately I decided that I should only cross out those that are too dangerous if they actually work. But what the list really came down to was exploring different avenues to find other people who could dreamwalk, even if they hadn’t done so already or didn’t realize they could.

An idea with lots of potential was a phenomenon called lucid dreaming. This was much studied and little understood within the realm of psychology. It wasn’t even fully agreed upon as to what it is, but it is some combination of being aware that you are dreaming and being able to control the dream. People could be trained to have lucid dreams, but not like I do; they only had lucid dreams some of the time, and it was considered a minor success for people who had never had a lucid dream before to be able to have just one lucid dream. Nevertheless, it was notable as being a real scientific concept I could relate to a part of my experience, but only a part of it. If I could establish a link between lucid dreaming and what I did, maybe I could promote something based on lucid dreaming that would bring me more potential dreamwalkers.

The idea of being able to choose what you dream about was not considered part of lucid dreaming, or even related to it. That was a completely different concept from being able to direct your actions within the dream, whatever it was about. And being able to put yourself into a dream state was yet another thing, but there were a lot of studies on it, showing that both meditation techniques and certain drugs could influence it. Hiroshi had taught me how to do this as a lesson in World of Dreams, and he was probably passing on something he’d learned himself from studies like this.

A lot of dream research focused on the idea of rapid eye movements or REM. Sleeping people alternated between periods of REM and periods without REM, and they could experience dreams in both, but they are different kinds of dreams, and REM dreams are more common. Interestingly, people normally only dream for about 5 to 20 minutes at a time, within one REM or non-REM cycle. This made me wonder what I did, whether my dreams were associated with REM or non-REM sleep, and what kind of a freak sleep researchers would consider me when they found I could dream for more than 6 hours at a time.

I did find and enroll in a sleep study, but before my sleep session I told the researchers that I didn’t have normal sleep and it was possible my data would be so much of an outlier it wasn’t useful for their study, but I still wanted to hear the results. And they said if I was so sure my data wasn’t going to be useful, they should not pay me for my participation, so we agreed I would sleep with their equipment on for one night, they would collect the data and share it with me, but I wouldn’t be paid for it nor would they ask me to pay them. The report I got back from the team confirmed I was as much an outlier as I thought.

“I’m sure somebody wants to study you, but you are definitely way outside the norms and we can’t possibly include your data in the study. You’re basically backward of how normal people sleep!”

They found that as soon as I got to sleep, I entered REM sleep, but only briefly, in two different modes which both seemed like some sort of dream but not a normal REM dream. The REM periods were interrupted by long spans of non-REM sleep which were each one long, deep dream interrupted only when I entered REM sleep again. What this meant in my terms was that the mode where I was selecting a destination was in REM sleep, with the times I used the menus and the times I searched for a destination purely in thought showing up as two different REM modes. The dreamwalks were detected as deep non-REM sleep. That I was lucid in the non-REM dreams was also unprecedented.

But this likewise told me I couldn’t use any of the conventional research on lucid dreaming to explain what I did, and I was unlikely to be able to teach lucid dreamers how to dreamwalk. I did have one idea, though. My REM sleep was still lucid, in that I both realized I was in a dream and could control what I did there. It was unlike lucid dreaming that within that lucid dream I could effectively choose what to dream about and then do so. Maybe that was what was needed: Get lucid dreamers, the kind who could choose their actions within the dream, to choose to dream a specific dream within the dream.

So that was one viable idea I got out of the entire field of lucid dreaming. I convinced one of my psych professors to organize such a study (in part by funding it), hiring people who’d already shown the ability to lucid-dream and asking them to dream about a specific subject within the lucid dream when they experienced one. And I was sitting there listening for any outsiders to dreamwalk in during the nights of the study. Our study yielded no positive results. But maybe a larger study was needed, or a different technique.

I worried I was on a fool’s errand. The theories of lucid dreaming ran counter to my experience. So did much else of my experience. Conventional science had no explanation for being able to experience other people’s dreams or sensations. Even the occult couldn’t explain it. There was no way around it: This was going to require me to develop original theories, ones which only I could test, unless I found another dreamwalker, and they might be difficult for anyone else to accept. In all likelihood it would be my life’s work and even then I might not understand it. But I did find some areas to explore.

When I got far enough into physics I learned of one other theory that had any potential application, quantum theory. It is hard to get one’s head around quantum theory, and there are still lots of unanswered questions in this field. But among the key concepts is one that objective reality doesn’t actually work the way we think it does. Our reality emerges as the large-scale result of the interaction of massive numbers of tiny particles that behave according to different laws. These laws state that the properties and behavior of these particles are probabilistic, and rather than having fixed values, they can have a distribution of values with some probabilities. Even calling them particles isn’t quite right, because part of the theory is that particles and waves are the same thing, a thing which can behave like a particle in some circumstances and a wave otherwise.

The wave-particle duality is probably the oldest part of this theory, and it became recognized due to the double-slit experiment. To run this experiment, you need to have a particle emitter which emits particles with a consistent energy level. Early versions of the experiment called it an electron gun because sources which emitted electrons were most easily available. And you need to have a screen made of some material that the particles will not pass through, with two slits in the screen. Finally, you need to have a second screen which might be a photographic film, something that will show the locations where the particles impact it.

Each particle impacts the screen at a discrete location, as you would expect. The weird bit is the overall distribution of these locations. If they behaved like particles, you’d expect to see the impacts clustered at two locations behind the slits, but instead, you get a wave-like interference pattern, with alternating intervals of greater and lesser frequency of impact. You sometimes see this sort of pattern when light interacts with certain objects, like soap films. In this case, the pattern is similar to what you would get if two waves were being emitted from the slits.

But variations in the experiment show that it’s stranger than that. This interference happens even if the particles are emitted so infrequently that only one particle is in the air between the emitter and the film at one time. Therefore, each particle behaves like a wave, parts of it pass through both slits, and these parts interfere with each other, until the particle impacts the film, in a location whose probability varies according to this interference pattern.

And if you install detectors which can tell when a particle passes through each slit, then each particle passes through only one slit, and you get the expected pattern with just two clusters of impacts behind the slits. Observing the particle, seeing which slit it went through, forces it to go through only one slit and not interfere with itself the way it does when it is not observed!

Another bit of this is quantum entanglement. Two particles can become entangled, so that the properties of each particle are not known but some relationship between the values of the particles’ properties is known. Each is restricted to certain states in ways dependent on the state of the other particle. This entanglement persists, even when the particles move away from one another. When one particle’s property is measured, the other particle is instantaneously forced into a state consistent with the other particle. This happens faster than the speed of light, and has been verified by letting entangled particles get sufficiently far apart, then measuring both particles simultaneously, finding them always consistent when the measurements are later compared. Albert Einstein himself initially rejected this idea when it emerged from his work, saying such “spooky action at a distance” was impossible, but later accepted it was a real part of nature at the quantum level.

This quantum behavior persists even for masses composed of multiple particles, whole atoms, molecules, and small masses of molecules condensed together, but the probabilities of each individual particle in each mass combine, strengthening the most likely results and weakening the less likely ones. By the time you get up to grains large enough to see, each object has single values for each property with so small a likelihood of any other value that it’s not likely to be observed for any object ever over the entire history of the universe. And for everyday items of reasonable size, forget it! In other words, I can’t simply phase myself through small holes in the wall as a mass of waves because the probability of it working is too low, beyond low, so low that you could never write out all the zeroes before the first nonzero digit in your lifetime. And even if I did, it would be even more unlikely that I would reassemble myself on the other side.

But another of these quantum experiments was one called Schrodinger’s Box, or Schrodinger’s Cat. This was proposed as a thought experiment, not one that was meant to be carried out in real life; he wasn't into killing animals. The idea is that you have an opaque, soundproof box which you seal up. Inside the box is a sample of radioactive material, a detector like a Geiger counter to detect the emission of a particle associated with the radioactive decay, a vial of poison gas which a device connected to the detector will break open when it detects the particle, and a cat which is initially alive. The particle is in a quantum state of having decayed and having not decayed until the result of the experiment is observed. So the cat is in a quantum state of both dead and alive until the box is opened again and it is observed whether the cat is dead or alive. This observation forces the radioactive material to correspondingly have decayed or not decayed.

The point of Schrodinger’s Box is to ask the question: Could you break through the probability barrier by forcing a macroscopic object’s particles to align in the same quantum state? Nobody’s ever really succeeded, but they also haven’t ruled out the possibility that there might be a way to align all of an object’s quantum states in a way that you can teleport the object through a solid wall.

How this applied to me was that it was possible that something I was doing worked because of quantum effects, that I could somehow entangle my particles with those of someone somewhere else, even in another universe, and even align the quantum states of the particles in an object to teleport it across worlds along with my consciousness.

Other universes were also possible. The Big Bang Theory says that the universe expanded from a singularity 13 billion years in which the entire universe’s mass was condensed into a single point. But expanded into what? And where did the singularity come from? This is another area science cannot yet explain. There are several different ideas which remain merely conjectures, with no clear idea how to test any of them. These real-life conjectures include many ideas popular in science fiction, which drew its ideas by speculating about the ideas proposed as a part of real science.

In some of these ideas, our universe is but one of multiple universes within some larger space, which may have existed for unfathomable additional time before our universe. One view of free will is that the universe also expands in dimensions we cannot see as a result of decisions people make, each decision branching off a new universe which is immediately and permanently isolated from the universe in which that decision was not made or was made differently. But in such a multiverse, who’s to say that particles from our universe can’t remain entangled with ones from another universe? If this is true, and I’m somehow quantum entangled with everything, it might explain why I can access these alternate Earths as easily as my own.

All of these subjects gave me more than enough ideas to contemplate over my summers, weekends, overnights, and whenever.

---

I didn’t let all that completely control my life. I finally figured out my dating problem! It wasn’t that I wanted to be a guy, it was just that I liked girls. It doesn’t matter whether I’m myself or a guy. Once I figured out I could be a real-world lesbian, it wasn’t much trouble finding a date, though it was tough choosing!

During my senior year I decided to try to look among my pool of dating candidates for one who was also a dreamwalk candidate, based on her not having counterparts of herself or close family members on the other Earths. This meant looking for each of these people as a target for dreamwalking in that system in my head. And there was just one, Jenna, a sophomore. Conveniently that meant we’d graduate together, and by my 5th year we were dating regularly and I started spilling secrets to her that only a couple dozen other people on Earth knew. She didn’t think it was too weird, though early attempts to test her potential abilities didn’t go anywhere.

Jenna also admitted she was “a little bi.” So we agreed that if she wanted to date a guy now and then, it was OK, and I might do some virtual dating as a guy. She ended up only dating guys twice the rest of the time we were in college.

I finished my multiple degrees according to my planned schedule, and opted out of continuing into a doctorate to study the brain further, deciding from what I had learned that it wasn’t likely to help. I married Jenna, and was happy to move wherever she needed for her own career since I could set up my studies in any big city. Her self-sufficient income meant more of the funding Hiroshi’s inheritance had provided could be committed to scientific study of dreamwalking.

I had certain advantages over the other scientists who had to speculate about so many things. I knew for a fact that parallel universes existed, in such a way that contact between them, whether by particles entangled before they split or in some other way, was possible. I knew that the power of our collective minds had made other universes exist, somehow, in some sort of likewise reachable space. I knew that somehow, in some way likely related to entanglement, I was connected to essentially everyone on Earth, as well as those in the other universes. I knew that it was possible, at least for some people, to close off those connections so that other people could not use them.

I ran a lot of different experiments, and when it fit the experiment and she had time, Jenna was a sport and let me use her as a test subject. One of the first things, naturally, was that she played through beginner training in World of Dreams, but she was unable to do any of the exercises from her real body. We made no progress until an experiment I ran one night after we’d been out of college for a bit over two years.

The purpose of the experiment was supposed to be seeing whether I was more resistant to being awoken out of a dreamwalk while receiving sexual pleasure. The way I was doing it was taking over Jenna’s body, masturbating as best I could with her body, and at the same time pleasuring my own body. All the while, both bodies’ brainwaves were being recorded on an electroencephalogram, or EEG. In the midst of all this, my own body’s dreamwalk detection went off and that woke me up and pulled me out of the dreamwalk.

“Whoa! Someone dreamwalked!” I exclaimed.

Jenna, now back in control of her own body, raised one hand. “It was me, I think. Just for a moment I felt like I was in your body, looking back at myself..”

“Do you remember how you did it?”

Jenna didn’t. But I assembled the recorded video of our bodies synced up with the EEGs, and paused them at a certain point.

“Right here, Jenna, there’s a spike in your brain activity right before it all happened. What were you thinking right at this moment?”

“You brought my body to an orgasm, and I was thinking really intensely of you.”

“But do you remember what you did in response? Do you think you could do it again? And how could you do that at all through my shield?”

At first, Jenna couldn’t reproduce it on her own, but eventually we were able to reproduce the entire experiment, with everything again falling apart the moment it happened. I confirmed that my connection to Jenna was creating a hole through my shield that she could come back into me through, an important thing dreamwalkers should be aware of that does not seem to be in use within World of Dreams, probably because Hiroshi never had the opportunity to model it.

But that approach didn’t get us further in helping Jenna. To try something different, I dreamwalked into Jenna, and I was able to use her abilities from her body: shielding, dreamwalk detection, and even actual dreamwalking into other people, which had never worked for me when I dreamwalked into World of Dreams characters. That didn’t work before that time. Somehow, what we’d done had “woken up” Jenna’s real-life dreamwalk abilities. Between learning from what I did in her body and reviewing the earlier lessons from World of Dreams, Jenna learned to repeat them all from her real body. She even learned to dreamwalk into her game character the way I did.

So how many other people out there had latent dreamwalk abilities that needed a kind of awakening as I had done with Jenna? If they were going to need that level of awakening, they might never get it!

---

It took Jenna about 6 months of practice doing things in World of Dreams and doing the same things in real life to get to a point where she felt fully confident in her abilities. During this time I pondered several ideas for identifying more potential dreamwalk candidates. Most of these were based on identifying people who didn’t exist in any other worlds, since so far all of the people I had known that to be true about had been capable of dreamwalking, or were closely related to a dreamwalker.

There was the technique I had used to find Jenna, just looking through the directory in my mind of all the people of all the universes. This only worked for one person at a time, but I just had to mentally query for all the worlds that person existed in. I felt that this technique was fairly solid. I likely wouldn’t be able to detect the person if they were already shielding themselves, but this probably meant I wouldn’t find them at all, and then I’d know to contact that person another way. But I couldn’t do bulk detections this way. I could run “sets” of people, which basically amounted to procuring some list of people, taking the list into World of Dreams, studying the details I had about a person, disconnecting from my character there and looking for that person as a dreamwalk target across all the worlds, and then going back to World of Dreams to write down the results. I had managed to run about 3000 people this way, including our neighbors, Jenna’s co-workers, high-level players in World of Dreams, and other candidates I selected in other ways, and not one of them existed on fewer than 6 worlds, and only a handful existed on fewer than 10. It made me feel that finding Jenna among only a dozen or so candidates had been extremely lucky.

I had some other ideas for doing more bulk detections, but they all basically amounted to acquiring databases of all the people on all the worlds and trying to compare them. And the list of problems with this idea seemed endless. First was the problem that there were a lot of worlds. I went back to the people from my directory runs who were on the fewest worlds, and there wasn’t a lot of overlap. I probably needed to gather data from hundreds of worlds to avoid having a lot of false positives because I just didn’t have the data from the right worlds to match certain people.

Second was the problem of obtaining the data. Did Earth just leave its directory of all the people in the world sitting around where anybody could get hold of it? No! It didn’t even have one such directory. At a minimum I needed to go visit all the countries of the world, and even then it wasn’t typically possible to just download a database of identities. That data was kept secret in various ways.

Third was the problem of getting all the data together. Even assuming I could just get all the data onto a USB stick and bring it home with me, were all these worlds going to have compatible USB sticks? No, of course not. My best hope there was finding some fictional world where I could gather computers from all the worlds and find a way to get them to talk to one another.

Fourth was the problem of actually comparing the data. When I looked up a person, that person didn’t always have the same name on all the other worlds. Or the same address or other data. My mind figured it out, but just looking at a bunch of computer data, which might be in different formats from not only different worlds but different countries within each world, how was I supposed to match up the identities?

There were so many obstacles that a technological solution seemed impossible. So I also tried to consider magical solutions. But it was just as bad. The magical people I could dreamwalk into didn’t themselves have access to the worlds I wanted to check. Could I first check for dreamwalkers in those worlds, and then figure out how to combine the ability with magic? Maybe if I could first find a world where I could use magic to detect dreamwalkers on that world. That would already be a huge advance.

But while simple magic wasn’t too difficult to do in those worlds, this was far from simple magic. I probably needed the equivalent of another college education to learn enough magic to do something like that. For the longshot chance of maybe being able to detect other dreamwalkers in my world that way, it wasn’t worth it.

Since I was unable to figure any of this out, I still had only the one-by-one checking. And before long, Jenna was through with her training and confident in her ability to dreamwalk anywhere I could direct her. So we started dreamwalking together.

Pretty soon, these turned into dates, 7 nights a week, spread across dozens of different fictional worlds, as different characters every time. I still used my days to work on my theories, and an occasional night when Jenna and I would sit in our World of Dreams dorm and I would bounce ideas off of her.

Over time I did actually manage to assemble theories to support large parts of what happened with dreamwalking. I gave Jenna some dumbed-down (that is, not for physics majors) versions of a few relevant concepts and then in one of our dreamwalks together in World of Dreams I went over the theories with her.

“I actually have a good explanation now for a lot of what we do and experience. There are still gaps, but some of your ideas helped before, and I hope you can help me again.”

“I’m all ears,” Jenna replied.

Theory 1: We live in a branching multiverse. Certain events cause a universe to branch into two universes (both part of the multiverse) which are alike except for details of that event, but the differences gradually spread due to interactions of the parts of those universes which differ with other parts of each universe.

“I shared with you the branching multiverse theory, which is one of several unproven theories, thought to be unprovable, which other scientists have proposed to explain what might exist outside the universe. But I know it’s true because I have visited some of these other universes, ones that follow the history of our universe up to a point and then diverge.”

“Right. You told me the very first place you dreamwalked was like that. Go on.”

Theory 2: Dreamwalking is based on quantum entanglement.

“When we dreamwalk, we interact with other places far from here, instantaneously. If that’s on the other side of the Earth, at the speed of light through the Earth’s core, that’s about 1/20th of a millisecond each way. We might not notice that lag. But we dreamwalk into other universes. How far away would that be? We don’t even have a way to get there, apart from dreamwalking. This is perhaps the weakest part of this whole argument, but the only kind of mechanism science offers that can possibly communicate in this way is one involving quantum entanglement.”

“The thing where a particle has two possible states, but a distant particle is correlated with it, so when one particle is forced into a state, the other instantaneously assumes the corresponding state?”

“Yes, that is what I mean, Jenna.”

“I don’t have a better explanation. I’ll take this one for granted. What’s next?”

Theory 3: The event which causes one universe to branch is the breaking of quantum entanglement.

“While you have this idea in mind about pairs of particles which can have either of two correlated states, which resolve instantaneously, in cases like the physics experiments where the particle could go either way but it is forced to go only one of the two ways, I propose that what really happens when entanglement breaks is that the universe splits into two universes, one in which the particles have one set of values and one in which they have the other.”

“It’s an interesting thought.”

“I tested this by watching, from my select-a-dreamwalk state, one of the researchers running one of these entanglement experiments, and specifically how many worlds he existed in. Even before the experiment started, he already existed in thousands of universes, but while the experiment was running this number fluctuated wildly, increasing more than it decreased. The fact that the number of universes containing the researcher did not simply double for every entanglement break shows that there is something else going on, but the fact that it changed wildly while the experiment was running and much more slowly when the experiment was not running shows that it was related to the experiment.”

“Neat! So it was like a meta-experiment?”

“You could say that. Though it was something nobody else could confirm.”

“Right. You mentioned that’s why you were sharing it with me in detail.”

Theory 4: Free will is powered by entanglement, specifically, a power our brains have over entanglement.

“For millennia, people have debated what free will actually is, in modern times crossing from philosophy into the fields of biology, chemistry, psychology, and others; basically into everything I studied. With a multiverse with branching powered by the loss of entanglement, the only thing that makes sense is that our brains possess the power to manipulate entanglement, and decisions and their impact upon the world happen by means of whether particles within our brains do or do not stay entangled.”

“Wow, that’s a big one. But I can see how it follows from your other assumption about entanglement-breaking being the pivotal event that separates two universes.”

Theory 5: Matter in our multiverse is heavily entangled to the extent that any macroscopic clump of matter contains particles entangled with other particles in every other macroscopic clump of matter.

“This follows directly from theory 2 and my own observations. I can dreamwalk into any person in any of these worlds, apart from a limited few who have developed a way to shield themselves, so I must possess particles entangled with them all.”

“Right.”

“Now this has a big consequence. It must be the case that entanglement doesn’t only happen in the way physicists set up experiments, which I call experimental entanglement. In fact, every time two particles interact it imposes certain limits, certain combinations of properties those particles may not have, leaving certain other allowed combinations, and resulting in the particles becoming entangled. This entanglement may leave multiple allowed combinations of properties, not only two, so it may take multiple future interactions before entanglement fully breaks. The brain uses particles entangled in this way and not just those from experimental entanglement, which are quite rare and only exist in modern times.”

“Of course.”

Theory 6: When a universe splits, particles within it become entangled with their other-universe equivalents.

“Another consequence of theory 2. I can dreamwalk into other-universe people as easily as ones in this universe. But particles from our universe do not interact directly with particles in other universes, so that entanglement must be set up at the time the universes split.”

Jenna nodded and I went on.

Theory 7: Entangled particles can pass entanglement to other entangled particles.

“This is another more subtle consequence of theory 2. I have a connection to essentially every person on Earth. We know that particles in Earth’s atmosphere circulate and recirculate, but they don’t do so fast enough. A little story is relevant here.”

“Do tell.”

“It’s been said that with every breath, we breathe in atoms from Julius Caesar’s dying breath.”

“Is that really true?”

“It’s arguably true. There are an astronomical number of particles in any macroscopic amount of matter. The ideal gas law tells us that in ordinary conditions in Earth’s atmosphere, one mole of gas occupies about 23 liters. A mole is a way of measuring the number of particles; it’s defined by the number of atoms needed to make up the atomic weight in grams. A mole contains about 6x10²³ particles. That’s 600 thousand million million million particles. A breath is only a couple liters, not 23, so divide that number by ten to get about 6x10²² particles in a breath. The entirety of Earth’s atmosphere contains about 3x10¹⁷ moles of gas. We can again say each mole represents about ten breaths, so that’s 3x10¹⁸ breaths. Some of that gas is up in the upper atmosphere and isn’t breathable, but that doesn’t matter for these calculations. It all circulates, and over the thousands of years since Caesar walked the Earth, we can assume it has evenly mixed throughout the entire atmosphere. But when you divide those numbers, that makes about 20000 particles from Caesar’s last breath in every breath of gas on Earth. And those atoms don’t all stay in the atmosphere; organisms breathe them in, and incorporate some of them into their bodies, which may become part of the land when they die, but enough of them stay in circulation to make the saying still true.”

Jenna nodded again.

“The problem is this thing called diffusion. It takes time to mix. There has been plenty of time since Julius Caesar’s era, but it takes years for air to mix across the Earth. The jet stream helps, but only so much. And not all the air that goes into my lungs is going to do anything to become entangled with me. I did some calculations and determined I would need more than 50 years to expect to have particles that reacted in my lungs reach 99.9% of other people on Earth, and react in their lungs. (And I think my coverage in terms of who I can dreamwalk into on Earth is even more than that.) I used the air because it circulates far more than any other matter that has a chance to get directly entangled with me. The circulation through water and the food chain is so much less it essentially doesn’t contribute. Since I’m still not close to 50 years old, nor are many of the people I can see as choices to dreamwalk into, it must be the case that entanglement doesn’t require direct interaction with my body. The reasonable choice is transferred entanglement.”

“OK. How is it transferred?”

“Suppose particles A and B are entangled until particle B interacts with particle C. If C is free in a certain way, perhaps because it is entangled with D, it may happen that A and B cease to be entangled, and B adopts a specific state, but A becomes entangled with C instead. It’s possible this causes C to cease being entangled with D, but it’s also possible that you instead get a more complex entanglement of the three particles (A, C, and D) with more possible combinations of states. But in either case, even though A never encountered C, it’s now entangled with it. This allows entanglement to spread quickly enough through the atmosphere to match my observations.”

“But you can’t prove there’s not some other way the entanglement happens?”

“Maybe the mechanism is different, but even so, the result is the same. The result isn’t critical, anyway; this is really just a side-effect of theory 5.”

Theory 8: Fictional worlds exist via the mass entanglement of the same ideas across many people’s brains.

Before I could even comment, Jenna interjected, “Right, we can dreamwalk into fictional worlds.”

“Fictional worlds exist in some sense, because we can dreamwalk into them, but they don’t work in the same way as real ones. They can’t. For one thing, we can simply make them up, in ways we can’t with real worlds. This theory is a way to try to explain their existence, in a way that I could prove, at least partially.”

“Oh, I want to hear this proof.”

“The fictional worlds we dreamwalk into are well known ones that at least a hundred thousand people are familiar with. Is there a limit? Is there a minimum number of people who need to know about a fictional world to make it real in this sense?”

“Good idea! So you tested it?”

“Yes. First off, I wrote a story about 20 pages long describing a unique fictional world with some unique characters which nobody else has seen. I could not dreamwalk into my characters even though I knew them very well as a result of having written the story. And then I shared it with you. It was that one from three weeks ago, that we discussed a while after you had a chance to read it.”

“Well now I know why you wrote the story.”

“Even after that, I couldn’t dreamwalk there. So I tried to make a list of stories I knew from books, TV shows, random reading on the Internet, etc. which weren’t especially well known. Where they were commercially published I tried to get some estimate of readership. I tried to visit about 100 of these. Most of the commercially published ones which were at least well known enough to have articles in Wikipedia that weren’t just stubs, and even some of the stubs were reachable, but some of the pretty obscure ones weren’t.”

“So that proved it.”

“Or at least supported it. But there was a second category of works that couldn’t be dreamwalked into that didn’t fit the criteria of being known by many people. Some further research showed that it has to be developed to a certain degree. For instance, even though that Far Side comic where the kid going into the gifted school tries to push a door labeled ‘pull’ is known by many more people than some of the works I dreamwalked into, I couldn’t dreamwalk there, because we know absolutely nothing else about the place.”

“OK, so well known and developed enough to be a meaningful place.”

“I even realized I already had evidence to support the theory. Hiroshi couldn’t dreamwalk into World of Dreams until he was able to start selling it to real players. This was the same thing; the fictional world didn’t have its own reality until enough players were thinking about it.”

Jenna laughed. “Right there under your nose.”

“There’s one more thing of note. We can’t dreamwalk into the major characters in fictional worlds, the ones everyone knows, because controlling their actions would require overriding the entangled memories of the many people who know the place. But it’s possible to dreamwalk into minor characters, the kind of people who show up in stories whenever a one-time character is needed, or in video games, player characters, whose actions necessarily vary from one game session or one player character to another.”

“That makes sense.”

Theory 9: Fictional worlds are subworlds of the worlds which created them. They don’t split on their own, but do so when their parent worlds do.

“If fictional worlds didn’t split when their parent worlds did, then we’d have people from different universes interacting in the same fictional world, and events from other real worlds influencing our fictional ones, in ways that don’t happen in actuality. I’ve seen some of the major events that happened in some of our near parallel universes, and the differences it caused in some of their fictional worlds as compared to the counterparts we have.”

“You have shown me some of those.”

“Indeed. And if fictional worlds split at times when their parent worlds didn’t, we’d have fracturing of the worlds.”

“But doesn’t that actually happen sometimes? Like when somebody goes and makes a major retcon to established work, people still remember the old version.”

“Yes, it does. But the fictional world doesn’t split because of the kind of quantum interactions within the world that cause universes to branch within the multiverse, but because of outside influence on the people whose minds support it.”

“Fair enough.”

“Oh, but I can show you. They aren't always even called the same thing, for instance Pigwarts isn't always called Pigwarts, but it's easy to find them across a vast swath of other worlds. I even found one crazy world where the author never revealed within the books that the head of Pigwarts was gay, but announced it on the Internet after the books were finished.”

“What? Why do such a thing?”

“The books were already too long and it got cut as an inessential element, apparently. On that Earth, in the mainstream dreamwalkable version of the world he was a closeted gay all through the series, but he never dated any other major character, or those characters died taking the secret with them, and nobody at the school knows. There are gay and lesbian kids at the school you can dreamwalk into, though, and they're out and accepted. But the announcement also sparked fan fiction authors to write a bunch of completely gayer-than-gay versions, some of which are popular enough you can dreamwalk into them. There's one where being gay or lesbian is mainstream within the magical world, they use magic to have kids, and the one straight couple at the school causes a controversy.”

Jenna doubled over laughing.

“Take me there sometime. I am not sure we could manage to have a real date there, but I'd love to see it."

“OK. Here's my next theory.”

Theory 10: The alternate versions of a person I can see when selecting dreamwalk targets are those who are strongly entangled with one another.

“This makes sense given that I see people from Earth in other worlds that are very similar to it and diverged more recently. When a universe branches, corresponding particles in the different universes become entangled. But not all of them, and some of them do not stay entangled over time, leading to the people no longer being recognized as the same after enough time has allowed enough differences to build up. Now that said, I think that in most cases I can still see those people; they just aren’t recognized by the weird interface in my head as the same person.”

“Yeah, I still don’t have that interface.”

“Hiroshi didn’t either. But now we’re at the brainstorming point. I’ve got a corollary to that last theory, but I am unsure how to explain it.”

Theory 11: Dreamwalkers are not entangled with their selves from other universes at all.

“This seems to be true, since I have never been able to see other instances of me, Hiroshi, or you. But it also can’t be the case that we don’t exist at all in other universes. It would cause too much of a cataclysm when universes split.”

“I agree. So where are our other selves?”

“Well I had an idea.”

Theory 11A: Dreamwalkers other selves are entangled with one another, but not with the dreamwalker. They lose the ability to dreamwalk, forget that dreamwalking ever existed, and whatever consequences of dreamwalking exist in their lives simply become mysteries to them.

“Ugh, really?” Jenna interjected.

“Well, I said it was an idea. But I agree I don’t like it because it still seems to impose massive changes on any world that branches off one with a dreamwalker. I tried to test it, by going into various other worlds and looking up you and me by normal means rather than through the thing in my head. I found us, sometimes. We were never together, though, and it was clear that my counterparts in those worlds had never dreamwalked, not at all. World of Dreams didn’t exist in most of them, but I found it in some, which was something I wasn’t able to do before with Hiroshi. However, I didn’t find worlds that had branched off from our world more recently, where I’d been playing World of Dreams and gotten together with you. So I think that’s not it. And I hope you can come up with something better.”

We brainstormed various ideas for a bit, and then Jenna proposed a new idea.

Theory 11B: Dreamwalkers have counterparts who dreamwalk, but dreamwalkers may not dreamwalk into the home world of another dreamwalker, unless the dreamwalker also originates from that world.

“Interesting, Jenna. So there may be millions of us out there, none of us able to visit the home worlds of any of the others, and I can’t see them because I can’t dreamwalk into anybody within those worlds.”

“Wouldn’t this, however, conflict with the researcher you mentioned?” Jenna asked.

“Oh, the particle physicist I mentioned back when we were discussing theory 3? Actually, no,” I confirmed. “I hunted around different universes to find one where a quantum entanglement experiment was happening just then. It wasn’t in our world. If we find one happening in our world, maybe we can check what happens when someone does it here. If the theory is right, we shouldn’t notice any difference when the experiment is happening versus when it is not happening, because the copies produced will all be in worlds I can’t see.”

“Unless the experiment is also happening in worlds without you but with this same physicist,” Jenna pointed out.

“Sure. I’d have to check that. But, oh, it also explains my family members!”

“What?”

“They also only exist in a single copy, but their other copies are in the worlds with the other versions of me.”

Jenna agreed, “That makes sense. Is there some place you dreamwalked that your other selves would have visited also?”

I didn’t have to think long to come up with my answer, “Tommy.”

“Your first accidental dreamwalk?”

“Yeah, or the real world containing it, since he finished the game a long time ago. We communicated by me inhabiting Tommy’s body and exchanging notes. I can just go look and see if I was ever there since the last time I visited.”

“Go ahead,” Jenna told me.

I got out of game-Sarah, and went to Tommy. Although he and Becky now lived elsewhere, together, they’d saved all the paper we’d exchanged notes on, now yellowed, tacked up on the wall, ending with Tommy’s last “Thanks, Sarah” note. There were no notations within the two stacks of paper that I didn’t remember writing or Tommy or Becky writing in response to me. I put Tommy back to bed and returned to game-Sarah.

“Nope. There was no evidence anyone else had ever visited Tommy.”

“What if you all had visited him at the same time?”

“What, all of us in his head at once? I’m sure I would have noticed, even if we were trying to do the same thing. No, wait! We would have caused Tommy’s world to branch, each instance of me occupying a different one of Tommy’s, doing the same or similar things. And I never looked for other instances of Tommy’s world, just followed my way back to the one I knew. Hang on.”

I went into the dream selector, and sure enough, there were over three million Tommys. Back to game-Sarah.

“Yes, Jenna, that’s it! There are over three million Tommys in different versions of his world, way more than I ever saw of another person. That probably means there are three million mes that visited him just now. Well, maybe not all of us at this exact moment, since we didn’t necessarily stay in sync. But we’ve done so.”

“What if I visited Tommy? What would happen?”

“I don’t know. Something good to try.”

I explained Tommy’s world to Jenna in the way I’d help direct her to other worlds when we didn’t dreamwalk together, and she took off, returning about 5 minutes later.

“Can’t say I noticed anything interesting there,” she said upon returning.

“We’ve dreamwalked together when I let you follow my trail. Let’s try that and see if you see the same thing. You can go into Becky, who should be in the same room with him.”

“There wasn’t anybody when I was there.”

“Huh. I guess you did visit a different Tommy.”

Moments later we were both there, me in Tommy and Jenna in Becky.

Jenna said, “Yes, this is totally different. Tommy was in a different, smaller room.”

I described Tommy’s room in his house with his parents and Jenna confirmed it.

“The Tommy you visited never got out of his parents’ house. Part of my interaction with Tommy got him together with Becky, who lived next door to him. Your Tommy probably never dated her. But now I realize that I didn’t help ‘Tommy’ per se, but the version of Tommy I created when I entered his world.”

I showed Jenna papers on the wall and recounted my experiences in this world. Then I left them a short note before we left this world.

We considered theory 11B partially confirmed, and it would be more completely confirmed when we found someone doing one of those entanglement experiments in our world.

Jenna came up with one more theory after that.

Theory 12: Dreamwalkers can enter the fictional worlds belonging to real universes that they have access to.

“That makes a lot of sense. I have dreamwalked into Tommy’s world and a number of others, and I have dreamwalked into games from some of those worlds as well. Is it strictly true? Hard to prove. I have some other hard-to-prove ones.”

“I’m all ears,” Jenna replied.

Theory 13: Characters in fictional worlds cannot actually dreamwalk.

“What have we been doing in World of Dreams, then?” Jenna asked.

“It’s a detailed simulation, which Hiroshi designed and refined over many years to reflect his knowledge about dreamwalking, but most of it is only a simulation.”

“Which parts are real?”

“Shielding, for one. In Hiroshi’s records were details of how he developed shielding only after he started selling the game and was able to dreamwalk into characters there. He was able to figure out, with a lot of trial and error, how to set up a character’s mind so that he could not dreamwalk into it, and he made dreamwalking within the game respect the same limits. And he was able to figure out how to do it in the real world by learning what a shield looked like when he dreamwalked into a game character and managed to set up the same sort of blocking state in that character.”

“OK. Anything else?” Jenna asked.

“The part about learning to induce sleep and dream states. This is actually a thing in the real world that predates World of Dreams, but is obviously relevant. And dreamwalk detection, another thing Hiroshi was able to have game characters do initially based on his own dreamwalks into the game. Everything else is designed so that when you dreamwalk into a game character, it will behave the same way it does for a dreamwalker in the real world, to the limit of Hiroshi’s knowledge, but those characters aren’t actually dreamwalking. They would fracture the game world in ways that don’t actually happen if they did really dreamwalk into the other game characters.”

Theory 14: Dreamwalkers can bring items with them into or out of their dreams. This is catalyzed by their entanglement with the target. If the items are transported between real-world locations or into a fictional world, their existence in the real world supports their continued existence. Items can also be transported out of fictional worlds and into the real world, but these items are unstable, and only continue to exist while they remain close to the dreamwalker. Otherwise, their connection to their origin is lost and the objects fade back to their world of origin.

We knew well the phenomenon of transporting items with us in an out of dreams. We didn’t have a solid explanation for why it was even possible, but this was a statement of our observations.

Theory 15: Just as certain states of subatomic particles admit exactly two particles with opposite spins, a world admits exactly two dreamwalkers at any one time.

This was easy to disprove if we ever found a third on Earth, but difficult if not impossible to definitively prove. We’d have to understand more about the actual entanglements of dreamwalkers.

We also discussed how it was a consequence of these theories that characters in World of Dreams couldn’t actually dreamwalk into the real world, and their dreamwalking into other characters within their own world was simulated. Real dreamwalks from these characters would have caused branches in the universe which conflicted with the theories.

---

Jenna and I returned to read Tommy and Becky’s response the following night, and it was a long one. They told us a lot about their life, which was good to catch up on. They were also confused and thought I’d permanently taken over the body of some man in order to marry Jenna, so in my reply I explained how we have same-sex marriage on our world, and we live together in our original bodies, both women.

We found one of those entanglement experiments happening on our Earth a couple weeks later, which gave me plenty of time to scout around for other possible worlds I could access where the man running the experiment existed. The experiment wasn’t running at the same time on any of those worlds, and indeed it didn’t affect the number of worlds he was in that I could reach. The new universes that sprouted out of this were all hidden to me. This provided the final confirmation for theory 11B.

I arranged another meeting with Jenna in World of Dreams to discuss the results.

“I’m glad you were able to confirm my theory, Sarah. But what’s the next step?” Jenna asked.

“Probably for me to keep looking for ways to confirm theories 12 through 15. Together with 11B, they would mean we basically have nothing to worry about; no malicious dreamwalker from elsewhere can invade our world, and no other one can arise while we both live here. It also means we can’t sneak information from the other worlds most like ours, making certain ways of using our ability to gain power or profit more difficult or impossible. I think there are still plenty of ways to do that which work, but just like Hiroshi, I’m not really interested in exploiting that aspect.”

“Hey, what if we write our own world to dreamwalk into?”

“That’s a great idea, Jenna. Let’s devote one night a week to brainstorming ideas for what kind of world we want until we agree on something.”

So we did that, and I kept looking for other dreamwalkers and ways to prove our loose ends. I never found them, but after a few years we published a novel. The book wasn’t a great success, but got enough readership to establish a world we subsequently visited about once a week.

The End