If You Find Him In Your Head... Well, That Might be My Fault

So, I found myself dreamwalking last night. I must have slipped into the dream world before I fell asleep. Either that, or it is possible to sleepwalk while dreamwalking. Or… sleep-dreamwalk. Or whatever. I don’t know.

All I know is that one minute I was curled up by a very friendly fire, and the next, I was wandering the dark world of dreams.

I guess when you’re sleep-dreamwalking, you don’t have as much control, because I fell into someone’s dream almost immediately. It just opened up and I dropped in.

Let me tell you, I never want to end up in the dreams of someone like that again. It was disturbing. First of all, the sky was purple. I landed on something soft, but it wasn’t grass. I felt more like really long, thick fur. Fortunately, whatever it was did not seem to be alive.

While my eyes were trying to adjust to too much color and I was attempting to stand up on what was a really flimsy fur landscape, I noticed the inhabitant of the dream perched on a giant brass mushroom nearby. Or at least, I thought it was a mushroom, but it could have been a button.

He asked me where I’d come from and how I got here. I told him it was an accident and that I would leave him and his…. furry world…. promptly.

“No,” he said, sounding cheerful and interested, “I’d rather like to find out more about you. The name’s Breen. I’ve never had someone sneak into my dreams before. Can you teach me how to do it? It’d be awfully swell to be able to sneak around in people’s heads. Oh, the things I could do.”

Let me just say that he did not look like a trustworthy sort of person.

“Sorry,” I told him, “but you have to have a special kind of magic to dreamwalk. Really, I need to get going.”

“Well, don’t forget your shoes,” he said.

I stared at my boots dangling from his hands. How had he gotten them? When I reached for them, he gave a naughty chuckle and tossed them in the air. I lunged for them before they could fly off the edge.

I pulled them on my feet and immediately began assembling a mental bridge. The door was, as usual, out in the middle of nowhere beyond the edge of his dream. I staggered across the bridge toward the door and fell through.

I could hear the weird little dreamer laughing as I fell out of his head. And I think he said something about how his author would appreciate the feet... but I'm not sure.

I woke up that morning with two very terrifying discoveries.

First of all, when I pulled my boots off, I discovered that my feet were dyed a very distinctive, familiar shade of purple. I don’t know how that nasty little creature did it.

And secondly, and much more disturbingly, I realized that there is the slightest chance that I could possibly have left the door open.

Let’s just hope that what’s his name doesn’t figure out how to sneak out into the dream world before he wakes up.