Adventures in Dreamscapering

the other

Max came back that very night after his semi-weeklong hiatus.

It had been less than moments after Max haphazardly shoved his dry ice dream marble into my mouth before he tore me roughly out of my body by my wrist and dropped me on the ground.

"So you're all buddy-buddy with that Nathan kid huh?" Max shouted, pacing the floor irately.

"What the heck is wrong with you?" I rubbed my arm, squinting at him from the floor.

"I thought you didn't like him Gwen, now I see you guys flirting like ---uuuggh! What the heck, Gwen I thought we were a thing---" Max's sharp outline blurred into the filmy background as he screamed

"What are you talking about? Nathan is..." I stuttered. Normally in such a sentence I would jump on any chance to roast Nathan but for some reason I felt like protecting him. I dug my fingers into the carpet of the floor.

"Your new boyfriend?"
"Heck no, Max. You know that. We put a beetle in his backpack, remember?" I meant to sound confident but I was genuinely scared.

Max was shaking with fury, but he let this explanation slide as he slowly faded back into clarity.

"Don't talk to him."
"I talk to whoever I want---"

Max gripped my wrist a little too tight and pulled me up to his face, one of his eyes black and the other almost imperceptibly a shade lighter.

"Don't talk to him."

I said nothing in response, shaking.

Max's scowl twisted into some strange smile.

"We have to get into the Dreamscape before the hole closes up for the night. Let's go."
He begins to yank me behind him like he always does, but I pull my hand out of his grasp and hesitate behind him.

"Don't be like that." Max gives me a pseudo-sad lopsided grin that doesn't make my heart leap like it normally would.

"I'm coming. I'll walk behind you," I replied nervously. Max shrugged and I followed him down the hallway that led to my bathroom.

---

"What happened the last time you saw me?" I asked Max suddenly.

I had been choking my way through an awkward pizza croissant date at a place that closely resembled a Chipotle / Max's attempts to swallow me alive via horrible French kissing and I couldn't hold in what had been plaguing me any longer.

Max stretched out the cheese in his pizza croissant slice and looked down at the pale ribbon hanging between his hand and mouth nervously. I didn't realize he was stalling until he had stretched the piece of cheese to longer than the length of the table.

"Max," I said.
Max faked a cough as the stretched cheese snake snapped back into his mouth in the same manner of a child slurping up a stray spaghetti noodle.

"Max, stop the crap and tell me what's going on."

I used my slightly better Dreamscapering skills to teleport Max to the seat across my own so he's not tempted to "distract" me with a kiss or some other vapid diversion.

Max looked down at his lap (initially shocked by my forward action) and then looked up at me with a look in his eye that may have been playfulness and may have been annoyance but I wasn't sure.

"You're feisty today."
"Max, stop."
"Don't worry about it! That was just your other you, the one that's usually in the dream world while you're sleeping. Normally she's the one that your consciousness goes into while you're dreaming, so you see your dreams through her eyes."

"But she's just by herself because my waking self (me) is with you."

"Yes. You're both in the Dreamscape."

"So she's just doing her own thing since there's no one to switch spots with?"

"Technically she's a dream error like me as of now. Only she doesn't have to evade...them like I have to because she's supposed to be here."

I still had yet to learn of this illustrious them but I'd ask later.

"Okay, but why do you want me to stay away from her so badly?"

"The same reason why you can't be next to your past self if you're time traveling. If you're together then the timeline is messed up and you are taken out all together."

"So if we are together, then...?"

"Your real, real world self will die. Since neither of your consciousnesses are in the real world, the Dreamscape will collapse and you'll die." Max slammed his hands together before continuing. "Death aside, your dream self is a total harlot. You don't want to be around her anyway. The girl's a straight up skank, likes to lie. I wouldn't listen to anything she says." Max laughed and snatched my pizza croissant slice out of my hand and pushed it into his mouth.

"Should I be offended?"

"Do you consider yourself to be a harlot?"

"Absolutely not."

"Then no," Max replies decisively.

"Okay, but what happened when we were in the bathroom and you sort of glitched away?" I asked again.

"Oh. That. That happens when a dream is caught outside the dream world when the sleeper awakens. You wouldn't let go of me so I couldn't really make it back in time?" Max said, the end of his sentence rising.

"Sorry about that."

"Hey, it only hurt like a little bit. And I didn't get caught or anything, barely. So it was good. No problem. Let's just...not cut it that close again."
Max concluded and then decides to fill the split-second of silence with an activity suggestion, perhaps to deflect more of my queries, or just as conceivably because he's just being Max, short-spanned in attention .

"We didn't come to the Dreamscape to eat pizza croissants in a Qdoba--"

"This is a Chipotle--"

"Same difference Gwen! Would you like to go fall off a building with me?"

No thanks. That wasn't an experience I enjoyed too much.

Of course Max could hear my thoughts; he presented another option.

"Well, my beautiful Gwendolyne Greene, would you like to fly with me then? It is a lucid dream staple after all."

I grinned and we stepped out of the Chipotle together into the macrocosm of the dream world.

I ignored the niggling and growing sensation of something wrong in the back of my mind and I let Max grab my hand once more.