The Misfits.

Chapter Two.

TUESDAY 11TH APRIL, 2016. 8:30 AM.

It didn't take long for Ethan to find out that he was dreaming.

While his dreams tended to be incredibly lucid, they also tended to skip or mix up a few details about the things constantly surrounding him in his reality. He had developed a game he played with himself- rather, a brain training exercise- where he tried to spot the irregularities in the false reality produced by his mind. It took years to get used to and master, but at the age of seventeen, Ethan Rake could fully distinguish his dreams from reality using simple, almost unnoticeable changes.

For example, the girl tugging at his arm, pulling him towards the door to his house was Sarah Mendel: A cheerleader from his school that wouldn't have even once looked his way in the real world.

Ethan wasn't exactly, for lack of a better term, popular with the ladies.

She had blindfolded him for some reason- the fact that he could see vividly where she was taking him despite being blindfolded was an obvious tell that he was dreaming. She dragged him up the stairs, taking two at a time. Ethan was having difficulty matching her pace. It was slightly unusual. Sarah might have been a cheerleader, but Ethan was still a bit more athletic than she was... At least he believed so.

She pushed open his doors without a care- doors he thought he had locked- and stepped into the middle of his parlor, twirling around in her white sundress, long, blonde hair following her every rotation.

Ethan slowly stepped into the room. It was empty- another tell.

"Come dance with me." Sarah said. But, she wasn't Sarah anymore. Dyed red hair and a tight, leather body suit immediately informed Ethan of the transformation of his bubbly cheerleader into the biker chic in his P.E class: Margaret- or as she liked to be called- Mangey ghetto. It didn't make a lick of sense to Ethan either.

"I preferred the sundress." Ethan bluntly stated.

"You could change me if you wanted." She replied.

Ethan simply waved his hand, "Nah. That would be rude."

"Such a gentleman."

Conversations like that were frequent occurrences in his dreams. It unnerved him.

The fact that the conversations actually occurred wasn't what had him nervous. It was the fact that he was sure it wasn't completely all on him. In a way.

He was aware of the fact that he was there. Not physically- he was just... there. Everything that escaped his lips came from his own brain. Every word he uttered was birthed from semi-conscious deliberation.

The words of every other person his mind manifested in his dream-world, however, came from something else.

He wanted to blame his subconscious mind- but that scared him even more. All those years he thought he was training himself to dream better, he could have been training a split personality instead. He just hoped that if he had actually created another personality, that it wasn't just a mental personification of his repressed emotions. Becoming a violent sociopath wasn't what he had planned out to do with his life.

"Such a gentleman." 'She' repeated.

"I feel like you're trying to hog my attention."

"Ridiculous."

"Trying to distract me, perhaps?"

"Isn't that the purpose of a dream?"

His dreams could tell when they had been figured out. After that, they didn't even bother pretending anymore. When that happened, Ethan felt like he had won a game. The game. What he didn't realize was that it was a very, very dangerous one.