Adventures in Dreamscapering

love affair

Other Gwendolyn and I walked outside. Prior to Other Gwendolyn opening the door she let her fingers hover over the glass of the door for a little bit. She closed her eyelids, which were noticeably more translucent than mine, and then quickly opened them, opened the door and led me through the doorway.

She was dreamscapering. The place we walked into was not the front of my school but in fact, a strange and quiet purple landscape, sandy underneath us but with snowy mountains and a bright, hazy sun shining in the distance.

"I know it's dangerous to dreamscape in the real world like this but, I needed a safe space," Other Gwendolyn said quietly. She walked ahead of me and sat down in the lavender sand, gripping it quietly.

She looked and sounded like she might get distracted and forget why she brought me here, so impatiently I reminded her to fill me in on what exactly was going on.

"I have a long story, so just...listen, okay? I'll answer any questions at the end," Other Gwendolyn sighed.

"So before you got mixed up in this whole thing, me and Max were...in a relationship. He was initially just a generic, nameless, dream boy character. There for when you wanted to have equally generic romantic dreams.

Something happened, to be honest I'm not sure what. He went where he wasn't supposed to go, or discovered something he shouldn't have seen. And he became a dream error. He starts screwing around with things, dreamscapering if you will. It's small at first, he'd change another background character, then two more, then the color of your room in your dreams, then the shape of the building the dream was taking place in.

Then he started talking to me outside of the script of the dream! Me, the main character of the dream! You aren't supposed to do that!

At first it wasn't really a bad thing, I guess. Him talking to me would just trigger a lucid dream for you --for us. We would go on adventures him and I. I quickly fell in love with him.

We were a happy little couple, rebellious and headstrong. We were together so much that the big eye in the sky known as the Subconscious was deceived and kept actually assigning us dreams together, which even then we broke the script.

Max then started finding 'holes', that would let him go into the real world.
They aren't accidental holes, as he might have told you. They are there so that the dream self and the waking self can switch places when you sleep. Portals if you will.

We started breaking the rules even more. We went into the real world together often. Changing things. Sometimes playing pranks on you. You remember when your furniture used to shift over by like, two inches randomly? Or your desk clutter would get moved around the house?"

I recalled a fuzzy memory of  finding missing presentation flash cards for school in the fridge and felt violated.

Other Gwen continued:

"Then we got caught. Or, I got caught. We were messing around  a lot that day. Subconscious noticed we were missing in a dream. Max and I couldn't get to a portal in time and got locked out; when things like that happen the whole mind gets put on lockdown to eliminate Dream Errors.

So we were standing outside of a bathroom mirror far from home (a hotel bathroom somewhere, I don't remember where but it was Max's idea to go there anyway), trying to get back into the Dreamscape.

Then Max busts out these pills. You know the little blue ones? Concocted from some dream drink or whatever (that's why he tells you not to drink anything because you'll just figure out his little magic tricks!) he stole from the actual Dreamscape. He eats one and the little skeev just slides through the mirror, like it just opened right up for him!

And he leaves me behind! He really did.

So-so-so I'm trying to get back into the Dreamscape and Subconscious, noticing that I'm not where I'm supposed to be and the Subconscious being blind and stupid --"

Other Gwen takes an exasperated and dramatic sigh,

"--tags me as the Dream Error. ME!

I got away before they could...do whatever they do to Dream Errors.

I've been hiding elsewhere in the mind until I was sure I could escape both Max and the Subconscious.

So now I'm locked out. But when Max decides to save his own ass over me, he also lost his girlfriend. Or whatever he considered me.

That's where you come in.

He needed someone to screw around with and at this point he had already committed the ultimate fuck up, pardon my French, when he somehow got the main Dream character expelled from the dream world !

He has screwed up royally a few times. Like that stunt he pulled with you, jumping off that building. Such an idiot. Kicked me to the curb but had to sneak me in temporarily to fix his mistakes.

That was when I first met you, by the way. You probably don't remember as immediately prior you were all up in Max's grill and immediately after you woke up. 

He had some tricks indeed. And that's how you got mixed up in this. But if Max pulls something with you, like he did with me...we could have very serious trouble."

I looked at Other Gwen with an incredulous stare.

"Well. Crap," I said finally. I settled down next to my dream clone in the sand.

"Is that all you have to say?" Other Gwen squints at me with pretentious disdain.

"It's a lot to take in!"

A silence weaves its way in between us.

Finally, I say: "Well. What now?"

Other Gwen turns to me, face aglow with the purple atmosphere of the Dreamscape.

"You have to help me stop him before it gets worse."