Nothing is real in the Infinite, but some things are less unreal then others. Or so I remember being told. Only the Dreamworlds are supposed to look real. If you end up outside of a Dreamworld, you wind up in a world where everything is completely dark, or you're surrounded by so much light it's overwhelming. Maybe, if you get really lucky, you see both at once.
What most people don't talk about are the dreams within the Dreamworlds. I don't know how else to describe them. Unlike Dreamworlds, which look real but aren't real at all, these don't look real at all. At least not when you think back on them. They look like places that could exist, but only if everyone involved was completely insane. Humans never seem to get these dreams, but I get them all the time because I need to sleep. I hate them, because even though I don't get any of the bad ones, like being chased by a large monster, they scare me badly. One dream I remember vividly is when I was put in charge of managing a magical book of paint samples, and I kept losing it and people kept getting mad at me. I realized how stupid this was when I woke up. Not even the dreamer, who's known for turning mundane objects into powerful items, would create a magical book of paint samples. Though it is said that Dalton, the most powerful Shadow to have ever existed, fought his enemies with a rubber duck.
I've never met a single other human who's had one of those dreams, but I'm told Nightmares get them a lot. They don't need to sleep, but you can't create Dreamworlds when you're awake, and most of the power the Nightmares use comes from others entering their dreamworlds. So they sleep, and they dream, and some of their dreams make no sense. When I asked Alex why people get these dreams when they sleep, she told me, "No one knows. They used to think that these dreams were messages from the Infinite, but now most people say they're just our souls trying to tell us truths we'd rather not acknowledge. My mother says that without them, we wouldn't be able to build the dreamworlds correctly because it's only in dreams that we can see the world the way humans do."
When she said "we" she meant Nightmares, of course. I sleep a lot, but I'll never be part of the world she was born into, even if that's what I wanted.
Something that no one, even Nightmares, struggle with, is day dreams. I've read that everyone, even humans, can get them, but everyone seems to view them as a nuisance. I have them a lot, mostly because when you don't have a house, can't go to school, and can't find work there's not much else to do. So I sit by myself, dreaming that I'm in the Temple, or in the Heartland, or talking to one of the god's. Well, one of the two gods I know the names of. All of them died shortly before I was born, so while we know the current avatars of the Shadow and Fairy Gods, we don't yet know who the Avatars of the Sorcerer and Monster gods. I'm told that the Sorcerer god has been identified, but no one knows her name yet, just that it's a girl. Not even the Gods know who the Monster God is, though my money is on Alex. She's who I imagine the Monster God to be. I don't know who the Sorcerer God is, and the land the Sorcerer's live in scares me. It's not scary, I just don't think a human as stupid as I am belongs in a world devoted to knowledge and study, no matter how much she loves to read and write. Sorcerers don't dream when they should be awake and aware of the world around them. But I do. I did it even when I lived back home, a place I don't dare go back to because I know my parents would be angry at me for being unable to hold down the job they got for me and too scared to find another one. So I wander the streets of the Homeland, where the city of humans is, and dream about being anywhere else.
In my daydreams, everyone calls me a Dreamling, a human of such little worth that their only purpose is to dream for the Nightmares. I used to get called that a lot back home, mostly when my parents weren't looking. Nobody thought I had to sleep, they thought I did it because my parents let me get away with it. Nobody in the city knows me well enough to think I'm anything but an ordinary bum, but in my head they know the only think I know how to do is dream. Dream of the worlds humans cannot enter, but so many sacrifice everything they have to try. I won't lie, I do find them enticing. They glitter with the promise of a world better than the one you live in now, but are filled with the warning that if you screw up everything you cherish will be taken from you. I've read a lot of stories about humans who work hard to get into the Nightmare's cities, only to be crushed under the pressure of trying to live in them. I can't even manage to live in the human world, I don't want to think about living in the Nightmare cities, though Alex is convinced that's my goal in life.
The thought that I'll never be anything more than a Dreamling haunts me. It's such a frightening thought that most of my Dreamworld dreams are about me being back home, only it's not home. It's just a place that looks like home, with a woman who only vaguely resembles my mother. I go through my day, going to school, running errands, meeting Alex to talk about what her mother wants. I don't know why but in my dreams her mother runs a hair salon, and my mother has a part time job working there. Everyone hates me, they say that if it wasn't for me they would be able to fight back against the Nightmares. I know that it's my fault, so I try to wake up to end everyone's pain. But I can't. Something always stops me. I run to the temple, trying to find answers, but nothing tells me how to escape this town. I run around the Infinite, looking in every Dreamworld I can find, and I still can't figure out how to wake up. Eventually, the Nightmares put a shield up around the town, trapping me in it so I have no choice but to stay in the dream forever. I go as lucid as I can, glimpsing sunlight, before being pulled back into sleep. But I still become awake enough to remember what I have to do, how this dream always ends. I have to find the other four artefacts of the gods.
I don't know if the artefacts exist, but in my dreams each of the gods has one magic artefact that demonstrates their status as temporary avatars. The shadow god wears a circle with a dot at the center, the fairy god has charm that's just a line, the monster god has a tetrahedron and the sorcerer god has an octahedron with an hourglass inside of it. These artefacts, combined with my star necklace, are the only way I can escape this dream.
So I hunt down the gods. Since this is a dream, and since I'm very lucid at this point, I can do this without any problem at all. The hardest part is defeating Alex, but I do it anyway. I will do anything to keep from sleeping forever. With the power of the Artefacts, I wake up at last, seeing the sunlight once more.
I have this dream often enough that even when it's daylight I still picture the village I'm trapped in. In moments when I'm looking at job postings to see if there's anything I'm both willing and able to do, I hear villagers yell at me for allowing Nightmares to torment them. When I see announcements from the gods, I see myself defeating them so that I may awaken. When I go to the heartland to meet up with Alex, which I try to do at least once a week, I pray that I'll never have to defeat her when I'm awake, the way I do when I'm asleep. It's feels, to me, like my dreamworld dreams and my daydreams are beginning to connect, which I don't think they should. After all, what would happen if Estellia ever connected with the Dreamworlds, or worse the Infinite?
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