Our town doesn't worry about the Homeless. Our mayor has a policy in place that anyone found outside after dark goes to jail, and after your third sentence you get sacrificed for power. The humans hate that policy, but as my mother and father always point out, coming here was their decision in the first place. Though that's not actually true.
Natalie, my best friend, rose from basically nothing. Her father's the janitor at our high school, her mother's a maid. Neither of them are nightmares themselves. But their baby fussed and cried a lot, and she slept too, something I and many others took advantage of. Then she started going lucid.
It's true that all humans can go lucid, but it doesn't usually go much further than being able to tell how strong a Nightmare is without seeing their nightmare form, which as my parents point out is completely useless. Any other lucidity abilities only come in handy in the Dreamworld, which you only go into while you're asleep, and since humans don't sleep they never need lucidity. Lucidity is only for children with neglectful parents, or children destined to become Midnight Nightmares. Sometimes the one becomes the other, but not often. Most of the time children with poor parents wind up being poor themselves, serving as guards or Night servants for other Nightmares.
The Mayors son found out about Natalie. He was, and still is, a jerk, but he's powerful in his own right, and decided to assert that power on the child who was sleeping when she didn't need to. He realized that he was wrong when she dispelled his "Nightmare form" (it barely counted, he was only seven at the time, and she was only five). He went straight up to his mother and demanded that Natalie be punished, but lady Grey, the head of the cult, decided to test Natalie first. That's when we discovered that Natalie is basically my mother's successor, as in she's destined to run our temple one day.
That should have made me sad, but the temple always scared me. Mostly because, since it's where all of our sacrifices take place, it's always covered in blood. But Natalie doesn't mind. She's always worked hard to please my mother, and bodily fluids don't bother her. What I like about her the most though is that she doesn't seem to notice that I'm my mother's eldest child most of the time. She never gets upset when I can't manage a spell, nor does she seem disappointed that I'm basically destined to work as a Dreamworld guard (I have no idea where Cassie got the idea that I was destined for Godhood). She tells me that she doesn't really think of me as a competitor, I remind her more of a human then a Nightmare, but I still surprise her with the amount of power I can wield.
I wonder how much of that is from her parents. She still lives with them, but she doesn't talk about them to me much. I have seen her talking with humans though. She told me that most of her friends families have lived in the valley for centuries, but there's so much power now that low level Nightmares are taking the jobs humans used to have. And they can't go to the human lands because the rules say you can only move there if you can get a job. Which not even most humans can.
Fortunately her father's job seems to be safe. Her mother hasn't been so lucky. They both get what work they can, but they say that they're worried that one or both of them will be sacrifices, and Natalie has said she'll do that if she has to, though she cries every time she says it.
I'm grateful that I'm not a human. I do wish they didn't hate us though. We're only doing what we have to for protection.
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