The coins were indeed all gone when I returned to bed for the next night. Oh well.
I tried an idea I’d thought of during the day. What if I dreamwalked into myself? Could I... get up and do things while I slept? Would that work? Would I wake up tired as if I hadn’t slept? But I couldn’t seem to do it, and when I called up the menu, after finding my Earth (I assumed; it was the one labeled with “Earth” rather than some weird code) and drilling down to my address, I wasn’t there. So that answered that; I can’t occupy my own body. Mom’s was available, and that might be an interesting solution. I could talk to her about that. But except for a moment to prove it was possible, I didn’t do so tonight.
Instead, I went into several other worlds, both from written fiction and from games, where there was magic, spiritual possession, or similar things, but no one could help me. What I was doing wasn’t like anything the magical people did, and the spiritual possession people had never seen an inquisitive, intelligent spirit. They were haunted by ghosts, phantoms, and other dead and undead beings who liked to take over bodies, but they hadn’t experienced that a live, sleeping person could possess other people. I even went to Unseen University in Ankh-Morpig, though the way that place was portrayed, I didn’t expect anything useful to happen there. And it didn’t. All I managed to do was get several wizards to engage in magical duels after misunderstanding one another, and after the fourth time I gave up.
There was a game I’d heard of called World of Dreams. I thought that was an interesting name, and if it’s the dream aspect I should be focusing on, it might be what I need. Although it’s pretty popular, there weren’t many sessions available I could join. I could see many thousands of games in progress of other similarly popular games, but there were only a few dozen of these. Poking into several, I found that all the characters I had access to here were just starting out. It looked like they were those who quit early on and never really played. So I picked one who had literally stopped before even the first mission, and started playing. It looked pretty interesting and relevant. The players were learning how to control their dreams, do things in their dreams, and retrieve objects they encountered in their dreams.
There was a tutorial, but there wasn’t a live person there for me to interact with. It was a recorded message, along with recordings playing in my character’s mind inside the dream. But it allowed me to take this character into a game-dream (a dream within a dream!) and complete the simple mission there, to retrieve a particular object. Unlike my dreams, this character was still himself in the dream, the same person he was outside the dream.
For the game’s second mission, I had an actual person to talk to. She was supposed to be showing me how to use the item I retrieved to protect my own dreams from being invaded by other dreamwalkers. This was a big hint! If all the characters maintained such protection for the rest of the game, then maybe that’s why I can only access ones who are just starting, but furthermore, it means they are doing the same kind of dreamtravel that I do!
In order to avoid simply being thrown out of the game here, I had to interrupt this process. It was clear in the other games that, by actually living as the game character, I wasn’t restricted to the flows designed by the game’s creator. So I asked, “Minda, could we make this so that I can keep everyone out of my dreams except one specific person I want to allow in?”
“That’s a more advanced version of this, but yes, it’s possible. We usually start with the basic version, though.”
“I’m afraid I need to, though. Because I’m already controlling this man remotely by dreamwalking into him and only the beginners here are open to me, so I assume what we’re about to do would lock me out.”
“That’s really advanced dreamwalking. I haven’t even gotten to that level myself, but we have some people who know it. The fact that you aren’t really here explains why an advanced dreamwalker is coming to us in the body of a beginner student, so thanks for explaining. But I will need to get approval before I show you this. We need to make sure you are not one of our enemies trying to infiltrate us.”
So the lesson was put on hold. I was made to wait there, and Minda went to find whoever could approve my training. There was some sort of probe of my mind while I was waiting, presumably from someone involved in this approval. When Minda returned, she was followed by 3 other people. Two of the followers stood on either side and took stances that made them look ready to attack, but they did not attack. The other follower was the only one who spoke.
“Who are you, really?”
Well, they know. I have to level with them if I want them to help me.
“I’m a girl from Atlanta who has developed the ability to visit other people, during dreams. It happened involuntarily at first, and later I gained the ability to control where I traveled. I’m hoping to find someone who can help me understand the ability more.”
“Atlanta. Where is Atlanta?”
I guess this game’s set on some other world. I replied, “It’s a major city in the southern United States, in the state of Georgia. It’s possible that doesn’t exist in your world, because I’ve been traveling to other worlds and fictional ones to find someone who understands.”
“Other worlds? Fictional worlds? And you’re able to not just read the mind, but actually control the body of this man? You must be the most powerful dreamwalker who ever lived! But it does agree with what our mindprober said. He is in too much pain from the attempt to probe your mind to come here himself, but he said that your mind was open but you were too far away to reach, and that the only way he thought this was possible is if you were not on this world.”
This man, whose name I still didn’t know, and Minda spoke in whispers for a moment. Then it was Minda who spoke.
“I will give you the lesson you asked for, both to help you protect your real-world mind, though I think you are safe from anyone on this world, and to protect the mind of this person you are occupying, whoever this poor soul is whose life you have taken over. But after this we will need to interview you in detail to learn who you are, even if it is so foreign to us we have trouble understanding it, so that we know who it is that we are training, before we can give you any additional training.”
“Thank you. That is very reasonable. And if you learn more about who I am, you may be able to help me better.”
The others left, and Minda pulled up a chair to put in front of the one where I had waited for the group earlier.
“Before we start, I want to ask about your time limit. Since you are dreamwalking yourself, you probably have some limit after which you must return to your own body. We will need at least an hour for the lesson.”
“Good call! I visited several other places before coming to your world tonight, and I did the tutorial here. I probably do not have an hour left.”
“Fine. Then we can start whenever you arrive tomorrow.”
“Sure. I guess that means I need to get this guy home, though I am not sure where home is for him.”
I could just leave and let him go home, but since I planned to keep using him, I decided I should learn where he lives. I checked his pockets and found a wallet. Apparently I was Umberto Gonzales. I had an address, which I had no idea about, but Minda helped me with directions. I got him home, to find he lived alone in a small apartment.
By the time I got there, I really needed to pee. This was my first time peeing as a guy, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. Interestingly, I had never peed as Elissa, either, in a month of 6-hour-a-day visits to her body. Did that mean that she never peed? That the game took care of it for her? Probably no way for me to know, so I let the thought pass.
After that, I spent some time looking around the apartment, trying to figure out who this guy was. It looked like he was dedicated to trying to get into the dreamwalking program, but he hadn’t been able to do so on days before I came. I wasn’t sure if all the player characters were made that way, or if this meant that whoever had started this character had failed the tutorial and was required to repeat it until he did it successfully before he could go on with the game. About the time I thought that, I felt myself falling out of this world and back to my own bed.
I decided to do some planning. In particular, I needed to set up a line of communication with this guy whose body I was using. I hadn’t seen any note paper there, but I took a pad and pencil to bed with me. I left it in his room for now to test whether it would survive the day, and went back to the dreamwalking place. Minda was there waiting for me when I arrived.
There was a man with her. She introduced him as Ken. He was the mind probe guy who suffered pain trying to probe my mind yesterday.
“I am here to probe your mind again, to see how well you are closing your mind back on your world. I have two advantages this time. By being physically closer to your presence in this world, the overall distance to your real mind will be reduced. And I’ve taken some drugs to make me less susceptible to that sort of pain. They don’t actually decrease the effect on my body, so I’m wearing this small device on my arm to warn me if I am in danger of doing harm to myself. If you hear a high-pitched screech from it, it’ll mean I have to stop probing you, and it probably also means you’ve succeeded in what you are here to do today. Don’t let it break your concentration, though.”
“OK. What do you need me to do? I brought the object I got from the tutorial mission.”
“That talisman serves as a focus for beginners to direct their thoughts. You are probably strong enough that you don’t need it, so I’m going to skip it for now. Keep your mind open, and let me probe you.”
He did nothing visible, and again I felt something small in my mind.
“OK. I can see that you are there, but nothing more, due to your distance. Minda will lead the next step.”
Minda explained to me how to close my mind, but asked me to do this with my mind in the real world, not Umberto’s mind. After a bit of explanation and trying, I was able to close my mind in the way she described and Ken confirmed my mind was closed while Umberto’s remained open.
Minda continued, “Now for the next step I want you to picture your own mind, Umberto’s mind, and the connection between them.”
This was not at all obvious and took a lot more explanation, but eventually I was able to get the mental image Minda was steering me toward. I rebuilt the shield around Umberto’s mind while leaving a hole where the connection to my mind came in. Ken confirmed that Umberto was now shielded.
Then they had me drop Umberto’s shield. Ken established an ongoing connection to Umberto’s mind, and Minda explained how I could see that in addition to my previous visualization of Umberto’s mind. Then she had me make a shield around Umberto’s mind with holes for both me and Ken, and Ken confirmed he still had his connection while Minda confirmed that Umberto was shielded to her.
Finally, Ken dropped his connection, and Minda had me drop Umberto’s shield and then rebuild it, leaving both the holes again even though Ken wasn’t connected. Once I had done that, Ken confirmed that he could still connect to Umberto and Minda confirmed she couldn’t.
Minda said, “Lesson passed. You will need to construct a shield like this around Umberto’s mind, leaving only the hole for yourself, and help Umberto to memorize it by keeping it up continuously. Once you enter our facility proper, Umberto must remain shielded from our enemies at all times. In addition, keep up the shield around your own mind in your own world to protect yourself there.”
“Does the shield need to be maintained when sleeping?” I asked.
“Yes, in a way, but practically speaking, no. The shield doesn’t have to be actively maintained at every moment. If you don’t intentionally tear it down, but just stop thinking about it, it decays slowly over time. But that’s a very good question, and exactly what I was going to describe next. You should raise the shield to the highest strength you can before going to bed, and since it decays more slowly while you sleep, it should keep for several hours. When you are living here, we constantly have people looking for unshielded people, so if your shield falls in your sleep, someone will come into your head and wake you, and you can reset your shield that way. With the level of shielding required to pass the tests you have, you should at most need to be woken once in an 8-hour night of sleep, and practice will get you to the level where you don’t need it at all.”
After we finished with a few more details about shields, there was the long interview promised, and I told them frankly about who I was and my experience in Tommy’s game and visiting other worlds after I learned how to control where I went. There were a lot of questions about Earth as they looked to see if they could catch me in a lie, but ultimately they were satisfied.
They took me through the doors into the main part of their facility, but pretty quickly they handed me off to a man named Pat who showed me around the place, or at least the parts I had access to now, since there were still parts off-limits to me. He finally showed me to the dorms where their students in training live.
“You can treat this as a permanent thing. You can move out of the place you are living now and move your stuff in here. You might move to another room later, but you’ll still have a place here. The landlords around here are used to this arrangement and you shouldn’t get any hassle over it; if you do, tell any of your supervisors here about it and we’ll straighten it out.”
So the rest of my day involved packing up Umberto’s few belongings and moving them. The notepad survived, and now I was able to see a faint connection from it going back to my world. So when I was done moving, I left Umberto a note.
I didn’t eat as Umberto yesterday, but all the work moving had made his body hungry, and since I was still here I went ahead and ate. I wasn’t sure yet if they didn’t eat meat on this world or if it was just that Umberto was a vegetarian. But he had sliced bread, some (apparently shelf-stable) sauces, and a variety of fruits and vegetables, some of which were unfamiliar to me, so I sampled several things and eventually made a sandwich with some of them.
The next day I finally had the chance to catch up with Mom more fully.
“Hi, Sarah. How’s it going? I saw your recording of the bag of coins. They disappeared slowly over the day with nobody coming to steal them or anything. Are you still visiting the game in your dreams?”
“I am still visiting games, but there have been some changes.”
“Good changes, I hope.”
“Mostly good, yes.”
I caught her up on how Tommy’s game finished, how Tommy helped me get control over where I’m going (but how I still can’t keep it from happening), how I tried to get Tommy and Becky together (I should check up on them), and how I’m seeking help in a dream-related game that apparently involves a kind of dreamwalking that might be compatible with mine; at least the same technique blocks both abilities.
“OK. I’m glad that’s going well. Mostly well, anyway.”
“I did want to ask you one thing. When I discovered that my control doesn’t extend to not dreamwalking while I sleep, I had the idea to dreamwalk into my own body. It didn’t work, though. It seems I can’t do that. I could see you and Dad and the rest of the neighbors as targets, though. I tested dreamwalking into your body, just for a moment, and stayed there just long enough to confirm it was really you. I wanted to ask your permission to do that, though I am hoping the training I am in now will give me the ability to simply not dreamwalk when I don’t want to, so I don’t need that.”
“Hmm, that is an interesting request. Let me say, if it’s an emergency, if you are in a situation where the forced dreamwalking is causing you trouble and you need a safe place to go, then do it. But I wouldn’t want you to do it regularly. I wouldn’t want you occupying my body every night. If it comes to that, I will help you to find someone else who can be your regular buddy.”
“OK, thanks, Mom.”
