In my dream that night, I found my game and entered it, finding myself in a weird, featureless body which was waiting for me to define it. I was a vaguely woman-shaped cloud. I wasn’t able to move the body, but I could basically see it from any angle. On the computer I would have been choosing colors and sizes for aspects of my body, but here, after a little experimentation, I just forced my own body image onto the character, and she became a virtual clone of me.

And then I was in the game, in her apartment which was similarly spartan as Umberto’s had been, except of course with female clothes in the closet. I took off the default clothes, put on something nicer, turned on my shield with the me-shaped hole, and went down to the dreamwalking school.

Once I got past the tutorial, Minda was there.

“Sarah!” she exclaimed.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Nobody else walks in here with a shield like that who isn’t one of our staff.”

I grinned.

“Just wait here while I get the staff to OK it, and I’ll advance you up to where you were with Umberto.”

The same group who had OKed my initial training showed up, but this time they seemed overjoyed to see me. One of the two guards said, “I have never seen anyone here put up such a strong shield. It has to be her,” and the others looked at him as if he’d just said something so obvious it didn’t need to be said.

They approved my enrollment and the slight skip of lessons, and I informed them, “I’ve set this up so I should be able to train more hours a day now, sometimes as this Sarah,” pointing to the body I wore here, “and sometimes as that Sarah,” pointing up to the sky. “But I’m that one now.”

They didn’t seem to doubt in the least that I was capable of this after what else I had shown them. The main follower replied, “Well, we’re here 24/7, and each student goes at whatever pace they are able. We thought we’d skip you over a number of other lessons as well, but feel welcome to ask for the complete lesson any time you think it might help you to understand something.”

They quickly moved to the step of checking me into a room, this time in a different wing which was occupied by only women, and I gathered my clothes and the few other personal belongings the game had created in my character’s apartment and moved into the dorm. And I spent the rest of the dreamtime that night showing a different group what I could do in a sort of extreme advanced placement test.

---

The next evening, as I played the game for real from my computer for the first time, I repeated those tests. I had to learn how certain computer controls translated into game actions, but I picked that up quickly and showed that my character was as strong when I was playing her through the game as she was when I had a direct conduit into her mind.

The instructors at this hour were different, but at the end of it they said, “It seems you are just as strong in this form as in your other form. So we’re going to skip all the beginner training, except where you wanted more info.”

They did actually read through all the lessons, just in case I wanted more info on something, but they just told me what I would be expected to do in each one rather than asking me to do it. There weren’t dreamwalks beyond what they had described earlier as level 1 and 2, and I actually only ended up asking for clarifications of a couple things to help me reconcile their ways of describing tasks with how I had accomplished or knew I could accomplish the same thing.

When I had no further questions, they (with a brief ceremony) announced my graduation to intermediate training. This took place deeper in the facility. They added me to a list of people who had access to the section where this took place, handed me off to a different crew of trainers, and I got a new room within this section. Incidentally, the beginner room had come with a set of uniforms which I hadn’t actually put on today, but they said those were “beginner robes” and I should leave them, so as far as clothes, I was only gathering what had been in the apartment.

I didn’t actually do any of it this first partial day, but they explained what I would be doing. It was basically level 3, 4, and 5 dreamwalks, which meant either viewing a specific dreaming person’s dream, viewing and getting the sensations from a specific person who was awake, or dreamwalking into a collective dream (which I knew as a work of fiction) and playing the role of a minor character within that dream.

For the level 3 and 4 dreamwalks, they had a group of people in the city who did not work sensitive jobs who were paid to be continuously monitored by equipment and available for people to dreamwalk into. They worked, and as a result slept different hours, so there was a reasonable chance of finding them in any desired state at any hour. When it came time to practice these dreamwalks, one of the trainers would identify a suitable candidate and direct me mentally to that person. If there wasn’t a candidate available, they would direct me into a level 5 dreamwalk.

Since there was time remaining which wasn’t enough time for an actual dreamwalk, I took game-Sarah to her new room, raised her shield again so high that even if she ignored it, it would last until my next session, and let her be. I hoped she’d finish unpacking my things since I expected to stay in this room a bit longer before I joined the game again, but I had no idea how much of a real life the characters here had when I wasn’t running them - what Umberto did might only have been backstory.

I visited Tommy. His brief note said thanks again and that he had finished out the game. So I went to Becky. She had left me a note also.

I guess it hadn’t happened yet. I added below it.

There was one thing I hadn’t managed to do yet, and it was what was supposed to be my next lesson: To enter someone’s mind and only view their dreams, or if awake, what they were doing at the time. I picked some people at random both in Tommy’s sleeping time zone and in mine, but in every case, I was consciously awake when I arrived there. I left them in their beds so as to disturb them less, but surely one of those people was dreaming and I should have been able to see their dreams.

So I returned to my own body, as it was starting to be a reasonable waking time.

---

In the morning I thanked Mom and told her it seemed to be working.

In the evening, I went back into my game. I was pleased to see that game-Sarah had in fact put everything away on shelves, in drawers, or, for just a few things, hanging in the closet. It looked like I imagined my room would look like when I went off to college, if I lived in a single room and had brought the bare minimum of belongings along. I decided that the way she had dressed herself today was fine.

To prepare for as long a session of dreamwalking as I could, I sent game-Sarah to the bathroom, and got to see what that looked like for game players... which was nothing. She went in and closed the door, and I was staring at the door for a couple minutes before she came out. I had just done it, myself; now I knew next time to have her go while I did. Having Sarah change clothes from the computer was the same way. There was a walk-in closet and I got to go in and browse through all the clothes and select what I wanted her to wear, but then she closed the door to change. But with that done, I decided I was ready, and headed down to the next lesson.

One of the trainers went off to locate a target for me as soon as I arrived, and I told the other that I had made myself bathroom-ready. I climbed onto the provided bed and waited. A few minutes later the trainer who had left returned and told me today I’d be doing a fourth level dreamwalk to view what a man was doing. I was to stay there until I figured out what goal he was trying to accomplish and then drop out of the dream. They would wake me up from the induced sleep when I did so.

But when I went into the man, I realized right away that I had gone past viewing and had taken control of the man entirely. He had been walking somewhere, but I didn’t know where. Using the man’s body, I shrugged and gave a sigh and then I dropped out. The trainers understood what had happened.

One of them stated, “You went too far and took over the man’s body completely.”

“Yes, I know.”

The other asked, “Is this something that happened in your dreaming before you came here?”

“Yes. In fact, always. Whenever I have gone into a living, real-world person I have taken over control of the body completely.”

The first trainer suggested, “Tell us about all the kinds of dreamwalking you have successfully performed.” She handed me a pamphlet listing the dreamwalk types mentioned in the study materials earlier, but with briefer descriptions.

“I’ve done 1st and 2nd level dreamwalks here, and also from my real body, if dreaming into and controlling a video game character counts as a construct. It was like the description of the construct in that I could only enter via player characters and not other characters in the games.”

The trainers had confused looks.

“Do you have video games here?”

They shrugged. Of course they didn’t. In a world where you could remote-view the world, past and present, and it was considered a level 1 ability, why would they ever develop video games?

“OK, never mind that. It’s a type of construct they developed in my world that allows the majority of people who don’t even have basic dreamwalk powers the ability to control a construct via a device, but I can bypass the device and control the construct directly.”

“Ah, yes, the constructs do have a physical control panel we can use. Go on.”

“Besides that, I can do level 5 dreamwalks where I control a minor character in a collective dream. I haven’t managed to control important characters in such dreams. And I’ve been able to do level 7 dreamwalks where I control the body of a sleeping person. I don’t know if they were dreaming or not. But I don’t think I ever dreamwalked into a person who was awake until now.”

“But you dreamwalked into Umberto and this Sarah and did so from a great distance. And I think you said you had done some of the other dreamwalks from a great distance. Multiple kinds of advanced dreamwalks.”

I wanted to explain that I considered these to be type 2 dreamwalks into the constructs in the World of Dreams game, and since the game was in my world, I didn’t even consider them long-distance, but it appeared that way to them, and of course they did not realize they are characters in a video game. But I had done long-distance dreamwalks into Tommy and Becky, taking control of their bodies, so I decided they were right for the wrong reasons and let it be.

“Do you have any other strong dreamwalkers who have trouble not taking over the person they dreamwalk into while attempting level 3 and 4 dreamwalks? I asked.

“That’s a good question. It certainly doesn’t apply to me, but we may have someone here like that,” the first trainer said.

“Not me,” the other said.

“I’ll go find out,” the first said, on the way into the deeper level of the facility where I was not yet admitted.

Meanwhile, the second trainer started me on a level 5 dreamwalk, explaining some sort of story they had there related to people on sailing ships. A third trainer arrived, a woman smaller than me, who was going to go into this dream together with me as another minor character, while the second trainer monitored us from outside the dream.

We were playing the roles of new recruits on a sailing ship, so we got the beginner training on how to manipulate the sails to carry out orders. Someone else was going to be giving those orders, so we were... just doing something they probably used constructs to do in this world in real life, if they did it at all. I could see the attraction, though. It was an opportunity to participate in an era from the past. And it was also an opportunity to inhabit a strong man’s body. And both of us were indeed in strong men. I had never before been in a man this well muscled, though our more experienced crewmates had even larger muscles, no doubt from a lifetime of hard work on the ship (or at least, so the story would have it).

We went out on the ship and had spent maybe half an hour sailing when we were both pulled out of the dream.

The first two trainers were there waiting for us when we awakened. My dream-partner gave a report.

“Sarah showed excellent control of the dream character. She had no trouble at all adapting to the role. I was in an identical body and even with my dream experience, Sarah was more tightly bonding to the character, and able to pull with more strength than I could.”

“Thank you, Clarissa. I think that’s all we need from you today.”

Clarissa left, and the trainer who’d gone off looking for a suitable more advanced trainer started an explanation.

“I haven’t found anyone with the problem you describe, but I’ve put the question to the advanced training team. While we wait for a response, there’s another lesson I want to accelerate you to that I think will help you a lot. We usually let dreamwalkers train here for about a month before we give them this, and some of the ones who never advance beyond basic can’t do it, which is a good indication for having them stay in basic. However, we expect the ones who complete the basic skills quickly to always be able to do this.”

When he stopped, I asked, “What is it?”

“It’s about inducing your own sleep and dream states.”

“Oh, that sounds very useful. It’s been my estimate that after I go to bed it takes up to two hours before I enter the dream state.”

“That’s actually a little longer than usual, but maybe it’s because of the strength of the dream state you are entering.”

I didn’t actually get to induce the dream state that session, so I had the usual delay switching over to controlling game-Sarah via a dreamwalk. And when I got in, they had switched off to another group of trainers, but they were able to continue where I’d left off. This time, I did get to induce a dream state in game-Sarah. They had directed me to go back to that same ship story once I got into a dream, and I did visit the story, though I didn’t go out on the ship because I didn’t stay there long. The rest of the session was about going into and bringing myself out of dream states, and learning to do it more quickly.

---

For a good while after that, I practiced inducing dreams a lot in real life. I found myself able to get to sleep quicker and into a dream much quicker than before, giving me more dreamwalking-into-game-Sarah training time.

Remembering how Tommy had looked at Elissa’s reports from the computer game, I found similar reports I could look at from the computer game about game-Sarah’s activity. It looked like she did just the minimum while I wasn’t there. She maintained her shield and she took care of menial tasks like putting away my items after I moved. I was able to isolate some things by logging statistics at the beginning and end of each of my game sessions and in the morning after I woke up. A few things had 24-hour charts, like the level of her shield, nutrition, tiredness, and a hardiness statistic which was similar to HP in some games but included a significant mental component. And these basically showed that she reupped the shield to about 90% of the strength I set it to when it fell to 80%, she ate 3 meals a day if my play session didn’t include one, and she rested most of the rest of the time, slowly reducing tiredness and regaining hardiness. She really didn’t do anything else.

At one of the sessions, an advanced trainer named Herren showed up. I can best describe them as being of ambiguous gender. They had broad shoulders, beard stubble, muscular arms, and a flat chest. But they had a female-sounding voice with a Japanese accent, and the entire bottom looked female in the shape of the waist, hips, and legs, to the extent these parts were visible when their loose dress fell against them.

They tried to explain to me how to dreamwalk into someone at lower strength so I only viewed and didn’t fully take control of their body. It was a lot like trying to tell me not to dreamwalk while I was sleeping. My body just didn’t do that.

It was actually in one of my real-life practice sessions that I figured out how to limit my dreamwalk strength. After I had good control of inducing my sleep, I discovered that if I kept myself at a minimum sleep level, where I was so barely asleep that the slightest noise in the room would wake me, then my power level in dreamwalking was reduced to a level where I wouldn’t take control of the person but only view their dream or wakeful activity.

Once I figured that out I was able to try to take this style of sleep into the game. It didn’t work while playing on the computer because there were footsteps of other characters and other noises that woke me up. In the sessions when my real body was asleep, I was able to explain to my trainers what I needed. In the advanced level of the facility, they had privacy rooms for dreamwalking that were meant for higher-level dreamwalks.

They couldn’t let me into that level until I had passed this level of training, but they agreed to exempt me from this requirement since I had shown the ability to do more powerful dreamwalks, and let me complete the requirements regarding level 5 and 7 dreamwalks.

So it was just three days after this breakthrough that they passed me on to advanced training, and I got to move all my stuff again, conveniently disconnecting from game-Sarah to let her put it all away.