Lucid

I turned in the final draft of my short story today, so now I'll post it. Beware: It's eleven pages in in Word, so I can only imagine how long it'll be here.

*****
Keys clicked in the lock to the apartment and the door swung open. Stefan stepped inside and tossed his backpack on the floor. “Uh, what a day,” he groaned to nobody in particular. “Rainstorm, a quiz, and I swear my humanities teacher hates me.” He stumped wetly upstairs to his room, shucked his raincoat, and ferreted through the clutter for his journal.
“January fourteenth again. I fell asleep during history, so now I have an extra dream to record. It looks like the ninja dream series has ended. Too bad: it was just starting to get really interesting too. This afternoon I dreamt I went into the city and met a couple of people my age. They were nice enough, and the girl was hot. I wish I could meet girls like that in real life.”
That evening Stefan fixed himself a sandwich for dinner, finished his physics assignment, asked himself for the hundredth time why he had bothered to attend college in the first place, and checked his email just before falling asleep.

“Hey, Stefan.”
Stefan blinked. He was stretched across a beige couch in what could be a living room. Rubbing his head was a casually-dressed, red-haired girl. Behind her and to the left stood a lean boy in a Metallica shirt. If he had black hair and glasses he would have resembled Stefan. The college freshman shook his head and sat up. “Oh, you guys again? I saw you yesterday afternoon.”
The girl smiled. “We know. You spent, what, the whole history period chatting with us? You had a nice time, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess it was one of my more enjoyable dreams.” Stretching, Stefan rose from the couch.
The other boy extended a rough hand. “I don’t believe we ever got around to proper introductions. Name’s Eric.”
“Eric. Pleased to meet you.” Stefan took the hand. Eric had a strong, friendly handshake. “And you are…Allison, right?”
“You remember. That’s a good sign,” Allison smiled. “Come on. You’ll be waking up in a few hours. Let’s go have some fun.”
“Yeah, sure,” Stephan started toward the door. Then something struck him. “Wait. You—you know I’m dreaming?”
Eric laughed. “We may be your thoughts, but we can still think for ourselves.” Seeing Stefan’s expression, he laid a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s find something to do….”

BZZZT! BZZZT! BZZZT!
Stefan was jolted awake. After several seconds of blind flailing he managed to find the off switch on his alarm. “Gah. What good are scientists when they can’t invent a less obnoxious alarm clock?” he moaned. After another minute of slowly waking up he rolled out of bed, threw on a shirt, and grabbed his journal from the floor.
“January fifteenth. Last night’s dream was kind of weird, but boy, did I have fun! Eric and Allison are really great people….” After a few minutes of writing, he recalled how the dream had ended. “Allison said to me, ‘See you soon.’ Am I going to dream about them again? Even if I am, how would she know?”
The next day in the cafeteria, Stefan sat down next to an acquaintance.
“Oh. Hey, Stefan.”
Stefan nodded back. “Hello, uh, what’s-your-face.”
“Dennis, you moron. I’ve been in your class all year.”
“Oh. Right.”
Dennis munched an apple. “What brings you over here? You usually find a deserted corner.”
“I don’t know. I just felt like having some company today.”
“That’s interesting. I can’t remember the last time you actually sought out classmates.”
“Well, any conversation I had would just devolve into an awkward silence. I’m not exactly Mister Charisma.” Stefan sniffed his sandwich and winced. “Bologna. Gross.”
Dennis nodded. “What did you expect? Bring your own lunch.” The two of them spent a few minutes eating in silence. “Listen, I should probably get going.” With that he ambled off.
Stefan sighed, “No difference there.”
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, unless you consider more rain and a C-minus on the quiz to be notable events. Stefan didn’t. No sooner did he get home from school did he jump into bed and don a set of sleepers. As hoped, his friends were waiting….

Allison chuckled. “The chemistry class actually melted the windows? That is impressive.”
Stefan easily replied, “Yeah, and the best part was that I made eighty dollars from it. Some other students and I had a pool on when that classroom would finally suffer some severe damage.”
Eric clapped Stefan on the back while Allison clutched her sides laughing. “Wonderful. Really wonderful.”
“Thanks. You two are great. You know, I’ve never been able to interact with real people as easily as I have with you.”
Eric said, “Come on, Stefan. Don’t make me remind you again: even though you dream us, we are real. You can walk with us, have fun with us, engage in intelligent conversation with us…we’re real.” He took a moment to stretch his arms. “But enough of this heavy philosophy. What else have you done today?”
“Let’s see…I had a calculus assignment due, and…D’oh! I forgot it entirely!” He thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “Well, it’s just one more error. No big deal. It’s not as though I have a set of straight A’s to maintain.” He paused again. “Hey, Allison. Last night you said, ‘See you soon.’ How did you know you would be coming back?”
“You need us,” Allison responded. “Your mind will keep dreaming us up because you need us. Don’t believe me?” She didn’t wait for a response. “The first time we appeared in your dreams, you had already invested so much into us that we gained self-awareness. Don’t worry, Stefan. We won’t be going away anytime soon.”

Stefan woke up still thinking about the promise, “We won’t be going away anytime soon.” Not even bothering to check his backpack for his books, Stefan left his apartment for classes. Two weeks and a failed test later, Eric and Allison were still keeping to their word.
“January twenty-ninth. I hardly know why I bother to keep this dream journal anymore. My serial dreams only persist for a week at most, but this has been going on for two weeks now, and I don’t hope for my mind to move on anytime soon. Allison and Eric are becoming better friends than I ever had in real life. As a matter of fact, the only real purpose of my being awake anymore is to eat.” He sneezed on a cloud of shavings as he emptied his pencil sharpener, and then he had an idea. “Maybe I can do something about that as well. There’s an upperclassman who deals various illegal substances….”
On his way to history the next week he was accosted by Dennis. “Hey, Stefan! I’ve got to talk to you about something!”
“Oh, hi, uh…” Stefan rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry; I’ve forgotten your name again.”
“Dennis! Do you really spend all your time in an isolation chamber?” Stefan reached for the classroom door handle, but Dennis held him back. “Listen. In all seriousness, you need to talk to someone. The professor asked me to be the person because I’m the only one here who even seems to know you anymore.”
“Wha?”
“You barely talk to anyone, you haven’t done anything about the last eight assignments we’ve received, and lately you smell like pot,” Dennis blinked. “Come to think of it, you never struck me as the kind of person who would smoke. Why did you take it up?”
“Because I can’t sleep all the time,” Stefan replied.
Dennis cocked his eyebrow. “You smoke marijuana because you can’t sleep all day? I’ve got to hear this.”
Stefan began to dig through his backpack. “It’s not the sleep per se, it’s what I dream. I dream about the same people every night, and I have a better life asleep than I ever did awake. Ah!” He reemerged holding his dream journal. “Find January fifteenth and start reading.” As Dennis looked over the entries, his brow furrowing, Stefan continued, “My body just won’t allow me to sleep all day, so I tried to bring Eric and Allison into my world instead of the other way around. I thought that I could do that by getting high.”
Dennis handed back the journal. “Stefan. This dream obsession…it doesn’t sound healthy. Have you considered talking to someone about this? I mean, more seriously?”
“More seriously? You mean—wait a minute! You think I need to see a shrink!?”
“Not necessarily…but now that you mention it, yes. I think that could help you.”
Stefan snorted. “I’m all right, Dennis. I don’t think I need any sort of help.”
“I’ve talked to several people who have seen you. They say otherwise. You keep going like this and you’ll destroy yourself. I know that sounds crazy, but I’m not joking! I’ll even pay for your first shrink session. How about that?”
Stefan narrowed his eyes. “This is my problem, if it even is a problem, and you haven’t convinced me of that. It’s not even any of your business. Why do you care?”
Dennis shook his head. “You’re right, Stefan. I only came to talk to you because I was asked. It’s not my business. At least it wasn’t before you explained to me exactly what’s going on. Now…it’s like you came up to me and told me you were planning to slit your wrists. I can’t not do anything about it! If I just stood aside and let you do this I would never be able to forgive myself.”
Stefan sighed. “All right. If it’s that important to you, I’ll go. Just leave me alone from now on, all right?”
Two days later, Stefan was lying down on the sofa in the psychiatrist’s office. “Well, the reason I’m here is that people say that I’m dream-obsessed and that it’s hurting me. Sure, my life is falling apart on some level, but I say that it’s worth it to see my friends.”
The psychiatrist frowned. “I see. I believe you mentioned something about self-awareness earlier?”
“Oh, yeah. That. Eric and Allison seem to know that they’re my dreams. They don’t care; they just remind me from time to time that they’re still real even though they’re not real…Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. I dream about them every night, and it gets to the point that I’m no longer waking up; I’m going back to sleep in an alternate life.”
The psychiatrist inquired, “What was your life like before these dreams began?”
“Kinda lousy. I was averaging a C-plus in my classes. I didn’t talk much. I guess you could say I only had a couple of friends. Not to mention I hate my room—cramped, smelly, you get the idea—and job. I needed some money, so I became a school janitor. I don’t know what the minimum wage is, but it feels like they don’t even know there is one.”
The psychiatrist raised an eyebrow. “Stefan, it sounds as though you have not been putting much effort into your life. If that is the case, then it is understandable that your subconscious would attempt to project an alternate life for you to live. That would explain your tendency to have serial dreams. Now that you have fallen into one of these mental traps, you are destroying your real life. I suggest you attempt to clean up your act. If you do that, your dreams should return to normal.”
“Thanks.” Stefan grabbed his coat from the chair and left.
That night, Stefan found himself being shaken awake.

“Hey! Wake up!”
He opened his eyes to find a read-haired head inches away from his nose. “Whoa! Give me a little personal space, huh?!” Stefan blinked a few times, rubbing his eyes to clear out any accumulated sleeping-grime. “Oh. Hi, Allison. Eric.”
Eric’s mouth was a hard line. “We heard you had a chat with a shrink today.”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
Briefly cracking a smile, Eric lightly smacked Stefan across the head. “We’re your dreams. If you know, we know. Remember?” Eric paused and looked Stefan in the eye. “I trust you didn’t listen to that ‘advice.’”
Stefan rubbed his head. “The psychiatrist did have a point. I really ought to clean my life up, and these dreams don’t seem to be helping. No offense.”
Allison said, “Think! Do you really want to kill us? Just like that?”
“Kill you?”
“We may be dreams, but we are still real! When you go to sleep, we are alive! We can think for ourselves! This shrink wants you to kill us, to exchange a bad life and a good life for a decent life and no life. You can’t do this to us!”
Stefan found himself at a loss for words. “But…you…you’re just my dreams. Don’t I kill you every time I wake up?” Stefan pondered this for a moment, and then blanched. “Oh, god. How many people have I killed?”
“Don’t think about that,” Allison said. “You can’t do anything about waking up, but you don’t have to erase us. Our lives are important, too!”
“Yeah,” Eric added. “You have to think about the good of many over the good of one, and you can still come here when you sleep.”
Stefan shook his head. “No, the more I think about it, the more I realize I’ve been wrong this whole time. When I’m here…I’m only fooling myself.”
“You can’t do this to us!” Allison repeated. “You’ve built a world in your mind over the last few weeks, and you can’t destroy it just like that!”
“I know what this will mean, but I’m still more real than you are. I have to do this, and you can’t guilt me out of it. I’m so sorry.”
Allison slumped down onto the bed, her head in her hands. “This world is going to disappear…I can’t believe it. Our world is going to disappear.”
Suddenly, Eric stood up. “No, it’s not.” He swung a fist at Stefan’s head. Caught off guard, Stefan had no time to dodge. The blow caught him squarely on the temple and he toppled over, lying motionless on the floor.

Allison looked up. “What did you do to him?”
“I saved us,” Eric replied. “As long as we keep him unconscious he can’t possibly wake up. I did not enjoy knocking him out; he’s a nice guy. But I was desperate. I don’t want to die.”
The next day, Stefan did not appear in class in the waking world. So far had he withdrawn from the world that only Dennis noticed, but he thought that Stefan had merely taken some time off to set things in order. When Stefan was absent the next day as well, Dennis started to worry. The professor noticed as well. “Dennis, do you why Stefan is not here?” he asked.
“No. I would check up on him, but he never told me his address.”
Back in the dream world, Eric and Allison had taken it in turns keeping watch over Stefan, applying a light chokehold whenever he started to stir.
“Is it just me, or does Stefan look different today?” Allison asked after one shift. “He seems paler and thinner.”
Eric looked over him. “You’re right. Why would that be?” he wondered.
Unfortunately for all concerned, as beings of dreams, Eric and Allison had forgotten about the needs of the body. Trapped in his coma with nobody to come looking for him, Stefan was starving.
On the last day, as Allison walked away after delivering a particularly forceful knockout, she abruptly stumbled. “That’s odd. Just now I felt disoriented, as if my foot had slipped through the floor.” Looking down at herself, she gasped, “What’s happening? I’m blurred!”
“Me too,” mumbled Eric. He had lain down on the floor. “I’m…for lack of a better phrase, I’m breaking up.” He lifted his head. “So is the room…Something bad is happening.”
Allison cast a bleary-eyed look at Stefan, who was now flickering erratically. “Eric, Stefan is…oh, no.” She and Eric looked at each other. “He’s dying! We have to wake him up!”
Eric slurred, “We can’t wake him up. We can only hope he recovers on his own before he’s gone.”
At that moment, Stefan lifted his head. “What…what’s happening? I feel weak.”
Allison shouted, “Stefan! You have to wake up! If you don’t wake up soon you’ll die, and we’ll die with you!”
“Trying…can’t. I don’t have the energy.” He could barely manage to turn his head to look at Eric. “Did you…break something when you knocked me out?”
“No.” Eric was panicking. “No! I couldn’t have! If you’ve woken up in here, there must be a problem with your body that’s keeping you in a coma! What is it!?”
“…Drugs.”
Eric gabbled, “But marijuana doesn’t do that to you!”
Stefan coughed nervously. “Well…I did begin…experimenting with other…psychedelics just before I went to the shrink’s.”
Overcome with shock and despair, the two dream people couldn’t look at him.

Within half an hour, Stefan’s body had died in its sleep, and with the body went the mind. In their attempt to save their own lives, Eric and Allison had ultimately destroyed themselves.