Chapter 17 #3
My stomach turns cold, even though the air around us stays warm.
“Is that—”
“That’s the monster from my first novel. Took me about six months of coming here before it felt true.”
“True,” I repeat, carefully not looking at it anymore.
“That’s what horror needs.” He lets the flower go. “It needs something true underneath. Fear you can recognize.” He finally looks away from the edge. “That book was my first bestseller.”
I turn to stare at him. He doesn’t offer anything else, just leans back into the flowers like he hasn’t handed me anything significant at all.
“Why horror?” I ask. “You could write anything. You could come here and build… I don’t know, whole worlds, and you choose to conjure up things that… ” I stop myself from looking at the edge again.
“Horror stories don’t need happy endings.”
“That’s… bleak.”
“That’s honest. I trust a story more when it doesn’t promise everything’s going to be fine.”
I look back at the flower fields and the rainbow curving softly over the water. “I think if I were as good at this as you, I’d only ever build things like this,” I admit. “Nice things. Safe things.”
“That’s more dangerous than the monsters.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
He nods toward the warmth, the light, and the beauty he has made.
“The monsters, you know to be afraid of. You stay alert and don’t forget where you are.
But this?” He lets out a small, humorless exhale.
“This, you could live in. This, you’d stop wanting to leave.
You have to have something worth coming back to.
Otherwise, you start preferring this place, and that’s how you lose your grip. ”
A weight drops into my stomach.
“That’s what happened to Tessa, right? She fell in love with a dream guy… and lost her grip.”
Ridge’s head snaps toward me. “She fell in love with a dream guy?”
“Well…” I swallow. “I think so.”
“Explain.”
“I don’t know…” I hesitate, then push on. “She wrote about him, how real he felt, and how safe it was with him. She stopped wanting to be awake.”
“Fuck. That’s not simply losing your grip. That’s something else entirely. Or rather someone.”
“What are you saying?”
He studies me for a long second, then exhales slowly through his nose. “You really have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
“I never said I did,” I shoot back. “I’ve known about this dreaming thing for, like, five minutes.”
“Yeah,” he says dryly. “And somehow you’ve already skipped to the boss level.”
I narrow my eyes. “I’m seriously considering yeeting you like you did Nevan.”
“Rude.” He sits up. “Okay. Lucid Dreaming 101. A lot of people say there are five different dimensions. Strip away the woo-woo, and the basic idea is pretty simple. 2D is a flat representation you can’t inhabit.
Our waking life is 3D. Dreams, no matter if lucid or regular, happen in 4D, and 5D is a space where more than one mind occupies the same experience, intentionally or not. ”
“So, we’re in 5D right now?”
“No, we’re still in 4D.”
“But we’re sharing—”
“A dream. Your dream. This is your 4D, Lennon. Not mine. I’m just… in it.”
I look around at the planet he apparently conjured out of thin air. “You built this.”
“Because you let me.” He says it carefully as if he’s still working out what that means himself. “Your dream, your space. I can influence it because you’re allowing it, consciously or not. But the foundation? That’s yours.”
“Okay.” I try to follow. “So what’s 5D then?”
“5D is what happens when awareness stops being private. People say it’s some higher state. Unity, enlightenment, all that shit.” He scoffs. “That’s not useful. What is useful is knowing it’s a place where identity doesn’t hold the same way. Good and bad don’t either. Intent doesn’t protect you.”
“So this isn’t that.”
“No.” He looks at me. “This is me somehow ending up inside your REM cycle, which shouldn’t be possible either, and yet…” he gestures vaguely at the flowers, the sky, the evidence, “… here we are.”
“Does that happen often?” I ask. “People just wandering into someone else’s 4D?”
“It doesn’t.”
“I… but then how?”
“It’s hard to explain without sounding insane. Think of it like this. When you sleep, you’re swimming in your unconscious. Lucid dreaming is realizing you’re in the water.”
“You’re aware that you’re aware.” At least that I understand now.
“And if you’re skilled enough, you can navigate the water. Build a boat. Choose where you go, what you build.” He pauses, turning our joint hands over. “Dream sharing is… when two people end up in the same water.”
“But how?”
“Connection helps. The stronger the thread between two people, the easier it is for one mind to find the other’s frequency.
You have to concentrate on the essence of them when you fall asleep, not only their face, even though that helps.
But it’s the feel of them, and if that person’s frequency is open, receptive, then sometimes… ” He trails off. “You find a door.”
I think about that. “Their essence has to be open to it?”
“Willing, even unconsciously. You can’t force your way into someone’s 4D. The dreamer always holds the key, whether they know it or not. Or at least so I thought.”
“Okay.” I chew on that for a second. “But I didn’t know you. So I couldn’t have been thinking about you,” I continue, following the logic carefully. “Which means I wasn’t the one who found the frequency. Which means…”
I look at him.