Logs:Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Nightmares and Dreamscapes
Dramatis Personae Amber, Maya, Ion
In Absentia Scott, Dusk	2025-01-15 "Is this your dream? Or his?"
Location <???>
The rich smokey smell of barbecuing meat mingles pleasant and achingly familiar with the more delicate scent of jacaranda on the breeze. It's a mystery where either of these things are coming from -- the mountains around are empty. Empty of other people, empty of life, the trees barren and the background rustle of wildlife eerily absent. From the burned-out gutted husk of a house that once stood here there's a different burning odor, accusatory and familiar, too in its acrid electric singe. It's probably the smell that's cutting right to Ion's chest. Probably that's what's leaving that pain there, a crackling wrenching agony that twinges sharp with every step he takes. He's on the steps, trying to walk up them but every breath stabs into his heart with -- is that regret? What else could it be. The pain is melting away, though, by the time he reaches the top step. There's still no house here anymore, but that suddenly doesn't matter quite so much. The crumbled doorway looks even more dilapidated, framing Scott Summers' bulk; those glowing red points of light feel like a beacon. Scott is reaching for him, a gentle brush of thumb -- "Hold on, you got some on your --" But where he's smudged it's blooming pink. Glowing, bulbous, running down Ion's face now, chewing away his hand, blossoming up to smother the ruins of the house around them. The pink is spreading, and spreading, billowing down the mountain to swallow up its trees and its familiar paths. The winged shape overhead feels like home, too, though its silhouette is warped and twisted against the uneven rippling pink landscape. He's coming to get them out of here before they're swallowed whole -- Ion knows this with some certainty -- but when he tries to say it it comes out only in Quechua. Scott's expression would probably be just about the same even if he did understand, but that's little consolation when he lifts a hand to his visor and takes aim at the sky. The usual beam of slamming energy does not come. From Scott's visor, now, there are only fireworks, signal-flare-bright but ultimately harmless, lighting the way for their swoopy salvation. Where the colorful sparkles shimmer back to earth they're sizzling into the ocean of pink, starting to melt it away. The dead trees are starting to bud back to life, pushing off their coating of suffocating pink as well. The batwinged silhouette dives down -- scoops both men up (if this necessitates they are Somewhat Intimately Close, well, maybe this dream needed a genre shift) to drop them instead near the edge of a festive party at the base of the mountain. The trails of fungus that cascaded down the mountainside are sparser here, just ugly lumpy ribbons that will probably eventually fade away. From the shade of a lush jacaranda tree, Maya (looking, even in this dreamscape, a little sleepless-haggard) smiles with a satisfaction as dream-Scott lifts a hand to help brace Ion's landing. Nothing really changes about the dream, just a sense (for those whose senses are fully present) that something has shifted slightly. “Oh that’s a lot nicer.” there’s a sense of relief to the ~~voice?~~ thought, as another presence seems to settle near Maya. Amber’s shape isn’t completely there, a blur at the edge of one’s vision, giving off a scrambled vibe of exhausted intruder that's making the best of an unwanted situation. Pink petals start falling, not really off the jacarandas, more appearing around the scene, framing the men as the lighting becomes softer. The-presence-that-is-Amber plumps down on the ground, legs crossed, one elbow on her knee as she leans her head on her hand. "Please don't remember me when you wake up, please don't remember me when you wake up," oozing off her in a soft plea. Maya is looking up, startled. In her vivid pink-and-orange salwar set she looks colorfully at home on the periphery of these bright festivities, though none of the dream participants are paying her much mind (very distracted with a happy couple to celebrate, probably!) She frowns, tilts her head to the side. She's looking between the dancing and the fuzzy-indistinct blur. "You're -- kind of blurry," she volunteers in what is improbably meant to be a reassuring tone. "I think it'd be hard to remember a blur. I mean, I might remember the blur but I'm not good at telling one blur from another -- not that I'm some kind of blur-racist, just --" She flaps a hand in the direction of Blur. "Indistinct." “Oh, sorry!” the-blur-that-is-Amber becomes more focused, her long brown hair being kept in place by a thick pink headband, and wearing baby-blue pajama pants and a long grey t-shirt that definitely has writing on it, but with letters that don't seem to want to hang around long enough to be read. “Is this...” she hesitates, looking in Maya’s direction more out of habit than needing to look. “Is this your dream? Or his?” she indicates in Ion’s direction. Maya's dark eyes get just a little wider as Amber resolves into clarity. She's starting to look in Ion's direction but then, with a very faint flush in her brown cheeks, flutters a hand -- a swirl of purple jacaranda petals join Amber's pink ones to flutter like a lightly fragrant privacy curtain between them and the men. "Oh, I'm just a visitor here." This comes lightly offhand, but a moment later she's turning to examine Amber more properly, like with this new resolve of detail she's just noticing something else about the young woman. "Wait, are you -- do you --" She hesitates, frown pulling deeper with a perplexity. "Do you -- know him?" “Not really?” Amber squirms a little. “I mean I met him the other day, kind of hard to miss, but we talked for maybe four minutes.” The air around her shimmers, little question marks popping up around her head, “Uhm, so wait, you also get dragged into other people’s dreams? Or, “ She tilts her head, growing more solid the more she talks, “what do you mean visitor? You got an invite or something?” "What do you mean dragged?" Maya's confusion is not leaving. There's a growing curiosity there, though -- she's lifting a hand to poke a finger at one of the question-marks, which expands until it's encompassing both women like a giant inquisitive aura. "Are you sure you're not just... toppling in? Most people aren't lucid enough to be dragging anyone into any dream. I did fall in a lot at first, though, that got disorienting." “I think I’m being dragged in?” she marvels at the aura, fingers reaching out to touch the edges of it and in doing so creating little fluttering fairy-lights. “Maybe I am toppling, I don’t really want to be in other people’s dreams, it just sort-of happens.” She gets up, regarding Maya carefully, "you control it? Wait are you like...." she gestures at the petal-curtain covering up Ion and Scott, then lowers her thought-speech to a conspiratorical whisper, "do you like, ship them?" "Oh-h-h." Maya's confusion is clearing up, but there's still a worried cast to her expression, echoed in a shiver of anxious blue flickering through Amber's dancing lights. "That does seem really tiring. I couldn't control it for a while -- how long has this been happening for you? Is it a lot -- just with people you've met or --" She seems to recognize that there's an unduly excited edge creeping into her tone and she pulls it back with a small apologetic dip of her head: "Sorry, I just haven't ever met anyone like this before." She, too, is glancing over towards the curtain -- the flowers are shifting themselves, darker-purple petals and lighter-purple ones clustering together until a purple-on-purple heart is in the center of the swirl. "Ohhh no I'm not forcing this so much -- just kind of guiding the mood happier, right, nightmares are not good for recovery. I think his subconscious decides on the, like -- specifics?" Though she has a conspiratorial smile when she leans in to add: "But, like, everyone ships them." The aura around them turns to excitement, the little lights turning into small fireworks. “Oh my god, I haven’t met anyone else either!” she’s positively tiptoeing, “it’s been a few years now, started-” for a brief second there’s a flash of hospital beds and cleaning agents, but they quickly disappear, “-when my mom got sick. It’s just people, I think, I meet someone, or see someone on tv that’s real cool and pop!” the lights turn into bubbles, popping as she says the word, “there I am, in their dreams, not weird at all.” Her laughter is very much forced, a crooked grin that permeates awkwardness. “How do you guide it? Wait, how do you control it?” the excitement doesn’t die down. “And oh my god yes everyone should!” "Ohmygod, it's so awkward when it starts, isn't it? Like hel-lo all your most private worries and --" Maya is flicking a small look askance to the floral privacy curtain, but, well, more exciting topics at hand than the ethics of dream privacy: "-- this is going to sound super corny but practicing meditation really actually helped, like --" Hopefully Ion's calmer peace is settled enough to continue apace, because she's hopping right to her feet and taking a closer step to Amber. The mountain shifts around them, fluttering and vanishing. They're in Central Park, now, the soft quiet of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary even quieter now without any other parkgoers about. Maya plops herself back down, this time cross-legged on a smooth flat stone overlooking the Pond. "-- when my mind just goes everywhere at night it's like pinballing into everyone around, or everyone I met that day, and that got exhausting. -- Do you keep a dream journal ohhhh gosh I've never had to talk anyone through this before and did not realize how new-agey-woo it was going to sound." “Yes!” Amber gushes, a flowery picnic-chair appearing under her as she sits down, “it’s so awkward, like you would not believe how many times I’ve ended up in someone’s holding-a-presentation-in-front-of-the-whole-class-naked dreams and I don’t wanna see that!” She gawks at suddenly being in Central Park, “how did you do that?” Out of the pond three glittering koi flies up, swimming in circles around them. “I haven’t tried meditating, my abuela makes me keep a dream journal, but it’s just made me remember stuff more.” "Oh! We just went back to my dream," Maya says this casually, like this cavalier hopping around is No Big Deal. "OK so what I do is kind of a reverse dream journal. I have a sort of routing at night now, right and -- it took me a while to work out what helps so maybe it'll take you a lot of experimenting, too, but. For me, instead of just writing down my dreams when I wake up, before bed I do a little bit of meditating, and then I write down what I want to be dreaming about. I try to keep that in my mind as I'm falling asleep so that I kind of -- steer rather than letting everything that happened today steer me. I've been pretty sick this week though and let me tell you, that does not help the craaazy-erratic -- you know." There's a cheerful ease to her smile, the you know not just a verbal tic but an affirmation: someone who really does. “You have your own dreams!?” A notepad pops up in Amber’s hands, she’s so excited she changes colour, shimmering through a spectrum of pinks and purples before settling back into her original gradient, “I only seem to dream when I’m in other people’s dreams, and it’s so exhausting.” She scribbles in the notepad, letters that crawl away as fast as she puts them down, “I know this is a silly thing to do, “ she nods at it, “but it genuinely helps me remember stuff when I wake up. Even if it-” she attempts to stab the letters back in place, “is hard to make it stick.” "Some nights, yeah. When I start from like -- a spot I feel calm in --" Maya is gesturing to the quiet urban sanctuary around them. One of the glittering koi dips down to do a figure-8 around her hand and then swim back off into the air. "-- It makes it so much easier to direct where I want to go. Getting here wasn't easy but soooo worth it." Maya is reaching out around them to grab at the words that have crawled off of Amber's page -- when this proves inefficient a glowing trawling net shimmers into existence around them, closing in to scoop the runaway words back up and topple them back toward Amber. There is pink, fluffy and bulbous, just starting to creep in at the edges of their vision, sneaking in globby strings up the trees, veining thin on the koi's glittering fins. One of Maya's eyes scrunches up, head tilting like she's heard an unpleasant sound. "Oh I have no stones to throw on silliness, I tried so much nonsense before. Hypnosis, crystals, sound bathing. Throwing off sleep just throws off everything." “Oh yeah, I get so snippy when it gets like this.” Amber grabs the words, glue appearing in her hand as she starts attaching them to the page, “waking up as exhausted as I was when I went to sleep..” she shakes her head, “and I wasn’t very patient to begin with.” The word ‘meditate’ glows in acid green on the page. “What’s the pink stuff about?” "Mutant nonsense," Maya says, with a kind of longsuffering sigh. "Kind of feels as ubiquitous in this city as obnoxious drivers dooring you in the bike lane." She bites at her lip, her fingers lacing together, and casts a faint and anxious look towards the encroaching pink. "I think it's giving someone another nightmare I should maybe put out --" But now she's looking back to Amber, concern written in her expression. "-- I don't know how to find you again. This stuff is probably so much easier with help." Amber tries to think the pink away, but when she actually concentrates about something nothing happens, the only thing she achieves is to create the sound of a faint buzzing. “I know this place, I can come here. Outside dreams.” She seems a little sad, the buzzing growing louder, “or you can call ...” The words grow faint as her edges start blurring the buzzing turns into an electronic dialog-clock dial hand, wrapping around her, "...grib..." as the hand disappears she does too, an orange translucent rock the only thing left behind. Maya's head is tilting slightly as she tries to focus on that last word. A small crib is sprouting in the place Amber had been, at first appearing to be ornately inlaid, though a closer inspection reveals the intricate strands of design are softly pulsing fungus. In the center of the mattress, the translucent rock. Maya considers it, then plucks it up and tucks it into a pocket. She's diving over the edge of the promontory, the water of the pond below shimmering to swallow her up. As the ripples smooth back into stillness, the pond itself seems to reflect another place entirely -- not the greenery and sky of the park but a maze of bland and institutional hallways that stretch off into unsettling infinity.