“Hey. Hey. Hey!” An impatient voice echoed through Dyllan’s room, its sound familiar yet alien. “Wake the hell up!”

Hesitantly, Dyllan peeked out from under his covers and glanced around his room. Nobody was there.

“HEY! I know you can hear me!” The voice again, though it still had no discernible source. “Dammit, you ignore me enough when you’re awake, I’m not putting up with this while you’re asleep, too! Hurry up!”

Dyllan glanced around his room again, and still found no one. Mysterious voices from thin air, it was like a dream… wait, was Dyllan’s bed always next to the door? And wasn’t that bookshelf kept in the living room? Yeah, it had felt totally normal before, but now that he started to focus, he could tell that his room was… off.

A muddled fog filled Dyllan’s mind, all his thoughts drifting through it aimlessly, slowly, and uncontrollably. Was it just him, or did the layout of his room keep changing? His memory wasn’t clear enough to be sure. Hell, his memory wasn’t clear enough to remember that his memory was unclear. He was just a fragment of himself drifting in his own head as it rearranged and sorted itself for the next day.

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A supernatural spike of clarity flickered briefly within Dyllan. He was asleep, and he needed to wake up. To separate his mind from his unconscious body. Dyllan reached his hand out from under the covers, flailing it about a little to stir up the dream smoke. Then, he bundled up in his covers like a burrito, and rolled off his bed into blazing red smoke.

The bedsheets evaporated into nothingness, Dyllan’s eyes snapped open, and a restored clarity of thought flowed through his mind. He was falling through a tunnel of smoke and electricity, the kind that he traveled through whenever he was entering or leaving a mind. In this case, he was leaving his own.

With a gentle thud, Dyllan shed his physical body and landed in the physical world, free from his dream. The dream smoke began to clear, and he could see the source of the voice. A vicious, monochrome version of his own face, leaning over him.

“Well, well, well. Good morning sunshine!” Dyllan’s shadow bared its teeth, emphasizing the half-scowl-half-grin permanently etched on its face and pissed off twitch in its eye. “So generous of you to finally join me…”