My dreams had gotten more real.

I'm really not sure what triggered it. Maybe its was my recent graduation from university, combined with moving back to my childhood home in a small, sorta...sleepy town. Maybe I just needed an outlet for my heavier thoughts, my extensive regrets after having spent four years of university sitting in the corner of lecture halls and looking away whenever someone met my eye.

Or, you know, maybe I'm overthinking things. I shouldn't necessarily assume that my weird dreams (and everything else that's happened to me up until this point) were triggered by some sort of change in my emotional state. Seems like too neat of an explanation, don't you think? For all I know, the changes within myself were caused by something weird I ate one time, or a quarter-life crisis hormonal imbalance. As we all know, life isn't quite as neat, quite as symbolic, as we like to assume. In any case, why should I assume that I have a monopoly on this story? What I'm going to write about is a mossy tangled network of stories, intersecting but never resolving. I should probably stop thinking of myself as being in the centre of that network, but hey, it's a hard habit to break. I'm an interior-facing guy by nature, which isn't helped by the fact that I have all the charm of a sea anemone whenever I try to talk to people.

But anyways, I should probably stop rambling and get to the point. What was the point again? The logical starting point to this story, I mean?

Hmm. Alright. If I'm talking about dreams here, I suppose it would make sense to start with the first weird 'dream' I had, the first real one.

Prior this incident, I had been experiencing way more nightmares than usual. These were really intense, abrasive episodes, filled with flashing lights, industrial clanging, and screams of pain that never identified themselves. I was always left confused and shaken by these nightmares, but I tended to recover pretty quickly. They were just nightmares, after all. Within 15 minutes I'd be downstairs with a bowl of Cheerios, my mind filled with thoughts of chores and video games.

Looking back on it, it's a real shame that I didn't pay more attention to these early episodes. If I had, maybe I would've seen the glimpses of my future hidden beneath those nightmares. Beyond the pure terror there were other worlds waiting for me—my mind just hadn't let them in yet.

And it would refuse to do so until Saturday, June the 14th, only four days after I moved back home. I had only just finished moving all my clothes and books and vinyl figures back into my old room, a sorta cramped little cubbyhole near the second floor stairs of our old log house. My mom had been pretty chill about letting me move back home, taking great pains to be accommodating and to help me figure out my next steps. This was because she's a good person, but also because, I think, she sorta pitied me. She was proud of me for graduating, obviously, but I think she saw how directionless I was and didn't know how to solve it (neither did I, so who can blame her). She could only look at me like I was a stray cat, hoping that I'd someday find somewhere that resembled a home.

I remember being pretty tired that night, opting to go to bed at 11 p.m. instead of staying up all night aimlessly wandering the internet. I stuck to my usual ritual of passing by my mom in the living room on the way upstairs and asking her sorta inane questions about the tv show she was watching. That night it was a cop show, starring a gifted detective with an unusually strong sense of smell. According to my mom, the writers had done a pretty good job of putting the main character in situations that used this premise in interesting ways—for instance, last week he had been tasked with solving a murder in a sewer, where the smell of piss and shit hindered his search for useful clues. The show sounded decent enough, but I wasn't a network TV kinda guy.

Still, I always thought it was a good idea to hang out with mom at least a little bit each night. It's not like she was doing badly since dad left, but I nonetheless felt an obligation to be there as an extra voice in the house, kinda like how people who live alone sometimes leave the TV or a radio on all the time.

We sat on the ratty old couch for half an hour or so, munching on dry cereal and chatting, until I excused myself to my room. I don't remember much of what we talked about, besides something she said to me in passing as I was getting ready to leave:

“Jackson...I just want you to be okay when I'm gone. I know you like the stuff you like, and that's okay, but please promise me that you won't just sit in your room. You need to have a life.”

Ouch. Her comment still burns a little bit, not gonna lie. It probably doesn't make much sense without any context, though. To give the quickest explanation possible, the 'stuff I like' referred to the vinyl figures I had been holding, a set of extremely rare 80s figures that would probably pay off my student debt if I ever chose to sell them. My mom had always been pretty accepting of my otaku (okay, of my weeb) interests, but there was a sense of weary resignation hidden behind that acceptance. She was watching me walk down a path that she hated, that she felt was poisonous to my soul, but as a mother she felt both powerless and unqualified to stop me.

Still, she'd speak her mind when my future happiness was at stake. When my future life was at stake, really. So in this instance, she felt justified. Her request was a simple one—keep the vinyl figures, but please, for the love of God, make sure that you don't become suffocated by your own imagination.

She was probably right to say it, honestly. I needed to get a life. But that fact didn't make her words sting any less. And it didn't make the whole business of 'getting a life' seem any easier, either. The phrase 'get a life,' the thing-in-itself, conjured up a whole bevy of awful images for me, of crowded lecture halls and florescent-lit offices and heartbreaking conversations. It's not that I didn't want a life, or rather, it's not that I didn't want to reach the end result of that process. I'd love to have a wife and kids, a nice big depressing house in the suburbs, a mortgage, all the usual bullshit—as long as I didn't have to put in any effort to get there, that is.

So, while I respected the hell out of my mom's opinion, I couldn't take it too seriously. I was the type of guy to just go with the flow, from the cradle to the grave. No effort required.

“Yeah, you're right honestly,” I replied. “I'll try harder from now on. I'll probably leave a lot of this stuff at Andrew's, too. Here, uh, give these to those neighbour kids maybe. They might like em.”

I tossed the bag of figures onto the coffee table next to my mom's couch. They hit the side of the couch with a slam and a crunch before tipping over onto the hardwood floor. I moved to pick them up, but my mom was already scrambling to grab them. So instead, I turned around to head upstairs before she even opened her mouth.

I loved my figures, and all my other collector's items, but I loved avoiding conflict even more. I figured that throwing away a bunch of my vinyl figs would buy me at least a few months of conflict-free living, even if it came at the cost of getting yelled at in the short term. And goddamn, I was right! About getting yelled at, I should say. I plugged my ears and trudged upstairs, my mom's lecture about frugality and responsibility dissipating into the air. Look, I appreciate where she was coming from, okay? But it was 11:30, and I was really tired. I just wanted to disappear into my dreams for a little bit.

2

My room was still pretty bare. Though I had already moved back most of my belongings, at that point I was still too lazy to take them out of their boxes. My floor was covered with half-opened, disintegrating cardboard boxes; nests of electronics and wrinkled old books peered out at me from inside their containers. Seeing all my stuff in that state, separated from its usual environment and locked away in discrete packages, made me kinda sad in a weird way. Why had I bought all this shit? Not to be some sort of hypocritical anti-materialist, but had any of this stuff enriched my life in any way? I had thought so at the time, at least. When my dorm room was decorated with this stuff, when I was surrounded by it like a blanket, I had felt my room transform into a fortress. Each of these items had been a talisman for my protection, and a little world I could escape to whenever I felt the need. But now, they were nothing but materials, plastic and metal and paper transformed into configurations that meant nothing to me.

Or so I thought at the time. Maybe I was just hungry.

At least my mattress still looked inviting. Tucked in the corner of my room, beside the splintering wooden wall and the window that would never open, my new life called out to me. My new life, or the start of the rest of my life? I didn't know, and I didn't care. Let me sleep for a few hundred years, then I'll start to piece myself together. If my mom wanted me to 'have a life,' it'd have to be found somewhere in my subconscious.

I didn't even bother to change out of my clothes. I lay down on top my bed, stared at the bumps and grooves in the ceiling, and let the sounds of the nearby highway sing me to sleep.

That was the plan, anyway. Instead, my mundane reality would finally come to an end, and a new nightmare would begin.

3

I could tell right away that the dream was different than the rest. I had experienced lucid dreams before, and while they had their own sort of psychedelic texture, the shift in perception I was experiencing was just too radically different from your everyday sort of dream. I don't mean that I was seeing or hearing or tasting anything out of the ordinary; it would be more accurate to say that I was seeing more than usual, even compared to my waking life (while I wouldn't say that I was constantly dissociated in real life, for a long time I had felt that I was only experiencing a fraction of what I was supposed to, like I was looking at everything through a set of foggy lenses. I probably should have talked to someone about that).

In this 'dream,' everything was overwhelming. Sounds and colours and smells rushed into my head like a waterfall; it was as if a crack had opened up in my brain and all this debris was forcing its way in. At first I couldn't even figure out what I was experiencing—I saw an endless patch of pale green flecked with blue, heard the rushing of wind, but I couldn't get everything I was seeing to resolve itself into a coherent image. Fuck it, I thought, I'll just ride this out. It may have been one of the weirdest vibes I had ever been subjected to, but in a few moments I'd be in Dracula's castle or hanging with Clint Eastwood or something. I just had to trust the process. My mind was having a bit of an episode, but it always sorted itself out in the end.

So I stood still, breathing slowly, allowing myself to exist in that weird moment for a little bit. Eventually—if I had to guess it was about three minutes, but as we all know time can be a little wonky in dreams—the world became more coherent to me. The patch of green was a field of alien grass, stretching towards the endless horizon. It was taller and wider than normal grass, and was perhaps the brightest green I had ever seen. It's hard for me to describe it now, after having been away from that place for so long, but it almost felt digital, like a garish asset from an early 3D game. The grass was almost all I could see; the ground was completely flat in all directions, with the only landmarks being these tall, thin poles placed at regular intervals way off in the distance. These poles looked to be bending slightly, and they might have had these slight grooves along their sides as well, but they were all too far away for me to tell.

As for the sky, I was pretty sure it was related to the weird vegetation of that place. It was pale blue, almost white, with a dim blue sun directly overhead. That must be a blue giant, I thought. Aren't they too volatile to support life? Why am I able to breathe here? I knew that these questions were pointless, given that I was in a dream and all, but couldn't help but be amused by the plot inconsistencies in the story my mind had cooked up. If I was reviewing my dream, I'd have given it a 6 out of 10 (with 7/10 peaks).

Since I had never been in a dream that vivid (and since I didn't have much to do in the real world anyways), I decided to walk around for a bit, just to see if my mind would conjure up anything interesting. The grass crunched pleasantly under my feet—it was like I was stepping on a pile of cucumbers—and the wind continued to howl around my ears, a cool breeze that, combined with the sparkling light of the foreign sun, made me feel weightless for the first time in years. Smiling and swinging my arms as I walked, I decided to arbitrarily pick a direction to travel. Everything looked the same, so why not go wherever my whims demanded?

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Well, everything looked the same until I saw the girl standing in the grass.

Geez, how had I missed her? She was right behind me when I turned around, about...twenty feet away, close enough that I could begin to make out her features. My brain had really pulled a fast one on me there, I thought. I was kinda impressed with myself, but I still hoped to God that I wouldn't run into any real jumpscares before the dream ended.

She looked to be around my age and height, with white hair that flowed to her waist. Even from the distance, I could tell that she was alert, yet ultimately compassionate towards me. Her round, freckled face radiated kindness and honesty. But most importantly, though, she seemed to be...well...from what I could tell, she was....

....a witch.

Or if she wasn't a witch, she was wearing an incredible cosplay of a fictional witch that I wasn't familiar with. She was wearing a long, jet black dress and black boots, with a belt around her waist (presumably) decked out with potions, or herbs, or other tools of her trade. But most strikingly, she was wearing a massive, wide-brimmed witch hat, sloping to one side and slightly covering one of her eyes. She stood still, staring at me quizzically, like something out of a store display.

Even though I was dreaming, I figured that it may have been my only chance to interact with a girl from a fairy tale. Who would pass up a chance like that? She seemed nice enough, anyways. Might as well strike up a conversation and see if she would say anything interesting.

But before I could get to her, she waved and took off in my direction, bounding across the grass like a gazelle. For a girl in a dress she was shockingly fast and shockingly graceful, running so fast that I thought she'd lift off the ground. She skidded to a stop right in front of me, instantly regaining her composure and looking as curious as ever. She didn't even seem to be winded, for God's sake. Was this the true power of magic?

“Hey there,” I said, waving awkwardly, “are you from here? Do you know where this place is? Or, could you tell me what you are, at least?” Pretty patronizing questions, I guess, but I wanted to scrounge up all the info on that place that I could before it disappeared from my mind forever.

“Hello, stranger! Well, of course, I can answer all of your questions, but first I really would like to know about you. What is your purpose here, do you seek adventure? Or was your appearance here merely an accident? That must be it, right? It's not that I don't like solitude but, well, I was hoping I'd run into another traveller on this barren old planet. Hopping can be so lonely sometimes—you have to find companionship wherever you can get it, I think!--and especially with such a bizarre series of events, all these quakes within hours, I just really wanted to share this place with another sentient being. As long as they weren't a cannibal or some other manner of heartless scoundrel. I hope you understand.”

Her voice surprised me. It wasn't deep or aggressive, and it wasn't loud, but it resonated in a way that made it seem loud. It was like her voice was reaching directly into my head. I suddenly felt like I had to take her seriously.

“I get you, I get you. Naw, I'm not a travelling, not here for the...quakes. That sounds rad though. I don't even know why I'm here, honestly. I went to sleep, like normal, and then I popped into this field, wherever it is, and I saw you. That's all I know right now. Was hoping you'd know what's up.”

“You went to sleep?” She raised her eyebrow. “Oh my goodness, you're not a first timer, are you? And in your sleep, no less?? You poor fool...you must thing this is all a dream then. Depending on your home reality, Hopping can be such a nightmare. The most nauseating type of whiplash. Trust me on that”

Hopping? As in...the verb, to hop? I hadn't encountered too much sci-fi terminology in my dreams before. I needed to investigate further.

“So what does this 'hopping' involve? And what does that have to do with where we are right now?”

She was barely listening to me, as she was too busy fiddling with a clear sphere attached to her belt. Blue vapor swirled around inside it. She truly has an impeccable aesthetic, I thought.

“Hopping is--hmm. It's hard to describe. Or anyhow, it's hard to describe in more words than one! You've...well, you've hopped through realities, from one world to another. But it's not a clean transition, you're not just here in an instant after being where you came from, it's more like you're packing up and starting again in a new place. Like making a clean break from your old life, a new village and a new king. You have to create a new 'you' every time you do it, even if that 'you' ends up being a ghastly mockery of the original 'you,' in your estimation at least.”

With a mocking glint in her eye, she cast her eyes downward towards my crotch.

“Looks like you didn't exactly have time to create an 'original self.' Unless your original self is some sort of pervert. Or, unless your culture has a natural aversion to clothes. If that's true, I apologize for my insensitivity.”

I looked down at myself for the first time since I had arrived in the dream. I was stark naked. I felt the usual rush of shame, familiar to anyone who's had an embarrassing dream involving missing clothes. But strangely, my feeling of shame didn't stem from the fact that I was being watched by a cute witch. I was more disappointed in my subconscious for having forgotten such an obvious detail. For some undefinable reason, I didn't feel at all ashamed standing in front of the witch without clothes on. Even beyond the fact that she was a dream creature, I felt a strange sense of familiarity with her that made my nakedness feel almost...natural. I know that sounds crazy, and believe me, I thought I was fucking crazy at the time, but if you give it a little time any mystery will resolve itself. In your case, you only need to give it another chapter or two.

Anyhow, at that moment the whole nakedness issue was far from my main concern. No, I was more interested in the three extra legs that had grown out of my calves.

The three extra legs? That had grown out of my calves?

Yep, there they were, stretching out of my calves and playfully dangling over the grass. Three tiny legs (about a quarter the size of my regular ones); two on my left calf and one on my right. There was nothing out of the ordinary about them, I should say. They weren't deformed or abnormally coloured. They were just miniature legs. It was their movement that gave me a shock. They were bending and stretching and wiggling their toes on their own, like I had a group of leg-shaped parasites attached to my body.

I know this might sound crazy (hell, I guess all of this sounds crazy, so you probably won't judge me), but the first thing I did was try to shake them off. I jumped up and down like I was playing hopscotch, slapped the sides of my ankles against the ground, and tugged at the creepy legs with all my strength, but they didn't budge. They just sat there smugly, waving at my face, mocking me in their own expressionless way.

I looked back up at the witch sheepishly, trying not to betray my panic. She barely seemed to register what I was doing, her smile belying her boredom and impatience. I felt like an ant crawling on an anthill.

“Can you use some of your magic on this?” I asked. “I don't know if you can actually do that but you know, I thought I'd ask. I'm cool with this whole setup if not, for the time being anyways. It's just a dre—I mean, it's just a...temporary thing, after all, I bet. It's not like I'm gonna be stuck with four legs for the rest of my life, that'd be ludicrous. That's never happened.”

“Has it not?” She replied, touching her index finger to her cheek and gazing up at the sky as if she was actually pondering my question. “I'm sure it has on some worlds. Throughout all the endless avenues of the universe, there certainly must have been a race of humanoids that evolved with four legs, or four arms, or even four genitals, though I can't imagine the good that would do.”

I could.

“Sure, you're probably right. But can you please help me? I'll be super in your debt.”

“I would if I could. But magic doesn't work like that, traveller. There's no spell or potion I've ever seen that would take your malady away. Only your own mind can do that now! But that ability only comes after much practice, and a lot of luck. You very well may be stuck with those legs for months, unless you happen to be an exceptionally gifted learner and the stars align just right. Personally, it took me three years to perfect hopping!”

“Jeepers, not sure I have that much time. It sucks ass, but I might just have to suck it up and move on.”

“As you wish.”

With a sigh, she suddenly let herself fall down onto the grass with her arms spread and eyes closed. She looked like she was trying to make a snow angel with the grass, frozen still in a pantomime of childhood. She remained like that for a few minutes, which I was confused about but perfectly fine with. I simply stared at her dopey grin, and the rising and falling of her chest as she steadily breathed (not that chest. I mean like, her normal chest area. Around her stomach, I guess).

I wasn't sure why this dream creature trusted me so much, but I figured that it was either due to her exceptional power level or a subconscious desire on my part to create a girl who would be happy to talk to me. I wasn't unpopular with girls in the real world, but one could never have enough pleasant conversations with cute girls, I thought. I felt a weird sort of gratitude towards my brain in that moment, the murky depths of my subconscious that always knew the right thing to show me.

But seeing her lying there, framed by the endless fields of green, I also realized that I had reached a dead end. She didn't seem to be interested in accompanying me anywhere, and anyways, there wasn't really anywhere to go in the first place. Those little towers were miles and miles away; I estimated that it would take about ten hours to reach them in the real world. I could try to break the dream somehow—give myself the ability of flight, for instance, or instant teleportation—but I already knew that I wouldn't find anything interesting there. The emptiness of that world settled on everything; I felt it deep in my bones. Underneath that emptiness was a vague feeling of panic, like I was about to reach the jump-scare at the end of a long nightmare. Some really bad would happen if I stayed in this strange dream any longer, and it would only reach me after an endless, agonizing silence.

Though I was starving for some excitement in my life, I was never good at handling jump-scares. I always hated amusement parks as well—honestly, I wasn't much of a thrill-seeker at all, I just liked the idea of adventure. Plus, those extra legs were started to really get on my nerves. It was time to go back to reality.

“Hey, miss witch, what's your name?” I asked.

She barely opened her eyes to look at me.

“Virginia. You can call me 'Miss Witch' if you'd like, though.”

“...Virginia's good. My name's Jackson, nice to meet you. But uh listen, miss Virginia, it's been great talking to you and meeting you and everything, but I think it's time for me to get out of here. This dream's making me all paranoid. Plus, there's some stuff I wanna do tomorrow, so I'd like to wake up as soon as possible.”

“Some errands?”

“There's a game I really wanna 100%. I don't have to do it by tomorrow, but I'd prefer to.”

For the first time, she looked totally out of her element. “How do you...100 percent a game?”

“Oh, right, sorry, witches probably don't have video games. Why would you need them if you're a witch? You can use magic for fuck's sake.”

Things were getting a little too off-topic. In the first place, I wasn't even sure why I was taking time out of my day to be courteous to a dream creature. Time to cut ties.

“Anyway, none of that stuff really matters. Hope you have a good one. See you in my dreams.”

With one last look at the girl and the alien world, I clenched my fists and closed my eyes as hard as I could. Fast, long blinking had always been a foolproof method for waking myself up from a dream; even during the gnarliest nightmares I could always count on blinking to immediately whisk me off to safety. Apparently blinking during a dream increases your risk of sleep paralysis, but that had never been an issue for me. I always slept easily and for an absurd amount of time, with a clear divide between my waking and sleeping lives. To me, sleep paralysis was an affliction reserved for people were always rushing in and out of sleep, never content to stay in one reality for long. I embraced sleep like a starving man embraces food, but once the dream was over I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to live in the real world for another 16 hours, give or take.

For that reason, I was confident that I'd never see Virginia (or that world) ever again.

So imagine my surprise when nothing happened after I closed my eyes.

Ten seconds passed, then thirty, but I was still staring at the the back of my eyelids.

I reopened my eyes. All I saw were those monstrous extra legs, continuing to stare at me, their existence taking on a horrible new meaning.

I didn't panic, at least not at first. I was too shocked to panic. The whole situation felt too surreal to react to. I don't want to say that I felt like I was 'in a dream,' because that particular cliche is both overused and a little redundant here, but there was a disconnect between what I was seeing and what I would soon be feeling.

Running purely on survival instinct, I closed my eyes again, hoping that this time, somehow, I'd find an escape hatch. But once again, nothing happened.

Fuck.

Shaking, I sank to my knees and began to claw at the grass, probably looking like I was trying to dig my way out of that world. Tears welled up in my eyes; a low moan escaped from my throat. I felt like a prisoner about to be executed, like that horrible presence I had felt earlier was about to find me and finish off its prey.

Was I going insane? Was I in a coma? Had I died, and was now experiencing my brain's last gasp of inspiration before I was shuffled off into the dark? I speculated on a thousand different sci-fi scenarios, but to be honest, the specifics of my situation didn't matter. All I knew was that I had left my home, I had left my mom, and that I would probably never see them again.

Yeah, I was sure of that—I had really left them, in both a mental and a physical sense. That was the source of the weird sensations I had been feeling since I entered that dream, not just the abnormal lucidity but the implacable feeling of separation. I had left my body. Actually, that probably wasn't true. It seemed more likely that my body had left the earth, and that my ratty mattress was now permanently vacant. This body was my real body, at least for the time being.

That meant that these new legs were real, my nakedness was real, this place was somehow real, the...witch girl, everything she said was true, and she was real too, and....

Speaking of the witch girl, my mind had been racing so fast that I didn't realize that Virginia had been talking the whole time.

“....to pull your self together, alright? I know it's hard, traveller, but we must let the wind carry us where it may. So please wake up. I need you at your full strength. By my dial it is almost noon here. We've reached the half hour again, so you must--”

A terrifyingly loud sound, like a bomb going off, rang out across the field to cut her off. I barely had time to cover my ears before the ground began to shake in its wake, a wave of vibration that would have thrown me on my back had it lasted more than five seconds.

Then, there was silence—for a few moments, at least, before the whole process began again.

“--YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME, TRAVELLER, AND WE MAY SURVIVE THIS!” Virginia yelled over the din, now standing upright and sporting an expression of pure determination.

She was staring at something way off in the distance. I followed her eyes, finding that she was fixated on one of the distant poles. I immediately knew why: the poles were moving, and the landscape was beginning to transform in a manner that defied belief. I had been in that world for less than an hour, and I was already facing something that seemed to violate common sense, natural laws that I had been taught were immovable.

And I was trapped with no way out.