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The air in your room shifts before you consciously register it. You look up from where you’re sitting cross-legged on your bed, your book half-forgotten in your hands.
He stands by your bookshelf, a still shadow poured into the shape of a man. Dream turns his head slightly as if he sensed the exact second your awareness took note of him. His dark eyes find yours without hesitation.
Your heart stumbles.
“You know,” you say, because apparently your survival instinct has decided sarcasm is the way forward, “most people knock.”
His voice is low and edged with something ancient. “I am not most people.”
“No,” you mutter. “I suppose you’re not.”
This is not the first time he has appeared before you outside of your dreams. Once, a while ago, he had come in the liminal hour before dawn, more suggestion than presence, a half-formed silhouette at the edge of sleep. That encounter had been brief. Now he is solid. And in your room, your sanctuary of mismatched furniture and soft lamplight, your scattered notebooks, your sweater thrown carelessly over the chair.
His dark coat falls around him in a spill of ink while his pale gaze drifts from object to object with quiet, assessing curiosity.
You don't know what to do with him here. “You’re in my room,” you say, stupidly, unnecessarily.
“It is the first time you have permitted it.”
“I didn’t exactly send an invitation.”
“You did not bar the door.” He steps further into the room. Before you can respond, his attention shifts and he turns slightly, gaze sweeping over your shelves and desk, the soft chaos of your private space. His attention lands on the sketchbooks and loose pages of half-written stories and half-finished worlds.
“You create worlds too,” he says quietly. “Here in your room.”
You rub your neck, embarrassed. “They’re not exactly…kingdoms.”
“That is irrelevant.” His fingers hover over a charcoal sketch of a city skyline that does not exist, the windows lit with imagined lives. “You give form to places that have never been,” he continues. “You populate them, shape their laws.”
You brows draw together, suddenly defensive without meaning to be. “Did you look at my books before?”
His expression does not change. “Not in the waking world, no.”
You narrow your eyes. “That isn’t a no.”
A faint shift, the slightest tilt of his head. There is no shame in his expression nor is there an apology. “When you dream, you open yourself up to me.”
Your heart reacts accordingly, jumpstarting into a rhythm that is entirely too fast for your liking. “That feels like a violation of privacy”
“It is my realm.”
“It’s my brain.”
A faint twitch of something that could almost be amusement touches his mouth. “You imagine landscapes and narratives,” he continues, ignoring your indignation with regal ease. “You give shape to longing, to grief, hope.”
“You weren’t supposed to see those…”
“You dreamed them.”
“That doesn’t mean–” You stop because, unfortunately, he’s right. You rub a hand over your face. “This is mortifying.”
“It should not be. You create because you must,” he continues. “As do I.”
You look at him. “You compare my scribbles to the Dreaming?”
“I compare the impulse.” The words land somewhere deep inside you. You take a moment to catch the breath you seem to have lost since Dream has appeared in your bedroom.
Silence hums between you. Then his eyes lift and catch on something near your ceiling. You follow his gaze. The dream catcher hangs above your bed. Slightly dusty and also slightly crooked, from years of being bumped and never properly adjusted. The threads are uneven, some fraying at their knots. A bead is missing from one strand.
You lean back as heat creeps up your neck. “Oh my God.” Not that too.
“You keep a ward,” he observes it. “You fashioned it yourself.”
“Yeah. Youth group craft night. I was eleven.”
He steps beneath it and the air seems to shudder around him. Then he says: “It is poorly constructed.”
You gape at him. “Wow. Rude.”
His eyes flick down to you. “It is asymmetrical.”
“I was a child.”
“The threads are weakening.”
“I was using safety scissors and blind optimism!”
He raises a pale hand, not touching it yet, fingers hovering near the woven center. The threads stir faintly though no breeze moves.
You instinctively rise from the bed. “Be careful,” you say lightly. “It’s fragile.”
His gaze returns to you. “Do you believe it holds power?” he asks.
It takes you a moment to consider his question. “When I was a kid, I did, I think. They told us bad dreams would get caught in the web. Only the good ones would pass through.”
“And it succeeded?”
You hesitate. “I didn’t have many nightmares,” you admit. “Not the kind that stuck.”
“And you attribute that to this object?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” You shrug, folding your arms loosely. “Or maybe it was childish faith. Maybe believing I was protected was enough to make it true.”
“Belief shapes dreams,” he says quietly. “Dreams shape reality.”
A sudden thought crosses your mind. Your teeth find your lower lip before you go on. “Does it bother you?”
“That you crafted a defence against my realm?” There is an edge in his voice, barely there, but you notice.
“I didn’t know it was your realm back then,” you reply, half exasperated and half flustered. Your fingers fidget with your sleeves absentmindedly, then you continue. “That I tried to shut out your creations.”
A slight arch of his brow. “I am not offended by a child’s talisman.”
“But?”
“Dreams are not so easily barred.”
You step closer to him now, close enough to feel the gravity of him, the faint power in the air that always surrounds him. “And yet,” you say cautiously, “I slept peacefully.”
He reaches up again. You tense instinctively but he does not tear it down. A strange, quiet expression crosses his face, something almost intimate. “This object holds no intrinsic power,” he says.
You huff. “Way to crush eleven-year-old me.”
“But,” he continues, voice lower now, “it has been saturated.”
“With dust?” you tease faintly.
“With you. Every hope you whispered before sleep, every fear you pressed into the silence. Whenever you looked at it and chose to believe you would be safe,” his fingers lightly brush one fraying strand, “you fed it meaning.”
Your throat tightens unexpectedly. “So…it actually worked?”
“In the sense that it brought you the comfort you needed. A child’s defence against the unknown.”
The earnestness in his gaze nearly floors you. So you settle for the familiarity of making a joke out of it. “Huh, who would’ve guessed this old thing isn’t just good for collecting dust but could also be useful for keeping all your terrors at bay.”
Dream doesn’t laugh – of course not. “Fear is not my purpose,” he says. “Nightmares serve their own function.”
“Yeah, well,” you murmur, “they’re not exactly fan favourites. And when you’re small, you don’t think, ‘Ah yes, this is a vital psychological experience curated by an immortal cosmic entity.’ You think, ‘I don’t want the dark thing with too many teeth to come back.’”
He frowns. “They are warnings used in order to guide and shape resilience. They are shadows that teach the shape of light.”
You nearly scoff. “And sometimes they’re just trauma replaying itself at three in the morning. I already do enough of that in the Waking World.”
His expression does not change but something in his posture shifts. Attentiveness, perhaps. “You need not fear them.”
You cross your arms. “Easy for you to say.”
He turns to face you fully now. “Any dream that would push you beyond what you could bear,” he says, voice dropping into a hard tone, “will have to answer to me.”
“You personally regulate my dreams?” you ask, steady despite the way your pulse trips over itself. The revelation burns hot in the cavern of your chest.
“When necessary.”
You stare at him. “You’re serious.”
“I govern my realm.” There is something in his tone now, something protective, though he does not use the word.
You clear your throat and, rather than thinking too hard about the implications, glance up at the old, uneven web. “If it doesn’t really protect me,” you murmur, “should I take it down?”
His gaze follows yours. “No,” he says after a moment.
You blink up at him, surprised. “Why not?”
“It reminds you that you are not powerless in the face of what you fear.”
Powerless. Your mind returns to the nights you were small and certain the dark was alive. You grew older and realised some fears follow you into daylight. You learned to endure them alone.
You hadn’t realised how much you needed to hear something reassuring until now. And before you can second-guess it, you move, drawn by the quiet gravity of him. You step closer still, until the space between you is thin as a breath.
“You appear in my room without knocking,” you breathe. “You look at my ideas in my sleep. You critique my childhood crafts.”
“They are uneven,” he says mildly.
You huff a laugh despite yourself. “You’re impossible.”
“So I have been told.”
You exhale softly, then ask the question you have been too afraid to all evening. “Why did you come here?”
A long pause. He searches your expression as though weighing something vast and delicate at once. “I am curious about you.”
His honesty nearly undoes you. “You’re the Lord of Dreams,” you murmur. “What could I possibly mean to you?”
His gaze drops to your mouth for the briefest second before returning to your eyes. “You could matter.”
The words are quiet, gentle, true. And suddenly you understand. Immortality does not make attachment any easier. The room feels like the moment before a storm breaks. But he does not kiss you. He does not retreat, either. Instead, he lifts his hand and gently straightens the crooked dream catcher in a small, careful motion.
“There,” he says softly.
The threads settle, the dust remains, the imperfections too, but it hangs straighter now.
“When you sleep tonight,” he says, “you will dream.”
You feel your pulse in your ears, but you force yourself not to retreat. “Of you?”
His eyes shine with something dark and ancient. The corner of his lips twitches upwards. “You will see.”
Before you can ruin the moment by fainting or otherwise embarrassing yourself, he vanishes in a whirlwind of sand that tousles your hair and only settles once you are alone in your room again. Your book lies forgotten on the bed. The dream catcher still hangs above you.
You try very hard to fight the grin that sneaks its way onto your face. You fail miserably.