Snippet #2690382

Rosemary opened her eyes in the kitchen and immediately knew she was in a dream. Not because she had unexpectedly developed incredible dreamscape skills in her two year absence from them - it was, in fact, very much the opposite - but rather, as she put herself under, her mind was whirling with her worries. Would she be able to do it at all? Would she ruin the whole dream by letting the monsters that lay in her head into it? She couldn't even go home to her bed each night for fear of her nightmares and that deep, dark panic that came every time she slept. So when she opened her eyes in the kitchen, her mind was still full of those questions, enough that it took seconds for her to realise where she was.

She felt an immediate wave of relief to see that James had managed to successfully bring them to his childhood home. Not just because it was a good sign of his capabilities, but because waking up in an amalgamation of someone's intended dreamscape and their latest nightmare is never fun. She returned Ben's look and forced a smile. She was feeling calmer now she was here and there were no monsters hiding under the table.

She had studied people's brain activity while they were under for years and she could feel the heightened activity in her amygdala. Or at least, she could feel it's affects: while the sun poured cheerily through the window, the atmosphere in the dream was buzzing with suppressed emotions. She knew her own anxieties and fears -- about the dreamscape, but the more familiar ones that fuelled her usual dreams -- were only just being held back from permeating the reality of the dream. She watched Ben as he spoke. He looked in control, but she wondered what lay beneath his cool composure. She could feel the buzzing of people's secret thoughts and dreams and tried to focus on what Ben was saying to tune it out. He must have been used to the buzz from his years of experience in dreamscapes, she thought. Even James, from his training in the academy, seemed able to ignore it relatively effectively.

Rosemary watched James grin at receiving free rein. "I almost don't know where to start." But where did one always start when discovering the ability to defy the laws of physics? James closed his eyes for a second to concentrate, but opened them again. He knew that the only way to control a dream was to make it effortless, to not concentrate, but simply know you can do it. He lifted off the ground and levitated above the floor, swimming through the air and ducking under the lampshade. Flying. It was a classic.

"Sorry," he grinned. "But it's got to be done." He lay in the air, wondering where to go next. He spotted a photograph on the wall of the family on the day they moved into this house, when James was just a baby in his mothers arm. They stood smiling with the house sat in the background. James floated over to it. He just had to believe it was already there, and it would be.

He slowly removed the photo from the wall. As he pulled it back, a formation slowly appeared behind it, as if it had been folded into the wall, squashed underneath the photo, and was opening out like a pop-up book. It was a model of his house, made from paper and ink, like the photo. As James kept pulling, paper flowers rose up at its base and tiles appeared on the roof. He could see his mother, a cut-out paper doll, moving inside one of the windows, hoovering the living room. "One of my cousins had a dolls house," James explained. "And when I was little, I was really jealous of it, but Mum refused to buy me one, so I made my own out of paper." Not that his rudimentary dolls house when he was nine had been this intricate, but he was sure that's where the idea had come from.