Dreams

"What's up with him?" Rachel asked. She pointed to her friend's brother, Andrew, who was laying asleep on the floor. His face was crunched up, eyes shut so tight it looked painful. Small groans escaped his lips, and his body was was curled into a ball, twitching occasionally. He looked like a pained dog having a nightmare. "He looks like... like he's dying or something."

Angela looked down at her brother and sighed. "He gets like that sometimes," she said. "His dreams... He says they get strange. Realer than real, he says. I can make him stop, but he gets mad at me when I do, and... Well, I don't particularly like doing it either."

Rachel blinked, looking at the sleeping boy. "How can something be realer than real?" she asked. "Doesn't that kind of... defeat the purpose of reality?"

"Yeah, I don't really get what he's talking about. But he stands by it firmly."

"He looks like he must be terrified."

Angela shrugged her shoulders. "He says sometimes he is. But sometimes it's better than the real world. Hard to believe, though. He never looks any different lying there."

Rachel hummed to herself, thinking. "So what do you have to do to wake him up?"

Angela sighed. "Please, let's not go there."

"Oh come on. You're only making me more curious."

Angela groaned and rubbed her face, but thought about it. "Fine," she grunted. "But you asked for it." She walked over to her brother and sat down at his head. "We're... It's complicated.  Our family isn't exactly normal, you know?"

Rachel nodded. "I know. I've seen the way you lose it."

Angela nodded again. "Well, we can all sort of interact with those things." Angela put her hands on her brother's head, steadying it from shaking, which made the rest of his body stop as well. "It all comes from his head. So you have to start there. Keep him calm. Make him find a center."

"Find a center?"

"Look, just... you asked. I can't explain it any better than that. That's what you have to do. Then I kind of have to reach in..."

A bright flash of light came from Andrew's body, and as Rachel got her vision back, she could see that bright images were leaping out of his wide open, empty eyes. Angela sat at his head, her eyes wide, seemingly staring into the distance. Rachel tried to focus on the images coming out of Andrew's eyes, but they moved too fast, too erratically. They seemed to evolve and change faster than she could blink. And yet, as she watched them, she felt that they were trying to tell some kind of story.

But before she could understand what that story was, it all stopped, just as abruptly as it had happened. Angela stood up and dusted herself off, though no dust had accumulated on her. Her eyes took a moment to refocus. "He'll be up in ten minutes," she explained. "I don't want to be here and get yelled at. Can we go?"

Rachel looked at her, trying to take in everything that had just happened. "Yeah..." she said slowly. "Yeah, ok. But you have to tell me more about this crap."

Angela sighed. "Alright."