When I sleep, I have nightmares. This is the reason I don't sleep, or at least I like to delude myself it is the reason. I actually like the nightmares. They're interesting, exciting, almost escapism. Usually in my nightmares I am trying to prevent something bad from happening, like a sentient train devouring my family, or kudzu creeping down the throats of the entire school. I'm a lucid dreamer - I always have been, and have no way of turning it off - but this doesn't mean I'll save the day. Most of the time I just sit and watch, strapped to the ground by terror. I move my hands to try and push Ginny off from on top of me, or to choke her so she can't say anything, and my hands move in real life, waking me up. So I sit and let the vines consume me, or let my family die, or watch the world burst into polluted flame. And I feel a sense of grim satisfaction. This is what I deserve, this is what you deserve, this is what you all deserve. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

My dreaming emotions are far more severe than any real life ones I pitifully fail to muster. Real life fear is a passing knot in my stomach, but dream fear is an entire world of horror, subsuming every atom of my being and replacing it with a supercharged essence of nightmare. Likewise, dream happiness, though fleetingly rare and usually only achieved in perversion or bloody revenge, is an all-consuming and awe-inspiring ocean of joy which I can float in for a few fleeting moments before my eyes burst open with tears.

That was far too personal, and I am considering editing it out. But you must understand how this dream - which I will call the first "vivid dream" - was different. The emotions were the same, in that they were boundless and all-consuming, but they were not mine, they were not about me. I was watching someone else. A disembodied third-person perspective, but I still was that person, living this dream that had nothing to do with me.

I mean it very literally when I say that, in that dream, I was not myself. I was a girl - no, a woman, albeit only sixteen years of age physically - with skin between my fingers and my elbow and my shoulder, forming a kind of wing, and large bat ears, and a crested, wrinkled nose, for some vestigial imitation of echolocation. My name, insofar that I can have a name or be an "I," was Tsul, Princess Tsulluts of the Realm of Dark. I knew this instinctively. I also knew instinctively that I was dead, and that I was very angry about it.

I do not know whether to use first or third person when writing about my dreams. For now, I shall use first person, just so you understand how completely our personalities and memories and feelings and essences meshed together. There was absolutely no sense of my own self. I will simply serve as the Narrator to her own thoughts.

So. I, Tsulluts, was dead. I was angry about it. I was not going to be dead for long. I was clinging to the roof of the cavern, my fingers growing weary and white from the tremendous pressure I was putting into them to keep myself anchored in place. The cavern was filling, steadily, with my own black, threadlike blood, flowing out of the open wounds on my wrists, ankles, chest, and tongue. There was no end to it. I would have as much blood as I needed, which, in this case, meant enough to completely fill the cavern and drown me in.

Fortunately, I couldn't drown, due to being dead. This annoyed me greatly.

My iron grip caused my fingers to crack, but no blood came out. All my blood was occupied elsewhere. And I could feel it, feel her - Tsulluts's, mine - exhaustion. Everything of her was leaking out of her. I was beyond tired. Sleeping, I should not have felt tired, but everything felt so impossibly heavy. My soul was weak and pale, my life essence streaming out in unceasing, undulating rivers. It was black, black as night, and flowed like fabric rather than a liquid. It could be pulled taut if necessary, but right now the goal was to fill the space as much as possible. The greater the concentration of my blood in this place, the more likely I was to lose myself and slip somewhere else. Or into someone else.

I saw me. Or she saw the Narrator. Or whatever. A like mind, perhaps?

I didn't need to talk to communicate, but I liked to. It made my targets feel more at ease, if there was another barrier in communication, if they had to hear the sounds rather than have the thoughts trickle into their brains as memories. "Zel-tsil-li-zin-vin-niv-niz-il-lits-lez is looking for me." I said, using the formal name for someone I despised. He hated this name, especially the palindromic version endemic to my people, especially the mispronounced version endemic to my people, so I used it. He preferred nicknames, and called me Stain for that reason, which I never liked. What kind of tool named themself? No, coward, your name is Zyeltsyillizyinvyin! At least do me the honor of living up it!

The person I was talking to - me - was not in the room, except that I was. It was a little hard to wrap my head around. Or her head. Whatever.

Actually, she found it quite easy to wrap her head around, and it was only difficult whenever I tried to think of myself as someone other than her. It was easy enough when I stopped trying. If there were enough of my own consciousness left after I stopped trying, I probably would have found the feeling pleasant, to not be stuck in my own head, in my own sleeping body.

So I gave a completely unnecessary explanation to myself, mostly for the purpose of my inhabitant's future memory, and partly because it was nice to hear words after all this time stuck and suffering and stewing in silence. Not to be cliche, but it's deafening, the silence of the dead. I said: "I thought I could kill him, so I kept coming back and trying, but it hasn't worked. He's a one-man army. I think... I think for now I just want to run."

I let the grip in my fingers relax, and I was held aloft with just my feet, long toes also white-knuckling into the jagged stone of the cavern wall buried deep within the afterworld. Or maybe near the surface. Who could say?

"One day, I'll come back and I'll kill him, and I'll free Vuccuv, but for now, I just need time to relax. Sorry that it has to be through you, but you know what, you'll get over it. Let me explain, poorly and quickly.

"A philosopher dreams he is a butterfly. But maybe he is a butterfly dreaming he is a philosopher. A similar principle applies. To have my blood "be" darkness means to be able to slip into the background radiation of the universe, obliterating the boundaries between anything. It is impossible to become nothing, as there is no "nothing" to become. As soon as you are nothing, you're no longer nothing, because you're you, and therefore something. There is no "nothing." Everything that is is and everything that isn't, well, wasn't anything to begin with.

"I can think of it this way: the power given to me by my blood fails to let me be nothing, and sidesteps and backtracks, pushing me somewhere else. But that would be misleading. I won't explain in full gory detail right now, because I only have so much time where I am lucid. Just know (a command directed at myself) that there is no fundamental difference between any two things. Everything is a part of the universe, so everything makes up everything, and is everything. There is no nothing, so to no longer be a particular something means only the dissolution of the self, an identity separate from the rest of "everything." I have slipped into another part of "everything," slipped into you, wearing your dream, or rather, becoming your dream. It's all very simple once you understand it, which you probably don't."

I chuckled, looking down at the sea of blood beneath me. I watched the blood drift off my tongue and join, in a lazy circular motion, with the tide below it. It was beautiful in a way, the motion of that liquid, like a ripple across fabric, like threads coalescing into a whole image. But I was far too tired to enjoy it.

"You live very far away from Zel-tsil-li-zin-vin-niv-niz-il-lits-lez. Farther than he can know, in a place he can never imagine, somewhere outside the six realms. There are many such places of course, but yours is special because this is where I hid Heddeh..."

Images of Heddeh sprang to my mind, unprompted, carrying with them a bitter and bone-shatteringly strong grief. My older brother. I had last seen him, what was it now, how long had it been, how long can anything be said to have been when time is meaningless and the days and years and centuries seamlessly merge together? For the living, those who haven't tasted hell or eternity, it hadn't even been a year. How could that be? That was the last time I saw him? Less than a year ago? I sighed.

I missed him. The last time I was able to have a conversation with him was my tenth birthday, the day it all went to hell. Literally.

"He's two years older than me, though it is impossible to know what that means in these circumstances. His ears were shorn and his tongue was cut. I was killed before he was maimed of course, being the first priority for the invaders from the Realm of Fire, but I was able to visit him, through my blood, as I slowly mastered the power it gave me. I've been him plenty of times, but only a few times in the long chain of my life have I actually been able to interact with him. He was funny, when he could still talk, but the last time I saw him, he looked so dead and vacant. He gave up, faced with our enemies' cruel fascimile of hospitality. Five years he'd been their puppet. Fucking hell.

"I hid him somewhere safe. On your planet. Near where you are. I'm going to become you, and I'm going to go visit him. He's doing better, but... I think it would do him good to see my face. And I can translate for him, speak for him when necessary and interpret for him when necessary. 

"I'll try and show him to you. I wonder if you would like him. Probably not. You don't seem like you like anybody very much, which I understand, but..."

I trailed off, wondering what could follow that. I was so tired. My few tastes of being alive, all the glimpses of the sun I've accumulated over the years, have all been short, violent affairs. I would sneak into Fire's castle or their prisoner ward or something, to try and do as much damage as possible, to try and kill Zel-tsil-li-zin-vin-niv-niz-il-lits-lez, to try and free my brothers.

"I miss him." I say, slowly, trying not to let the weariness slacken my grip. "I miss a lot of things. I don't want to think of this as a vacation - that would be a betrayal of my identity - but..."

Again, there was nothing to follow the "but." I wondered if that was a habit living people might develop, but they probably weren't as mired in their thoughts as I was, so trapped in their own loneliness even as they toyed with every inhabitant of the grand web of creation.

Instead of completing my thought, I woke up, and was entirely different person, the person who I'd originally been, who I now resented for the simple and unforgivable act of being someone other than Tsulluts. I had been a girl, a woman. It felt nice and good and freeing and a bunch of other words I was too flustered to let pass through my head. She - Tsulluts - didn't have these pathetic little struggles like an evil younger brother and an evil best friend who might be in love. These problems were powerful and big, and just real in a way my small life wasn't. I could feel her emotions as giant waves, as real emotions. And now, awake, I was left with only a dumb and muted longing. It didn't feel real. I didn't feel real. I felt like a butterfly dreaming of being a philosopher.

I bolted upright and threw off the covers and stood in a hurry, which caused my legs to buckle under me from standing up too fast, but I pulled myself up using my bed. My breaths were deep and ragged. I rushed over, as soon as I could, to the bathroom, to look in the mirror, to force myself to confront the reality that I was still me and not Tsulluts.

I saw my face in the mirror. I will not describe my appearance, and I do not want anyone to be able to know my appearance. Kindler says it would make the story make more sense if I did, but I don't care. It's just too personal. Rape dreams about Ginny are fine to divulge, when push comes to shove, but not this. This is my greatest secret. I saw my greatest secret in the mirror, that awful unacceptable reality that I still existed, that my entire being wasn't yet subsumed by Tsulluts, that I didn't see her in the mirror.

I wanted to cry or yell or something, but the emotions were just not strong enough. I no longer had dream emotions and was instead stuck with the dull waking ones. I was passively aware that I wanted to feel anger and sadness and loss, even though those were all supposedly negative, but nothing came. I stared at my own face for far too long. In the dark.

And then I turned the light on, in the feeble hope that light would draw out Tsulluts's features, that maybe the darkness has obscured my vision (pun intended). But no, I was still me, or the me that I was previously. For the rest of the night I wrote. Fanciful stories about things I could not have. Fiction.