I was at a complete loss for words. I knew it couldn’t have been my real mother, but seeing such a familiar face acting and speaking like this, full of rage, felt surreal. More importantly, she seemed to know who my mysterious visitor was. Calling her an intruder — well, to be fair, she did intrude into my bedroom, but somehow this word seemed to hold another meaning I couldn’t quite grasp yet.

I turned to her to check her reaction, only to find her with a blank expression, silently watching the scene. She seemed completely unimpressed. Or maybe…

“Uh, Ash,” she eventually said, turning to me, “I think she’s talking to you?”

“Are you dense!? She was obviously talking to you!!”

“Oh. Sorry ma’am, I wasn’t listening, could you repeat?”

“How can you be so calm about this!?”

My “mother” stepped down from the car’s carcass and starting walking towards us; the “intruder” didn’t move, but I instinctively took a step back. The closer she got to us, the less she looked like my mother. She slowly grew in size and her muscles began to swell. Her hair grew longer, her teeth became sharper, and her fingernails morphed into sharp claws.

“Who are you?” grumbled that creature after a few steps, now completely unrecognisable. “What are you?”

“Me?” my companion asked back. “Ah, that’s a bit complicated. Let’s see… You could say I’m your son’s… life partner?”

“My what!?” I yelled.

“We’ll be pretty much inseparable from now on. Oh, I guess I should call you ‘Mom’?”

The creature did not answer. Instead, she leapt towards my self-proclaimed “life partner”, and without leaving her the time to react, she grabbed her by the neck and lifted her off the ground.

“Oh my, looks like we have a Mama Bear.”

“What did you come here to do?”

“Hey Ash,” the woman giggled in my direction, ignoring the creature’s question. “I think your ‘Mom’ is about to kill me! Might choke me to death, or twist my neck and break my spine. Wanna, I don’t know, do something about it, maybe?”

“Wh… What am I supposed to do!? Have you seen how gigantic she is!?”

“Eh, I’m sure you could kick her ass. You’re a big boy.”

“No way!!”

“Oh well, I tried”, she sighed. “Once again, you overthink, and end up not doing anything…”

“Answer me!”, the creature roared, tightening her grip around her prey’s neck. “What did you come here to do?”

“What I came here to do?”

The woman chuckled.

“I just came here to eat! Actually, it was my understanding that you were serving dinner soon? You should get to that, don’t mind me. Your son is literally starving right now, you know!”

“Like I said, you’re the only one who’s hungry here!!” I yelled at her.

“Anyway,” she continued, ignoring me, “thank you for getting so close. You’re saving me some time.”

She let out a laugh, and showed a large grin. For the first time, I noticed how sharp her teeth were. Almost sharper than the monster in front of her, in fact.

“What are you—”

The creature did not have time to finish its question. It turned out “Mom” wasn’t the only one capable of growing and changing shape in an instant. Out of nowhere, the woman’s neck extended, and her head grew several times its original size. Her jaw opened wide, and closed the next second on her assailant, cleanly biting off the upper half of its body. All that was now left was a pair of legs and a single arm, which all fell limply to the ground.

“Mooooom!!!”

“Oh, great,” sighed the woman, whose head had returned to its normal size, as if nothing had happened. “Now the kid is going to cry for Mommy.”

I couldn’t believe what I just saw. Or more like, I couldn’t process what I just saw.

“What the fuck just happened!?” I shouted.

“Hey, language! Just because your Mom got eaten doesn’t mean you can fucking swear like that.”

“But you just swore yourself— No, more importantly… Did you just eat her!?”

“Well, I kinda had to do something,” she replied nonchalantly, while picking out a bit of flesh stuck between her teeth with her fingernail. “After all, someone must have imagined that door opening and let her follow us down there…”

“Like I said, you kept repeating it!”

I gave up arguing with her, knowing that this conversation was going nowhere, and that she wouldn’t answer my questions anyway. I stared silently at the severed limbs on the asphalt. I knew that thing wasn’t my mother, but it didn’t make the scene I witnessed any less disturbing. No, not just that scene — everything up to that point. A poster that wasn’t mine, a bedroom that wasn’t mine, a mother that wasn’t mine. A door that couldn’t open until I decided so. A fall that should have been deadly, but wasn’t. Gravity slowing down. And the strangest of all — this “intruder”, this woman whose arrival coincided with everything getting turned on its head.

“Aw, looks like the kid is angry at me now…” she thought out loud. “Is it because I ate his Mommy dearest, maybe? I only ate half of her, I made sure to leave a few pieces, it’s not that big of a deal…”

This woman who was now crouched down, prodding the lifeless arm on the ground, drooling and looking at it like a child about to get dessert. She clearly knew what was going on, but she wouldn’t explain anything to me.

None of this made any sense. None of this felt—

“Oh?” she exclaimed in delight as her eyes lit up. “Sounds like you’re about to figure something out! What were you about to say?”

“It’s just…” I replied. “Everything that’s happened until now… None of it feels real…”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh!”

She nodded with a large smile. For some reason, she seemed excited about what I was about to say.

“This room… This parking lot… Everything…”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh!”

She sounded more and more insistent. I didn’t have time for her games, however.

“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on, once and for all?”

“No way! I can’t just ‘tell you’! You have to figure it out by yourself. These are the rules!”

“The… rules?”

As always, she was being cryptic, and none of what she said made sense. Although, I did have some idea of where this was going.

“Am I… Am I dreaming?”

She stared silently at me with a disappointed expression on her face.

“Ah,” she replied dejectedly. “Wrong guess. This is a virtual simulation.”

“Huh!?”

“Just kidding! You were right, Ash, this is a dream!!”

She grabbed the torn arm, stood up, and started waving it at me. I couldn’t help but take a step back in disgust.

“I was worried, you know,” she continued. “I thought it’d take you a lot longer to come to this realisation. We’re off to a good start!”

“So this really is a dream? Why didn’t you say so from the start?”

“I couldn’t! Like I said, I had to follow some rules… You had to come to this realisation by yourself. I could have tried to tell you sooner, but you wouldn’t have accepted it easily. There was a risk of you outright rejecting the idea, making things even harder for me. Your dream could also have become much more unstable, and your subconscious much more aggressive — I was lucky to only have to deal with ‘Mommy’ just now.”

“Wait, so that ‘mother’, she was actually…”

“I guess you could call her a ‘defense mechanism’. Something your subconscious conjured up to stop me — an ‘intruder’, as she said herself.”

“To stop you…” I repeated, not fully understanding her explanations. “But, to stop you from what?”

“From waking you up, what else!” she proudly announced, while patting my head with the severed arm. “Right now, this dream wants to keep you asleep. It wants to keep you all to itself. That’s why I came here. To save you from its evil clutches.”

“To save me…? But I don’t really feel in danger. I mean, this is a dream, after all. It can’t harm me, right?”

“Well…” she replied, taking a pensive pose, her chin resting on my dead fake-mother’s hand. “It is true that, strictly speaking, you can’t get hurt while in your own dream. That’s why you survived that fall earlier, or why Mama Bear never attacked you. You were never in danger in this dream. However, that doesn’t mean that dreams can’t hurt you in other ways.”

“In other ways? What other ways?”

“Ah, sorry, Ash. That one’s a spoiler. You’ll have to figure it out by yourself.”

Great, more unanswered questions.

“Look,” I said with a sigh, “I get it, there are things you can’t tell me. But can you at least answer a simple question? Just who, or what are you?”

“Eh… That’s a bit complicated. I’m not even quite sure myself, if I’m being completely honest. But I can try explaining. Let’s just say that dreams and I, we’re kind of… natural enemies, I guess you could say? I hate them, and they hate me.”

“Why do you hate dreams?”

“I’m not quite sure. It’s kind of like an instinct. An urge. A primary desire to…”

She smiled, once again showing me her sharp fangs. She then opened her mouth wide, and shoved the entire arm down her throat, swallowing it whole.

“… eat them.”

A chill went down my spine.

“I eat dreams!” she repeated, proud of herself. “That’s just what I do! I get inside the heads of people like you, and save them from those pesky, evil little dreams by eating them. It’s as simple as that.”

“You eat dreams…”

“So, I guess, if I had to answer your question with a simple term, what I am is…”

“A dream eate—”

“An oneirophage. Wait, what were you going to say?”

“A dream eater?”

“Yeah, no, your idea sounds way better. I am a dream eater.”