“So… What’s a ‘dream eater’, exactly?”, I asked. “Are you a figment of my imagination, or like, some kind of magical creature, a spirit, or…?”

“Eh, I’m not quite sure,” she replied without a care. “I’m me!”

“That doesn’t mean much… Do you have a name, something I can call you by besides just ‘dream eater’?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’!?”

“Well, it’s more like, I don’t have a name. That’s why I’m just ‘me’! I kind of gained consciousness for the first time the moment I entered your dream. I may have been given a name at some point by someone, but this ‘me’ came into existence without a name. Before that, I wasn’t… really ‘me’, you know what I’m saying?”

“Not really, no.”

“Cool. So yeah, that about explains it.”

“I said I didn’t understand!!”

She placed her finger on my lips, signalling me to shut up. Her eyes had a serious look to them, for a change. I complied.

“When I came to,” she continued, “there were only two things I knew. One was that I existed solely to eat dreams. That was all I knew, and all I needed to know about myself, about my ‘self’ — the fact that I didn’t have one. No name, no past, no thoughts other than this one, simple goal. And the second thing I knew… was you, Ash.”

“Me?”

“The moment I became conscious, I knew all there was to know about you. Everything you know, I know. It’s a bit hard to explain, but… let’s just say, I have all of your memories.”

My memories… That would explain how she knew about that Star Wars poster earlier.

“Yup, I got that from your memories.”

“I see… Huh?” I paused for a second. “Wait, how did you know what I was thinking!?”

“Huh? Oh yeah, I guess I do that too. I can read your thoughts. Everything that goes through your brain, goes through me too — I’m basically in your brain right now.”

“That’s both impressive and terrifying…”

“Don’t worry, I won’t get upset if you ever have naughty thoughts…”

“I don’t have any!”

“Thoughts like, ‘I could totally eat that severed leg right now’…”

“I think these are your thoughts!!”

“Oh. Maybe. You and I are basically one and the same now, so I sometimes get things mixed up. Anyway, so… Can I eat that leg or not?”

“Why are you asking me!?”

“I don’t know, I just feel that if I keep eating more of her, Mommy’s boy is going to hate me for it…”

“She’s not real, I don’t care!”

There was still a lot I didn’t understand — who or what this “dream eater” really was, where she came from, and why she was so hell-bent on eating my dreams — but things were starting to make a bit more sense, even if just a little.

“So, if I recap, you’re a… thing that somehow found her way into my dream, and wants to eat it. Meanwhile, said dream is somehow trying to… keep me asleep forever?”

“Yup, that’s about it,” she replied while chewing a bite of my mother’s leg. “Pesky dreams, right?”

“Can a dream even do that? Keeping me asleep? I’m a pretty light sleeper, I’m sure my alarm would be enough to wake me up.”

“No, it wouldn’t, not while you’re having this kind of dream. I can’t go into details, but this is a dream you cannot wake up from. Not without some help, that is.”

“And how exactly are you going to help me, eat everything until there’s nothing left of my dream?”, I asked jokingly.

“Hm… Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“Seriously!?”

“Well, obviously it’s more complicated than that. I could eat everything your dream throws at me — your mom, your dad, your aunt, I could eat your entire family if it ever came to that — but that wouldn’t solve the issue. What I need to eat is the core.”

“The core?”

“The starting point of this dream. The one thing this whole illusion is built upon. If I find the dream core, and eat it, the dream will end, and you will wake up.”

“That sounds simple… So how do we find that core?”

Without a word, she lifted her hand and pointed at something behind her back with her thumb. I looked past her and saw my desk and my many notebooks piled on top of it.

“These things you brought from my bedroom?”, I asked, confused. “What about them?”

“I narrowed it down to just these. One will lead us to the core.”

“What do you mean, ‘narrowed it down’?”

“Earlier, I wasn’t just looking for food, you know. I was inspecting every single piece of furniture, every item, every tiny detail. There’s a reason your dream put you in that room, there was something in there that it wanted you to see. Something it knew could keep you under its spell forever. By process of elimination, I was able to narrow it down to these three suspects.”

“Three? Can you even count? There are a lot more than three notebooks on this desk, there are several piles of them!”

“That’s not what I meant… Ah, you’ll figure it out. My point is, the dream core is closely tied to what you see here. It was just an intuition at first, but I’d say the fact your ‘mother’ followed us all down here is proof that I’m on the right track. She didn’t want me to get close to the truth of this dream… And, more importantly, she didn’t want you to get close to it either.”

“The truth of this dream…?”

“I need to fulfil two conditions to find the dream core. Understanding what it is and where it’s hiding is obviously one of them, but the other condition is that you need to be lucid. For the core to appear, you need to be fully aware that this is a dream — and like I said earlier, this isn’t something I can force to happen. You need to realise that on your own.”

“But I’m already lucid, aren’t I? I know I’m in a dream now, so that part should be good?”

“Not exactly. There’s being aware, and being lucid. You can know that you’re in a dream, but still unconsciously be at its mercy. Believe you have control, but in reality still play along with the script. Right now, you may know, or think you know this is a dream, but make no mistake, Ash: you haven’t achieved true lucidity yet. It’s very obvious from where I’m standing. Until you figure out the truth, the whole truth about this dream, it will continue to play out, and you will remain powerless to end it.”

“You’re speaking in vague terms again…”

“I have no other choice! I can try to subtly nudge you towards the truth, but if I’m too direct, I run the risk of your mind shutting down to protect itself, and rejecting that truth. So, until you figure this out by yourself, I’m kinda stuck waiting around. Being hungry. Hm, should I eat that last leg, I wonder…”

Was there something else I was missing? I thought that after listening to all these explanations, and accepting that nothing around me was real, I would have reached a “lucid” state, but that somehow wasn’t enough, according to her. Thinking about it, something did seem a little off, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it yet. What wasn’t I seeing?

“If my dream didn’t want us to have all of these things,” I said as I walked towards the desk, “if the ‘core’ is really hiding among them… Then, do you think looking for that core will help me reaching that ‘truth’ you mentioned?”

“It doesn’t hurt to try!”

I grabbed one of the notebooks and flipped through its pages. It was filled with drawings and notes, drafts of stories I’d imagined throughout the years. Some of them were school notebooks — instead of listening in class, I couldn’t help but doodle a funny character or write down my latest big idea, worried I’d forget about it by the time I got home. This got me a lot of scolding from my parents and teachers alike, but I never stopped doing that. It was just what I liked to do.

“Find anything interesting in there?” the dream eater asked.

“Well, I’m not sure what exactly I’m looking for to begin with. But it’s a nice trip down memory lane. I had forgotten about half of these stories. This one is about this ragtag group of superheroes called the Nightwalkers!”

“Sounds incredible.”

“Or that one about a time traveling secret agent, Max Maelstrom!”

“Ground-breaking idea.”

“Oh man, I had so much fun writing this one! It only has a few chapters, but I really feel like continuing it. It’s a comedy about aliens invading the earth, except they’re terrible at it!”

“Simply unheard of!”

“You know, you don’t have to fake interest like that.”

As I put that last notebook down on the desk, I accidentally tipped over one of the piles with my forearm. The books spilled on the floor, and out of this giant mess I made, I noticed something.

“Ah,” I exclaimed, “that one…!”

I crouched and picked up one of the notebooks. I wasn’t sure how I knew it, as they all looked exactly the same, but that one was special. I flipped through the pages to confirm my guess.

“This is the one from earlier… The one I was drawing in…”

“You were drawing?”

“Yeah, in that room, remember? I was drawing in that notebook when you arrived. ‘Space Justice Warrior: Athena’.”

There, at the centre of the page, was a full portrait of the titular Athena, a beautiful — well, to the extent of what my artistic skills could create — green-haired woman, wearing a golden suit of armour and a red cape, and wielding a large gem-encrusted sword.

“Space Justice what now?”

“Athena! You asked about her, remember?”

“Oh yeah… I think I kinda remember an excited teenage boy telling me her name like she was her crush from middle school or something.”

“I didn’t sound like that…”

“It absolutely did sound like that. So”, she continued after coming to my side, looking at the notebook’s contents over my shoulder, “what’s so special about that imaginary girlfriend of yours?”

“She’s not an imaginary girlfriend! She’s just some character I came up with. She’s based on the Greek goddess of wisdom, but there’s a twist: she and the rest of the Pantheon gods are actually a race of aliens from a distant galaxy! This truth was lost to history, as the gods were all slain during a great war against demons from the underworld, but—”

“Why is she wearing a bikini?” the dream eater interrupted me.

“That… That’s not a bikini!” I yelled in a panic. “It’s a sacred armour built from a special metal from planet Parthenos—”

“It looks exactly like a bikini though.”

“Lots of fantasy stories have armours like that! Don’t think too much about it, it’s just supposed to look cool!”

“Eh, I don’t see it. If anything, it exudes virgin energy.”

“I’m not a virgin!!”

“Then you definitely were one when you drew this. I prefer that design a lot more, actually.”

She pointed at another character on the next page. A sinister woman holding a giant pair of scissors, dressed in a long black dress, with glowing red eyes and a nightmarish, sharp-toothed jaw.

“Her? What do you like so much about that character?”

“Well, she has clothes, for one. But I like her style. Is she also a galactic superhero or whatever?”

“No, she’s just an idea I had for a one-off villain. She’s called Moira, and she’s based on the three Moirai from Greek mythology. You know, the goddesses of destiny, who spun and eventually cut threads representing the life and death of mortals? She’s all three of them, but in one character. Her power is to create a thread, and when she cuts it with her scissors, her opponent dies, just like that.”

“That sounds like an amazing power for just a one-off villain… You should have made her the main antagonist or something.”

“Well, that’s precisely the problem. She was too overpowered, so I just ditched the idea.”

“Aw, that’s a shame. Anyway, I like her. Moira… Moira…”

She kept repeating that name while staring at the notebook. She couldn’t take her eyes off of that drawing. It was just something I had scribbled on a whim, I didn’t think much about that character, and I wasn’t even that happy with her design, but somehow, she seemed fascinated by her.

“Is something wrong?” I asked. “You seem pensive.”

“Nothing. I just like her. The idea of her. She has a nice name.”

“A nice name?”

Then I remembered what she told me earlier. How she had no sense of ‘self’. How she didn’t have a name. This gave me an idea.

“You know,” I told her, “since you seem to like her that much… How about I call you ‘Moira’?”

“Huh?”

“You said you didn’t have a name. Why not ‘Moira’? That way I’d finally have something to call you by.”

“You’re… giving me a name?” she muttered in a confused voice.

“It’s not really ‘giving’ you a name. More like, this name could be yours, if you wanted it to be.”

“You mean I can choose a name, just like that?”

“Well, in your case, it’s that, or having no name forever. And even if you had one before that you can’t remember… Take me, for example, my name is Ashley, but I just prefer to go by ‘Ash’. That’s what all my friends call me now. Even you called me that. So, if you like that name, or any name really, just take it, and I’ll call you that.”

She stared at me with a puzzled look.

“I had no idea you could just do that. Names are such a strange concept…”

“So, what do you say?”

“I like your suggestion, and I do like the sound of ‘Moira’, but there’s just one small problem…”

“What is it?”

“It’s way too long.”

“What do you mean it’s too long, it’s just two syllables!!”

“Well ‘Ashley’ is two syllables, and you still shortened it to ‘Ash’, didn’t you?”

“That… wasn’t the reason why I wanted to change it…”

“I know! I’ll shorten it too. From now on, my name is going to be… Mo!”

“Mo…?”

“Yup, that’s my name!” she exclaimed with the largest of smiles. “The name I chose for myself!”

A strange name for a strange woman. She seemed very happy about it, however, so I didn’t want to rain on her parade. Just like that, Mo became her name.