“It feels so nice having a name!” Mo shouted at the top of her lungs. “I feel so powerful!”

“I didn’t think it would make you this happy.”

“Now that I’m Mo, I can cut your life short with my magic scissors!”

“Just because you took your name from that character doesn’t mean you also took her powers!!”

“Anyway,” she resumed, getting rid of her smile and immediately returning to her usual serious expression, “that ‘Space Hero Whatever Athena’ story sounds really special to you. Why is that?”

Special? All the stories I came up with were special to me — they were my creations after all. But it was true that this particular story did feel more “special” than the rest, in a way. Why was that?

“I don’t know,” I replied, “I just… I feel really inspired by this story. I like the other ones too, of course, but for this one, I have so many ideas… Dozens of books worth of ideas. I think I really have something special here. I want to write this story in full, illustrate it, and then publish it and become a famous author when I grow up!”

Mo listened to my ramblings in silence. I might have imagined it, but for a brief moment I thought I detected a tinge of sadness in her eyes.

“I see…” she eventually said. “Well, let’s try to get you awake so you can get back to actually writing it instead of dreaming of it.”

“Right! So, about this ‘dream core’, how can I get it to appear?”

“Easy, just say ‘dream core’ three times in front of a mirror.”

“Ha ha, very funny.”

“Try it if you don’t believe me. There’s one right here.”

Saying that, she pointed at something behind my back. I turned around to find a standing mirror just a few steps away. A mirror, in the middle of a parking lot?

“What the…?” I muttered, confused.

“Weird, huh? Look familiar? I think you had one like it in that room upstairs.”

I tried to remember if there really was a mirror like that in my room, but my thoughts were interrupted by a loud rumbling noise. The ground started shaking, and the next second, a concrete slab rose out of it behind the mirror.

“What’s going on!?” I yelled in a panic.

“Well, your dream wasn’t going to let us hang around this parking lot forever. I must’ve weakened it during our little fight earlier, but now it seems to have regained its senses and is attacking again.”

More slabs of concrete continued to arise from the ground, gradually forming walls around us.

“My guess,” Mo continued, “is that it’s trying to rebuild the bedroom we were in earlier. That’s where your dream began, and where it wants to keep you — which would make sense for an ‘endless’ dream, right? It would rather keep you in the same spot, in an endless loop. Living the same dream, with the same scenes repeating over and over. What will probably happen next is you’ll gradually lose your recent memories, until you completely forget about the previous loop, and begin the next one without realising you’ve already experienced it. The same kid, drawing the same story in the same bedroom, over and over… Come to think of it, it’s likely you had already experienced that loop a few times before I barged in.”

I stared at her, horrified.

“Is that really what’s going to happen?” I asked.

“Well, that’s just a guess from what I can understand about the situation. But hey, I’m just a dream eater. ‘Dreams’ only make up half of my title, so what do I know?”

The concrete started changing colours, progressively turning into the bedroom’s wallpaper. I didn’t know about the whole ‘loop’ thing, but Mo’s theory about the room rebuilding itself seemed to be right on the money, at least.

“Ah…” she sighed, “to think I went through all the trouble of getting you all down here, only for the room to follow us. If I’d known, I would have stayed upstairs, at least I had a comfy bed to sit on.”

Just as she said that, an exact copy of that bed appeared in front of her.

“Oh, neat, a bed!”

Mo happily sat down on it. As soon as she touched it, the mattress grew spikes and began to stretch and fold onto itself like a bear trap. Mo just barely managed to jump off of it before getting crushed completely by it.

“Wow!” she shouted, “That was close! I can’t believe this was a trap!”

“It was very obviously a trap!! Stop messing around!!”

But as I said that, she lifted her leg up high and brought it crashing down on the bed, breaking it in half. She then turned to me with an angry look.

“How about you stop messing around? Don’t just stand around watching! Do something, Ash!”

“But what can I even do!?”

“You need to find the core, and the truth of this dream! You don’t have time to think too much about it. Since you’re not entirely lucid yet, the dream can still control you and your memories. Once these walls finish closing down on us, it’s over!”

More and more concrete slabs continued to appear around us at an increasing speed, expanding and bending to form a ceiling. Furniture, as well as a rug, started growing out of the ground like vegetation. Mo was right, it was only a matter of seconds before we would be completely surrounded, and find ourselves back in my bedroom.

“I brought you three things,” she continued, “you need to decide here and now, which of these three contains the core? You’ve been looking at them this whole time, go with your instinct!”

Again with the number “three”. The three things she brought from my room. The desk was one. The pile of notebooks could collectively count as a “thing”. Wait, what was the third thing, then? Did I just not see it? Was it hidden among all the books, perhaps? Once again, I couldn’t shake off this feeling that I was missing something. Something crucial. Something at the centre of this mystery, of this supposed “truth” of this dream. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to think about it. With what I knew at that given time, if I had to make a decision there and then, there was only one answer I could think of. One that was already in my hands.

“It’s ‘Space Justice Warrior: Athena’! That’s where the core is, I’m sure of it!”

“Yeah?”

“It’s the story I was working on when the dream began. It’s the one that immediately caught my eye when looking at all these notebooks earlier. It’s the one that feels the most ‘special’ to me. No matter how I look at it, it’s at the centre of this dream! It’s the one thing that stands out the most!!”

“The thing that stands out the most, he says…”

She sighed and took the notebook from my hands.

“You disagree?”

“No, your logic is sound, that story is indeed very important. It may not be where the core is hidden, but I also have the feeling it will get us closer to it. At the very least, it will make for a nice escape route.”

“An escape route?”

The walls and ceiling continued to expand above our heads, covering up the sky and the moon, slowly imprisoning us in darkness.

“How will that help us escape, exactly?” I asked again.

“You’re the writer here, aren’t you? Try to have a bit of imagination.”

Mo flipped through the notebook’s pages and stopped at a drawing of a large planet. Well, an awkward, badly shaped circle that was supposed to be a planet. She held the notebook opened in front of my face.

“What’s this big melon thingy?” she asked.

“It’s a planet!!”

“Oh, so it’s not a melon…” she replied dejectedly.

“Do you only ever think of food!? Anyway, what about this drawing?”

“Let’s go there!”

“Huh!?”

The concrete had nearly finished merging into a complete, unescapable ceiling.

“It’s Athena’s home planet, right?” Mo asked. “You mentioned it, I think… ‘Barfy Nose’…”

“It’s Parthenos!!”

“Whatever! Let’s go there!”

She held the notebook from both sides and started pulling. It began to stretch like it was made of rubber and became twice its original size.

“What’s happening to this book…!?”

“Just one of the fun little things you can do when you’re inside a dream! You’re still only partially lucid, but that’s lucid enough to have some degree of control. And since I’m in your brain, if you have control, I have control too!”

She then placed the enlarged book on the ground. The pages’ surface appeared to change, and became almost like a pool of water, with ripples forming as she let got of it. Instead of my drawing, I began to see something else appearing behind those ripples — a planet. A real planet.

“This is our way out of here,” she claimed with a smile, “our escape route!”

“Wait, are we supposed to… go in there?”

“You’ve got it! You said this story was ‘special’ to you, right? That you had a ton of ideas? Then it’s time you did something with those ideas.”

She then grabbed my hand and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Tell it to me, Ash,” she said with a wide, sharp grin. “Tell me your story, the story of your dreams!”

I stood there in silence, my eyes locked into hers. I could feel myself blushing a little. Then, as the concrete above us finished covering the last ray of moonlight, I snapped out of my dazed state and pulled my hand out of hers.

“Okay, fine!” I shouted, trying to hide my embarrassment. “All I have to do is jump, right?”

“Yup, just think of it as jumping into a swimming pool. Oh, before we go, though…”

She suddenly sprinted away from me. I couldn’t see where she was going due to how dark it was now that the ceiling was nearly complete, save for a small hole at the very centre which was about to close, but she quickly returned. And she wasn’t empty-handed.

“I thought this might be helpful to us over there,” she said, showing me what she brought.

“Really? So you are going to eat it after all, huh?”

I pointed at the last of my mother’s severed limbs, which she was holding in her left hand.

“What? It’s just a little snack in case I get peckish during the trip.”

I didn’t have the strength to argue with her. We were running out of time and had to get out of there.

“Just like a swimming pool, huh?” I repeated.

“Yup! You coming, kid?”

She jumped with her things into the pages of the notebook. I sighed, and just before the room was complete and the whole place fell into darkness, I followed her and dove into my very own story.