4.23 – Kali

Zoey’s consciousness expanded, one awareness traded for another. She floated from high above, formless, with pinpricks of light bursting into existence beneath her. Tens of thousands of them, varying colors, linked by spindly, trailing ribbons connecting the points in a spiderweb of dizzying complexity.

It took a second to organize her thoughts. Having a moment ago been chemically knocked unconscious, she had to fight off a fogginess in her brain. It lifted slowly. She found herself floating, without a body, above the sea of lights and interconnecting ribbons.

She tried to make sense of it.

‘Open the consumer’s mind to the dream world’ had been the potion’s description. So this was that, then? The dream world? Were each of those colorful lights a dream? The mass floated too far away to make out in detail. Could she move, somehow?

It came naturally. Her formless body drifted, guided by her intent, descending into the ocean. While from above it had looked like the lights were all at the same elevation, as she approached, she saw that wasn’t true. There was a depth, with some orbs higher and lower, though not by much. The sky, and the space above the mass, however, was empty.

The pinpricks expanded into orbs as she neared. Strangely, the ribbons stayed the same size, despite her descent, not growing with her shifting perspective as they should. It was a disorienting effect.

She did her best to ignore it, growing vaguely nauseous. With the nearest orb nearly on her, she focused on that, instead. The glassy, misty sphere grew until she could make out details.

A scene played out inside the orb’s depths. Fascinated, Zoey finished closing the gap. The image was discernible, though not clear. It seemed to be a stress dream, the unfortunate subject—a middle-aged woman with short brown hair—having an animated, heated conversation with someone important to her.

She could almost hear what they were saying. Zoey pressed a little bit closer, and—

And bumped her head. Not that she had a head, being a formless, floating construct of thought, but that was what it felt like. She’d been rejected from inspecting the orb—the dream?—closer. Or perhaps from entering it.

She wondered why. The orb had a yellow tint to it. Did the colors mean something? Looking around, other lights—some near, some far—had different hues and of varying vibrancies.

Zoey watched the woman’s dream for a few moments, running her fingers—her mind’s fingers?—across the glassy-mist pane, questingly, testing for weaknesses or a way in. But Zoey was barred from this one. Surely not all? It would make this adventure rather anticlimactic.

Considering her class, Zoey had a suspicious how this would work. If there were a category of dreams she were allowed to slip into, what would it be?

Zoey turned away from the yellow-tinted orb. She floated upward, leaving the previous behind, and scanned the ocean in front of her.

Sex dreams. Obviously, those would be the ones Zoey could invade, or had some sort of affinity toward. How did she identify which those were?

Were the colors identification? Describing the type of dream? And maybe the saturation described the intensity?

What color would sex dreams be?

Pink, Zoey settled on, eyes falling onto the nearest. She descended back into the sea of pinpricks and lines, approaching the orb.

Her theory over color categorizations was proved in short order. Inside the vision—foggy, as the previous, but clear enough to see—a blonde woman was being thoroughly handled by three men. Zoey paused, despite having expected something of the sorts, then politely withdrew. Beyond not wanting to join in on that scenario, for obvious reasons, she’d rather find a dream that was more in the ‘beginning’ stages than the ‘well into them’.

Plus, more even than the prospect of getting to play around in strangers’ dreams, she found herself intrigued by the landscape in general. The dreamworld and how it worked. She wanted to explore more before diving in.

The previous orb had been deeply tinted, which would line up with her suspicion that intensity of the hue meant intensity of the dream. Deep pink, to represent the woman’s erotic dream that had been well underway.

Ascending to get a better view, Zoey searched through the ocean of spheres, then, identifying a lighter pink one, pulled close.

Her second guess was right. Or at least not proved wrong, since two points of data couldn’t guarantee anything. But this dream, a softer hue of pink, featured two men trapped in a closet together. Zoey got the impression it was a memory being relived. The dream hadn’t actually taken the turn toward what it was obviously leading to. Zoey assumed once it did, the hue tinting the misty sphere would darken considerably.

Zoey departed quickly, feeling like she was intruding. And, obviously, as the previous, the dream wasn’t territory she wanted to encroach on. Reasonably, the dreamworld didn’t present only dreams suited to Zoey’s preferences, but all dreams. She left the dark-haired man’s burgeoning fantasy to himself.

The intimacy of the previous two fantasies made Zoey uncomfortable. Her initial wonder and excitement was fading now that the novelty was wearing off—if only in a tiny way—and she started to doubt the … well, ethicality behind this. She was effectively spying on people’s inner thoughts and desires. For that matter, diving into someone’s dream and commandeering it—especially in an exciting manner—was questionable, too. The people she partnered with wouldn’t know Zoey was real, that their intimate fantasy was, while a dream, still with another actual person. Her enthusiasm sagged, realizing that.

Though … she wasn’t so troubled with these realizations that she put off exploration entirely. Maybe peeking in on people’s dreams wasn’t strictly ethical, but Zoey wasn’t some saint. At a minimum, she wanted to know more about how the strange landscape worked. The issue of inserting herself into the dreams, she would consider in a second, but as far as the lesser sin of peeking in—well, to assuage her guilt, she promised herself she’d keep their secrets. Not that she’d likely ever see any of these people again.

She explored, learning more about the dream world. It didn’t take long to confirm a few rules. First, the color of the orb was the dream’s classification, the primary emotion ruling it. The three most common were yellow, pink, and black. Stress, lust, and nightmares. Plenty others were present, though in smaller quantities. For example, red for anger. Blue was trickier, but she eventually settled on melancholy. The deeper the shade, the more it moved toward ‘grief’.

The ribbons connecting the dreams were the stranger part. No matter how close or far she drew to them, they didn’t change in size. That said, some were larger than others. Some so faint as to barely be visible, a thin floating strand of spidersilk, and some almost a finger’s width, a taut wire. Those were rarer.

Closer inspection revealed nothing, but Zoey had a theory. It seemed the obvious one. With how the ribbons always led from one orb to another, the ribbons represented links. Relationships. The thin ones, acquaintances, the thicker, family or lovers. She couldn’t prove the theory, floating between some of the endpoints, but it seemed reasonable. Barring proof otherwise, she tentatively accepted it as true.

Then, because she couldn’t hold back her curiosity any longer, she found a candidate dream. As she’d expected, while she couldn’t barge into dreams of different categorizations, the pink ones—lust—Zoey was much closer attuned to. She picked one with a lighter hue, where the action was building, but hadn’t begun.

She didn’t know if she felt comfortable doing anything inside the dream—anything exciting—but she still wanted to experiment with the capability.

The dream she picked was a promising one. The young, black-haired woman was out in public, seated on a park bench. With her hand on the orb, and focusing, Zoey found she could peer in and intuit the woman’s thoughts and the developing scenario. Kali—and that was her name—fidgeted in place, glancing nervously around at the other park-goers.

Little by little, even, Zoey started to feel the woman’s thoughts.

She shouldn’t be doing this. She had a book propped up on her lap, half-way blocking the view, so she ought to be kind of safe. But then again … not really. It was a terribly flimsy defense, and that was the point. Her other hand, the one not holding the book, slid across her inner thigh, thumb brushing against herself. She shivered in excitement.

In public. She shouldn’t.

She popped opened her pants button, breath coming faster. She looked around frantically. No one was paying attention, but still. Out in public. At the park. Really? She was doing this?

Her hand slid down her stomach, into her pants. She rubbed over her panties, massaging herself, heart slamming faster and faster. She felt the pounding in her ears. How had she gotten so insanely wet, so fast?

As long as she was careful, she’d be fine. Right?

Zoey pulled out of the woman’s thoughts, then shook her head in disorientation.

Could she enter the dream entirely?

Slowly, Zoey’s outstretched hand sank into the glass. A moment later, she was falling, diving into Kali’s fantasy.