I do not Own Naruto. This fic is heavily inspired by LinzRW's The Skipper. Read it. It's boss. Also, tw for dysphoria and trouble finding reality. Also, linear is not how I would describe this fic.

Reality, she knows, is entirely subjective.

Oh, people might argue that, sure, but the fact is that they have to argue it at all. There is a niggling suspicion in the back of their heads, a question that they find is incredibly hard to answer.

What is real?

Lien thinks about that question a lot, and her best guess is that reality is ultimately what the most amount of people in a certain place or time agree upon as being real. There are limits, of course, because at one point many people believed the world to be flat, and that didn't make it so. Thing is, to them, it was. Their conviction was so steady and unrelenting that the world was flat, and that was a fact, even when it wasn't really flat or factual at all.

So reality is a matter of perspective, or at least, collective perspective. There are things that most people can agree upon being very, very real, and some that most will throw away as not real at all.

Unfortunately, as with all matters of perspective, it shifts a little bit from person to person, and it's limited by what humans can conceive. Everybody might agree that the light exists, but because of the way human bodies work, they might not all perceive it exactly the same shade, and because it's beyond human comprehension, nobody's really sure what lightspeed really is other than a concept.

It's all really complicated, and also a matter perspective and comprehensive capabilities.

Anyway, the reason she's going on about this is because she wants to establish the fact that reality is somewhat of a fluid concept, and it changes. It's always changing, and the fact that she can't really grasp what reality is remains a huge problem for her. How is she supposed to succeed like this? How is she supposed to set a goal for herself when goals are such abstract concepts in the first place? What is a goal anyway?

Obviously she knows what a goal is, but to set one you have to have all sorts of others things first. Ambition, for one, and focus for another. Drive is probably important.

All these inward, esoteric concepts that she gets, but when it comes to outward manifestation, she struggles with. How the heck is she gonna go and fulfill a set objective? What is it? What are the qualifications for fulfillment? How does it pertain to her interests or desires? Does it have to manifest in the physical to be achieved, and does it have to be perceived by others to be considered manifested?

It's enough to drive her nuts, and really, she has lost all hope that she isn't nuts at this point. It's far too late for that. She wishes it wasn't, and maybe that's her goal. To reverse the sequence of events she is almost one hundred percent sure are to blame for this.

Then again, if they were reversed, would that be fulfillment, or non-existence? Does that count as a completed goal? Is it set if it's just a vague metaphysical thought form?

Aiyaaah! She doesn't know!

Maybe if she follows it in a linear format it will help.

Lien, she dreams. She has dreamed for as long as she can remember, and the places she goes when she dreams are as real to her as the world she knows when she wakes. Most of the time, separating them is fairly simple, because in one, she wakes up in her bed and goes about her life in the pre-described way that seems fairly constant to the inhabitants of this realm. She is a child, she is an adolescent, she is a teenager, and she is adult. Things flow forward, never back, and there are always ways to explain what is happening.

Her social circle is small, but it is stable. She has friends, co-workers, and a family of a sort, and they help keep her focused and oriented. Some, later, will become more ingrained in the madness then perhaps they ever wish, but they remain solid, in so much as anything ever remains the same. She has school, then later, work, and she functions as best she can in these environments.

Her body takes a shape and it holds it for long periods of time in this waking world. It does not fluctuate in size or form, and it is a constant thing. She inhabits her limbs well, and they move to her command, instead of the otherway around. She does not feel entirely to uncomfortable about her shape, is ambivalent towards her given form, as it works well and suits its purpose.

This world she dubs 'waking' or 'real', because it seems to make the most sense. It doesn't always make sense, but regardless of how ignorant she is on some some subjects, people assure her that there is always an explanation to be found.

The other world, it is not that way.

When she falls asleep inside the waking world, Lien comes to exist inside another realm. In this world, nothing is given, and everything is always changing in ways that do not make sense.

Time has no meaning, because when she learns the story of this place, she learns that she lives it both forward and back, jumping in and out of the pool that seems to make up the founding basis here.

The people of this world that come to know her assure her that she isn't always part of it, that she comes to them both in dreams and their reality, jumping the borders of real-and-not so hard as to make them question their own sanity. Her social circle here is entirely random and makes no sense, and she drifts in and out of established hierarchies like a piece of dust inside a ray of sunlight. She is both tangible and not, a thoughtform given physicality at times, and nothing in others.

Her body there (Here? Somewhere?) is a great cause of distress, because it is always shifting. Sometimes she is three again, sometimes sixty. Sometimes she is not even human at all, but a curious animal given sleek wings or smooth scales to move with, and though she lacks lips and a proper tongue, she is often given a voice as well. She morphs periodically, as free and ephemeral as the wind, and nothing really stays the same.

Not all things inside the dream make sense. Some things just are, regardless of what she seems to desire or want, and there isn't an explanation for them. It just is, as it will always be.

Lien would go so far as to say that some things inside the dream go out of their way to be nonsensical, most likely in an attempt to warp her or bend her to their needs.

It never works well. She doesn't hold a shape in that world as well as she does in the waking one.

She can't pinpoint when, exactly, she lost her sense of reality though. It's hard to say, exactly, where she lost track of 'waking' and 'dreaming'. Perhaps it is when she met the boy who grew trees to shelter himself from the dark, or the child with snakes eyes and a hole in his heart.

Thinking about it, maybe she gave her sense a reality to the girl with eyes like aquamarines and a smile like secrets, or perhaps she gifted it to the man with a soul full of hate and confusion. Maybe it got lost somewhere in between her cousins joining her, or the figures from her dreams slipping over into her reality.

When she described it to her mother, the woman had laughed and pinched her cheek.

"You dream to of Shambhala, the pure land," she teased. "Safety and peace, with no sense of self or time. When you dream, you are not one, but all. You become the dao."

Lien doesn't get it. She's not sure if she ever will.

She keeps dreaming.

AN: So. Blame Enbi. IDK What I'm doing here or where this is going. I have no beta, no outline, and just sorta a vague plot. Kinda thinking about turning this into OC someday, but for now, it's fic. We will have many, many characters, and tons of nonsense.