Watson Baker suggested I do something with dreams. So here's some philosophical sibling fluff for you. :3

Dreaming

August 10, 2012

There was a knock on the door.

Jazz made some sort of non-committal noise, recognizing that someone was indeed at the door, but not having enough interest in whatever the useless ghost-related interruption probably was to see what it was.

But then there was a second knock.

She raised herself on one elbow and looked at the door. "Who is it?" she asked in a tone that she hoped would scare her dad away if he was holding another one of his crazy inventions.

"Uh… it's Danny."

"Oh!" Jazz was surprised. She swung her legs out over the edge of her bed and sat up, straightening her books and her hair. "What is it?"

"Can…" there was a pause. A shuffling of feet. "Can I come in?"

Jazz reflected for a moment. She was in the middle of a really compelling passage on the way in which the subconscious twisted everyday realities in the subjects at the Princeton Study. It was fascinating reading. And her project was due in three weeks and she'd barely made it through Amity Park Library's psychology section. She really shouldn't be disrupted in this delicate stage of research.

Then again… Danny had been acting rather strange lately. More distant.

She was sure that part of it was her parents' craziness over ghosts now that the portal was supposedly working. Not like she'd actually seen a ghost yet. That was probably half of the problem.

Her little brother was growing up in an environment that was completely detrimental to his developing and impressionable mind.

Perhaps she should be taking charge of the situation more than she had been. Driving him to school once in a blue moon wasn't really doing much to make him feel normal in what had to be the most abnormal family ever.

So she closed her book cover and called out, "Come on in!"

The door opened slowly and Danny shuffled in. Abashed. Almost apologetic. Definitely embarrassed.

He never used to be embarrassed around her.

Jazz motioned for him to come in and he did, closing the door behind him and standing awkwardly beside her desk.

She waited for him to speak but after a minute or two of him fiddling with his hands and various papers on her desk, she realized that it would be up to her to break the silence.

"What is it, Danny?" she began quietly, hoping not to scare him off. "Is there something wrong?"

"No!" he said a little too quickly, jerking his head up to meet her eyes for a brief moment before returning them to his hands. "No," he repeated, this time a little more slowly. "I just… was…" he broke off again. "You're doing a project on the subconscious, right?"

Jazz was impressed he had bothered to find out. Or remember, might be more appropriate, since she had been discussing it over breakfast for a while now. She just didn't think he'd been listening.

"Yes, I am."

"And the subconscious, that's like… dreams, right?"

"Yes…" she said slowly. "A lot of what the mind takes in and thinks about subconsciously is manifested in strangely uninhibited forms in our dreams. That's a bit of an odd question, though. Why do you ask?"

"No reason really. I just wondered how your project was coming along."

"Fine…" She bit her lip and stared at her younger brother thoughtfully.

"You have all of the material you need to write up whatever it is you're doing?" he continued.

"Well…" Jazz eyed the book lying next to her on the bed. The last one from the local library. Soon she would have to pick up the pile she had waiting on interlibrary loan. "There's always more to learn, right?"

"Yeah," Danny chuckled as he looked at the pile of textbooks already threatening to bury her desk. "And you're the queen of overkill."

Jazz decided to ignore that last stab in favor of discovering why her little brother had come in here. It was a puzzle that had suddenly become even more interesting than her psychology project. "Perhaps I am," she acquiesced as she too saw the multitude of books littering her room. "But having you interested in my stuff is new. What's going on?"

"Well, I'm not really interested in your… psycho-science analyzing stuff really. It's just that… well, I had this weird dream last night and it just… and I thought that it might be useful for you if you still needed material…" he let the sentence drop off, not sure of himself, of his offer, of why he offered.

Jazz wasn't sure of the answer to those questions either, but the one thing that she did know for sure was that she was not about to alienate her brother when he had made an offer so outside of his comfort zone. It sounded like the dream had rattled him. So much that he was voluntarily coming to her. For comfort, under the guise of wanting to help her. If nothing else, even if she couldn't use his dream for her theory, it would probably be good for him to be able to talk about it, talk through whatever it was that had made him so uneasy.

"I would love to hear it, Danny. To be quite honest, I've gotten a lot of information out of these books, but it hasn't come together to form an idea or thesis or purpose yet. Maybe it's all too distant because I haven't completed a course on qualitative subconscious psychoanalysis yet, but maybe if I heard a real dream from someone I know so well, it will make things click for me. That's a pretty brilliant idea there, little bro."

"Uh, it is…?" Danny looked a little lost for a moment. Then skeptical.

Maybe she had overdone it just a tad.

She scrambled to fix it, "Yeah, it is. So come on in, take a seat." She patted the bed beside her, but Danny moved a pile of books off of her swivel chair and sat in it instead. She tried not to look disappointed.

"So… what was your dream about?"

Danny scuffed his shoes along the wheels on the bottom of the chair and didn't respond for a moment. Just when Jazz was about to prompt him again, he said, "It wasn't so much a dream that I remember."

Jazz was confused. What was there to remember about a dream other than the dream?

He saw her confusion and clarified. "I mean, it wasn't one dream in particular that I remember. You know how you can have a couple dreams in a row?"

She nodded. "Everyone has lots of dreams every night. Sometimes we remember one when we wake, sometimes two or three, although that is a bit rarer, and even when we don't remember any of our dreams, we've had a bunch."

"Right. I think you've said that before. Anyway, I know that I had a bunch of dreams in a row. I don't really remember what I was doing in any of them. Or where I was. Or who I was with. But it must have been six or seven right after one another. At any rate, it was a lot of them."

"Okay, I think we've established that you had a bunch of dreams last night."

"Right. I gotcha, moving on. Umm… have you ever heard of things carrying over from one dream to another?"

"What sorts of things?"

"Um, like people that you're with or clothes that you're wearing or something? I don't know, but something that you are conscious of being the same in more than one dream?"

"I haven't personally had that happen to me. And I don't recall coming across it yet in any of my texts, but then again, I wasn't looking for it. I'm sure that it happens to plenty of people, even if not many people remember."

"Okay…" Danny nodded slowly, processing the information while looking at the rug. "Because that's what happened to me. I mean, that's what I remember. There was something that was the same in every single dream I remember from last night. All of them."

Jazz tilted her head to the side. She hadn't heard of this happening. Who knows, perhaps this dream actually would help her out for this project.

"So," she prompted, "what was the common denominator in each of your dreams?"

Danny took a deep breath, looked at her, and then looked back down at his shoes. His mouth worked a couple times before Jazz offered another avenue of questioning. "Did it start in the dream, or did you begin the first one with whatever it was?"

He shook his head, forcing raven locks to drape over his face. When he finally brushed them back, Jazz was able to see the dark circles prominent under his eyes.

"No, it happened in the first dream. Pretty early on, I think. And it didn't have to do with anything else in the dream. I mean, no one was after me or anything. Either before or after it happened."

"After what happened?" she asked when he fell silent.

"See, this guy, I don't know who he was, just some random person, shows up and attacks me with a knife."

"He what?"

"He stabbed me in the stomach. On the right side, right above where my appendix would be, I guess."

Jazz gaped.

"So he stabbed me," Danny said again, as much to tell himself as to tell his sister. As if he still didn't believe it had happened. "It wasn't gory; there wasn't any blood. But it hurt. I mean, it really hurt. A lot. So badly. And…" here he looked up. "That's another thing I wanted to ask about. Because I didn't think you were supposed to be able to feel pain in dreams. You know, I thought that when you pinched yourself, you woke up. So if I got stabbed, shouldn't I have hit the roof or something?" He tried to chuckle, but stopped pretty quickly when he saw that her face hadn't changed from its shocked state.

He cleared his throat. "I knew that you can feel emotions in dreams, like being scared of the boy who controls the narwhal or ghosts chasing you through school bathrooms. And that you can be confused about how suddenly all sorts of people you know from different places are hanging out together and building remote-control hamster balls with antennae. And you can feel really sad when the guy shoots someone with you or your friend drowns."

Danny took a deep breath before moving on. "But… I didn't think you could feel actual pain in a dream. I heard somewhere, not sure if it's true or not, but I heard that if you dream you're falling off a roof, you would die from shock if you ever actually landed, so nobody ever makes it to the bottom. It's all just the falling, but there's never an impact. Nobody ever gets hurt. But I did. The guy stabbed me and it hurt like heck. The entire time. Through all of my dreams, through the entire sequence. And I was holding my side and it was hard to breathe and it felt like it was on fire."

Jazz didn't think that she could move, or breathe. She just managed to blink a few times as he continued.

"And then the other part of this whole thing was that, for some reason, and don't ask me what it was because I don't know… maybe someone told me or maybe I just thought I had to do it or maybe it was some bizarre law of the dream world… but I couldn't let anyone know that I was hurt."

He swallowed hard and let his eyes follow the trails of pencil shavings on the carpet. "I had to hide it. The entire time. I couldn't let anyone know I'd been hurt. The fact that there wasn't any blood helped that, but it still hurt. And I had to keep going, keep doing random dream things like… I don't even know what they were. But some of them meant that I had to be walking, moving, running, climbing and I couldn't let anyone know I was hurt. I couldn't scream or cry or grunt and I only got away with grimacing one or two times when nobody was looking. It didn't matter what dream I was in or who was there or what I was doing, it still hurt and I couldn't even acknowledge it."

He sighed, fitfully, before staring at his hands.

Jazz tried to process the bizarre dream and figure out what it meant, connect it to something she had read, reconciled it with cases she had come across. But nothing.

Nothing but her shaken younger brother who had spent an entire night injured and unable to tell anyone. Unable to go for help or get it treated. Unable to even deal with it. Forced to ignore it, hide it away. For fear that… something would happen. The dream would collapse around him.

Even if it was only a dream, it was a horrible thing for him to experience, to have to live through again in his waking hours.

And what could have caused such a phenomenon? What kind of things must he be dealing with in his life that they would manifest in such a horrific way in his subconscious?

What was happening to her little brother?

"Well," Danny finally said, not meeting her eye now that his revelation had come to an end. "I didn't think it would be useful to you… sorry I wasted your time. Good luck with your research and… just forget that I even came in here."

He was out the door before she could say anything.

I've heard most of this before... somewhere... at some time... but I didn't double check any of my "facts" so as of now they're just psychobabble and please don't accept them as true just because I wrote them here. XP

Also. If anyone wants to correct my mistakes or interpret any of this, I'd love to hear what you think. ;D