I have no idea where I am going with this. However, sophomore efforts, as a rule, must suck. Therefore, I must write something that sucks to complete my sophomore effort and hopefully move onto bigger and better things. Yet, don't think for a moment this story doesn't amuse me. Not that I'm expecting it will amuse anyone else. I'm just confessing I'm a strange one and that it amuses me.

Her whole life, Amy had been like a possum, a nocturnal creature. She liked to stay up late into the night while everyone else went to sleep. When darkness fell, she did not have her mother there to nag her, nor schoolmates there to bully her, and she could be alone with a book, or her computer, or simply with her own thoughts. Night after night, she peacefully pursued knowledge and logic like an sailor at sea would follow the stars as they rose and sank from one horizon to the other.

Besides, the longer she stayed awake, the longer she could put off the night terrors she had been prone to since she was a child.

Tonight, Amy was curled up in bed with her laptop. She typed the words Lucid Dreaming into the Google search field and hit return. Skipping past the Wikipedia entry, she found an entry titled: The World of Lucid Dreaming. She clicked on the text, murmuring to herself, "sounds promising." A webpage with a background of enticing blue clouds popped up on her screen.

Amy was skeptical about the font choices, and could not decipher what the palm tree graphics might have to do with dreaming, but she had long ago adapted to the fact that the Internet was not a place to apply high expectations for grammar or logic. She skimmed the site until she found a link for "Lucid Dreaming for Beginners," clicked it, and settled down to read. She spent the rest of the evening studying, with all due seriousness, the art of controlling her dreams.

Somewhere past one in the morning, Amy reached her limits, signaled by the strain and tiredness that overtook her eyes. Looking at the clock, she knew it was past her bedtime, so she closed her laptop and put it on the floor. Amy rolled over, curled up quietly, and put into practice the first tenants of Lucid Dreaming: thinking about the thing you wanted to dream about. The answer was so obvious she almost giggled to herself.

With deliberate slowness, Amy recalled all of the pieces of conversation she had shared that day with her boyfriend, Dr. Sheldon Cooper. She envisioned them in her head, gloating in private over each one, watching letters magically march across the screen of her computer or phone. She especially took time to replay each word that she'd heard spoken in his own voice. Somewhere in the midst of recounting his riveting lecture on bleach and its effectiveness on water spot removal on glass beakers, she fell asleep.

Amy smoothly rolled from her side to her back, her hand pressed against her eyes. For one of the few times in her life, she felt refreshed, and she stretched luxuriously against the wine colored satin sheets, letting out a soft hum of satisfaction as she felt the fabric caress her naked body.

Naked body?

Amy opened her eyes and beheld a wide and endless blue sky.

"Bon matin, ma petite intoxicating bijoux," purred a rich baritone from her immediate left.

Amy knew that voice. Her eyes tracked to the side, and she jerked up straight, clutching the satin sheets over her breasts as she surveyed the scrawny, pale chest of the man beside her.

"Howard?" She said, glancing at him and than around the room, which was not so much a room as it was a bed, floating in a tranquil pond lavishly dotted with water lilies and completely closed off from the rest of the world by curtains of graceful weeping willows. She glanced at Howard, and then glanced back at the trees, and then glanced over the side of the mattress at the fat golden koi fish swimming lazily in the crystal clear water. She did a brief self-analysis, and curiously did not feel as alarmed as she thought she should.

"Oh, yeah, you're dreaming," Howard said cheerfully, gazing at her through half-lidded and merry eyes. "Would you like a banana?" he asked seductively, pulling out a yellow fruit from beneath the covers.

"Absolutely not," she said, eying the fruit and then the lush and tranquil scenery. The mattress floated and turned slowly, adrift on the gentle currents of the pond. Which was ridiculous, Amy noted to herself, as a pond would not have currents. Reluctantly, she turned back to Howard. He smiled up at her lovingly, in a sickeningly sweet way she usually saw reserved for Bernadette.

"It's funny what happens when the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex goes offline, isn't it?" Howard said with a smile, placing an elbow on his pillow and propping his head up in his hand. "I really have to congratulate you on the idyllic beauty of your limbic system, Amy. I never knew you were such a romantic." He leaned forward, his voice turning seductive again, "We have that in common."

"Nonsense," Amy replied stoically, determined to shoot him down with the same brutality that Penny saved specifically for him. She looked at the water again, and considered trying to swim for it, but even as she did, the weeping willows seemed to shift gently towards the horizon, growing farther away even as the pond became larger. She turned back to Howard and inquired, "What are you doing here? Why am I here with you, specifically?" A water lily drifted past the mattress, and Howard scooped it up and placed it in her lap. "And why is this dream rife with blatant erotic symbolism?" She picked up the water lily and threw it back over the side of the mattress.

"You don't think that you have latent sexual feelings for me, Amy?" Howard asked, smiling up at her so serenely she wasn't sure if he was in earnest or mocking her.

"Definitely not," Amy replied. Carefully tucking the satin sheets under her arms, she slowly lay back down and watched puffy white clouds in the form of valentine hearts float one by one across the sky.

"Yeah, I figured you didn't, but a man has to ask." Howard pushed back part of the sheets to reveal a small wooden bowl, which he offered to her with a chipper flourish. "Cherries?"

Amy put her hands over her eyes, "Dear amygdala," she said, speaking to the walnut-sized organ of her brain that was definitely in control of this particular dream, "I'd really like to wake up now."

"Oh no," Howard said sweetly, reaching over to gently remove her hands from her eyes. "You and I have things to talk about, ma bijoux. You see, tonight you're going to be visited by four ghosts. Or spirits. Or basically your friends as I'm going to send them to you to, um, torture you for a bit." He paused to think about it, and then said, "It's like A Christmas Carol by Dickens, but not as spooky. Or it might seem spooky to you, when you see Raj dancing naked with a monkey. Or maybe not so much spooky as deeply disturbing to the point you'll want to gouge your eyes out. But anyway! You might be starting to catch my drift about how this evening is going to turn out for you." He popped a cherry into his mouth and chewed on it with a smile, wriggling his eyebrows at her suggestively.

"Wait," Amy said, watching Howard spit out the cherry stone towards the water. A koi fish broke the placid surface and caught it in its mouth the way a dog might catch a Frisbee in the park, "….Why?" She found her brain sluggishly trying to find logic in her current situation, and failed. "Dickens novel was a Victorian-era morality tale about self-redemption. Did I do something wrong?"

"No," Howard said, grinning as he started to peel another banana he had found under the silky sheets. He looked at Amy dead-on and said merrily, "We just like to fuck with you."

"And by we," Amy inquired, "You mean the parts of my brain responsible for dreaming that are currently manifesting themselves as you?"

"We sort of see this Lucid Dreaming idea as cheating, Amy. You were hoping for a sex dream with Sheldon, and cheating in your efforts to get it. We've been giving you night terrors for years - you really think we were going to give you your wildest fantasy that easily?" Howard took a bite of banana, and then spread his arm out expansively, "Instead we're giving you all this. Beauty, romance," he wiggled his eyebrows at her suggestively. "Naked men in your bed at long last."

Amy whimpered.

Howard leaned over and placed a kiss on her temple. "Enjoy," he purred in her ear, even as the surface of the pond started to ripple, and a familiar chiming sound echoed in the air. The bed seemed to finally sink into the water's depths, and Amy found herself drowning. She flailed her arms, trying to swim for the surface, but the koi fish swam around her, faster and faster, turning into a golden maelstrom that sucked her deeper into it's depths, their laughter ringing like electronic bells.

She twisted helplessly in the water, opening her mouth to scream, her lungs filling with liquid instead. Suddenly, she felt herself hit something with a hard thump.

Amy opened her eyes, her screams fading as she stared at the familiar ceiling of her own apartment from its floor. One leg was still on the bed, twisted up in her sheets. Her head ached, but there was a reason she had picked an apartment with a bedroom with thick carpeting. Her cellphone trilled again, and she groped on the top of her bedside table, pulling it down to where she lay prone on the floor. She opened her text messaging, expecting to find a morning greeting from Sheldon. Instead, she found Bernadette's name and happy photograph staring back at her. She tapped the screen to open her friend's message.

Amy, it read, I love you very much and you know that. But if you continue dreaming of being naked in bed with my husband, I am going to have to kill you slowly by putting flesh-eating bacteria in your Cheerios.

The phone pinged again. A new message appeared from Bernadette: Oh, and have a nice day!

A koi fish leapt out of the sea of shag carpet, and she watched it flip cheerfully over her stomach and vanish with a ring of ripples into the floor on the other side of her naked body.

A smiling face topped with brown curls popped up upside down above hers. "Good morning, Amy," Leonard said, dropping a sweet and familiar kiss on the tip of her nose. He mussed her hair, and walked away, carrying a skillet that was still sizzling with bacon.

The air smelled like melting butter, bacon, and fresh hay. Hay? Amy pulled herself upright, and found herself on clean, white linen sheets, in a barn. A chicken slowly strutted by, bobbing its head as it pecked after seedlings on the floor. Amy stared at the chicken blankly until the trilling of the cellphone in her hand brought her back. She looked at the screen, and she had a new message from…Howard.

Yeah, it read, we're still fucking with you. Love, your brain.

The phone trilled again.

PS. We hear Leonard is a magnificant beast. Maybe you'll get lucky! Enjoy!

Amy looked up at the wooden beams of the barn ceiling and demanded to know, "Why me?" Then she flopped back into the soft pillows and attempted to mentally prepare for what was coming next. Instead, Howard's laughter chortled back at her from the barn's rafters.