Dreamstrider

by OkemosBrony

Chapter 17

“Aurora,” mom whispers while nudging me slightly. “It’s time to get up.”

My stomach feels uneasy, and when I open my eyes they feel so dry that they hurt and start to water. “I don’t feel so good,” I moan.

A hoof is placed on my forehead, then taken away after a few seconds. “Well, you don’t have a fever. What feels wrong?”

“My stomach.” There’s now a dull throbbing in my head, causing me to rub my forehead with my hoof. “And I’ve got a headache, too.”

“You might just be groggy from sleep, or maybe you were up late last night.” She laughs a little. “It’s almost eleven, and you’ve never slept this late; were you up Dreamstriding?”

Sitting up in bed, I part my mane so it’s not going into my eyes. “Didn’t even do any last night, and I wasn’t up that late reading. No later than normal.”

“Just becoming like your sisters, then,” she sighs as she gets out of bed. “Well, once you get something to eat and take a nice, warm shower, you’ll probably feel a lot better.”

She gets off my bed and leaves the room, so I just rub my forehead again. I don’t know what it could be; I just slept for over twelve hours and still feel really tired. For some reason I also feel sick, but at the same time I also don’t feel sick. Mom’s right, I probably just need to give it a little time. I’ve always been slow to wake up, that must be it.

Almost as soon as my hooves hit the ground, I find myself downstairs with a bowl of oatmeal in front of me. How did I get here? Nopony else is here with me, did I make this myself? Whatever’s happening is weird, because I’ve never just moved from my room to the kitchen with food before. There has to be a good reason for this.

The oatmeal looks and smells real, so I start eating it. Tastes real, too. Strange, but maybe I’m just getting sick with something that doesn’t give me a fever. Come to think of it, that would explain everything. I probably just zoned out coming downstairs, too.

Nothing strange happens throughout the rest of breakfast or when I go upstairs to take a shower, which is a good sign. There’s no more steam or buildup on the mirror or walls but it still smells strongly of flowery shampoo, so Dew Drop’s up and has been in here already. And there’s about a million things of makeup near the sink, so Snowy is up as well. I love my sisters, but why do they have to do so much in the bathroom? Having my own bathroom in Canterlot was great: no makeup or hair dryers or whatever else around the sink and only a bar of soap and a bottle each of shampoo and conditioner in the shower. Not to mention the lack of hair in the drain, because I don’t shed like two certain older sisters I know.

The water heats up quickly, so I get in and just sit down in the tub because I’m so tired. After getting both my mane and body nice and wet, I just close my eyes and take a few deep breaths.

Now that I’m just trying to relax, I can notice the pulling in my mind more. Or rather, the lack of it. Opening my eyes for a few moments and closing them again doesn’t change anything. I take a few deep breaths and try to latch on it and see if I can maybe enter my dream, but it feels like when I was just starting and couldn’t really get a firm grip on it. It’s probably related to my sickness, since I can’t remember a single time in my life that I didn’t feel the pulling. But what to do about it? I can’t go into the dream world and ask Luna about it, so I’m just stuck here.

There’s really nothing I can do in the shower, so I wash up but take my time to see if I can think of anything. As I’m getting out and drying my mane off, I start wondering if I can still use the grimoire Luna gave me, the one where I have to think of something before the book has any writing in it. She never specifically said that it’s related to Dreamstriding, so I guess it’s possible that I can still use it.

After tying the towel around my mane in a turban like Snowy showed me how to do, I leave the bathroom and go back to my own room. The grimoire is still sitting on my desk, so I just go up and sit down. I think about playful demons just to test it, and sure enough, there’s a lot of information as soon as I open it. But when I try and read it, my heart sinks: I can’t understand any of it. Luna once said that only Dreamstriders can understand Demon in both the spoken and written forms, so I’ve somehow lost my ability to Dreamstride.

Calm down, Aurora. There has to be an explanation for this. There’s only one place that I can think of that might possibly have this information that I could access: the library.

---

Unfortunately for me, I forgot how bad the Coltlumbus Public Library can be.

The library isn’t very large, and most of it is books that parents donate when their foals grow out of them. On the plus side, that meant the foal's section always had a ton of books, making this the best place to be when I was little. Especially when I would come with dad, because he's stronger and could carry a lot more books home than mom could.

No time to waste, though. As mom peels off to the mystery section because she insisted that I not walk around town alone, I go into the really pathetic reference section of the CPL. There’s just two shelves, and a quick search shows nothing about Dreamstriding or dreams. There has to be something, though. Our presence may not be known to almost anypony, but it’s not like we were kept a secret. They just never bothered to learn about us.

Instead of trying to read through all these books, I take a step back and close my eyes. There’s some old earth pony proverb that says if you need help, you only need to stick your hoof out and what you need will come to you. I stick out my hoof and walk forwards, and when my hoof hits one of the books, I take it out and open up my eyes to see what I got.

Unsheathing The Sword: The Sexual History Of The Equestrian Unification War

This is why I never listen to old proverbs.

I put the book back and decide to try and find a book the regular way. As I’m searching, I do have to admit that the last book at the very least sounds interesting. Mom explained sex to me a few weeks ago and frankly, I don’t get why everypony makes such a big deal about it. Doesn’t sound like it would be very fun or even comfortable. Maybe the book could give me some ideas as to why ponies seem to love it so much.

The best lead I get is Forgotten Magics of Equestria, a good-sized book with all sorts of arcane symbols on the front. I take it to one of the tables and open it up, and to my relief, there is indeed a chapter on Dreamstriders. A picture of a big full moon greets me when I flip to that page, and I start skimming the chapter to see if there’s anything about what I'm going through. My eyes catch a little box on the side of the page with the title “Dreamstriding”, so I look at it and start reading.

When a Dreamstrider closes their eyes for longer than a few seconds, they feel a pulling in their mind that they can manipulate to begin Dreamstriding. The pulling is there throughout their life, and can only disappear temporarily due to dream creatures present in our dreams.

My guess is a ‘dream creature’ is a demon, but I’ve never heard of any demons that can basically make you not a Dreamstrider. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but I check the rest of the chapter to see if it mentions anything about demons or “dream creatures”. It does, but it’s a little trivia fact in the back. And yes, book, I did know there were creatures in our dreams that only Dreamstriders can communicate with, thanks for asking.

The really short chapter on Dreamstriders has nothing else to offer, so I close the book and put it back on the shelf. If there was an encyclopedia of magic here that might help me more, but unfortunately, there is not. There’s not even a regular encyclopedia here. Not a full one, at least. And the letter D is not one of the volumes here.

I guess knowing that this is based on my abilities as a Dreamstrider is a start, and the fact that it’s only temporary is comforting to know. But still, what could have caused it? I can’t read the grimoire about Dreamstriding, and almost nothing else in this town would give me the information I need.

Well...whatever’s affecting me is just temporary, so theoretically I should still be able to do Dreamstrider stuff, right? Tea can be a powerful tool for Dreamstriders, and thankfully the manual Luna gave me for that is in Equestrian. I guess I could try and use one or many of those to try and change my magic to be more like it normally is. I mean, it’s just tea. Worst case scenario is it does nothing. And I don’t want to just be sitting around for days waiting for this to come back on its own, if it even does that.

Guess there’s only one way to find out.

---

As I turn on the lamp on my nightstand, I use my magic to close the curtains so my room is at low light, just like Luna had me do when I was first learning. I don’t know if the low light thing just affects Dreamstriding or all magic related to it, but I figure I should be trying everything I have.

I go and sit back down at my desk and pull out the grimoire, moving aside all the mugs I stole from downstairs so I don’t have to keep going to the bathroom sink to dump out my self-cleaning one. When I open the book, I’m greeted with the familiar chicken-scratch writing of Demon that means absolutely nothing to me in its current state. It took me a few tries to get exactly what the book wanted me to think of, but apparently it wanted me to think of the pulling in my mind before it would fill up and let me read it. First attempt at reading this book will come with the mulch-y blend of tea, which focuses your magic and gives you a greater connection to the dream world. Great for beginners, or so I’m told. Luna used to have me drink this all the time during the first few sessions when she tried to teach me how to Dreamstride so I could feel the pulling more. Hopefully, now it’ll help me feel it at all.

I drop the infuser full of tea in mom’s faded blue-and-silver Canterlot University mug, then pour a little bit of boiling water into it from my kettle. After letting it seep, I take a sip and close my eyes. My mind is calming down, and I can feel the pulling a tiny bit. Hopefully, that’s enough to be able to read the grimoire.

There’s no time to waste, so I open my eyes and start skimming the book. The entire section is only about twenty pages long, and there’s only one word I manage to pick up: ‘morbanimae’.

Morbanimae? I have absolutely no idea what that means, but for whatever reason we own a dictionary. A quick trip downstairs to the bookshelf in our living room gets me the dictionary, which I just set down on the floor and start looking through right there. I opened it right up to the M’s, so thankfully I don’t really have to go through a ton of the dictionary to find what I’m looking for. And before long, I get right to what it is I’m looking for.

Morbanimae: archaic word for SOUL SICKNESS.

Soul sickness? I’ve never heard of that before, so I flip through and go looking for that. Before long, I’m on the page where it would be, so I find it and start reading.

Soul sickness: a non-contagious acute illness of uncertain cause characterized by lethargy, weakness, nausea, dreamless sleep, and weak magic.

That definitely sounds like what I have, but there’s nothing I would really be able to do about it right now. The book at the library said this was only temporary, but for how long does it last? Guess the only thing I can do now is just wait for a few days and see if anything changes, then read my grimoire and find out what it knows about this.