I was in California, obviously, the bus having taken the tunnel only moments before. The weather was sunny here, the terrain rocky.
The bus pulled into a layby and the side of it opened as it had been designed to - flipping-up gullwing style. The seats of the bus were, obviously, arranged as they might be in a stadium and faced sideway. This way myself and the others on the bus - strangers - were able to get a better view.
An ex-girlfriend of mine was also present, though I didn’t have any strong feelings about this.
Walking to the edge of the cliff - for I was off the bus now and the bus was next to a cliff, but I knew that already - I looked down at the ocean. And what a fine ocean it was, so far below.
Turning back to cross the road and return to the bus I found my path blocked by a winged, horned horse with a big billowy head of hair. Or a mane. Yes. Horses had manes. Remembered that now.
“Hello Celestia. You got small and differently coloured. Good for you,” I said. Celestia was meant to be white and maybe a little shorter than me (horn excluded), but if she wanted to shrink and be a deep midnight blue that was her prerogative.
“We - I - am not Celestia,” said Celestia. Or not-Celestia. Certainly, she didn’t sound the same.
“Oh, terribly sorry. You looked very much alike is all,” I said. Then in a moment of freezing panic clarified: “Not because you’re both horses or anything just I saw a lot of resemblance. It’s the hair. I mean mane.”
Nice save.
This horse which somehow had stars in her mane turned her towards me.
“I am Luna, Celestia’s sister,” she said.
“Ah, family resemblance then. I wasn’t that wrong! Hello. I’m, uh, actually I’m not sure about that, still. But welcome to Earth all the same! We’re in California!”
I knew this for a fact. So much so I waved my arms around.
Luna fixed me with a look that chilled me despite the sunshine. I think I preferred her sister, given the choice.
“We are not on Earth, wherever that may be. You are dreaming.”
“Huh. That so?”
I looked around. The bus was gone, but that was normal. Everything looked pretty normal to me. Still California. Still sunny. Still Earth, plainly. That I did not believe her must have been obvious as she asked:
“How did you get here?”
Easy question, easy answer.
“Took a bus. Through the tunnel.”
“Why?”
“Uh…”
I hadn’t actually thought of that. And now that I did, I realised there was no why. None of it made sense. I had no idea where the tunnel had come from, or even where it had come out. The tunnel was just how I’d got here. And here was California, which I somehow knew without actually ever being told or it even being hinted at.
My head hurt.
“Ow, fuck,” I said. “Okay maybe you have a point. Is this what lucid dreaming is? Why would anyone do this, it sucks.”
Luna walked past me and looked out across the sea, which - when I did the same - looked smaller now. I could see where it ended and it was far nearer than the horizon. My dream had a bloody sky box. That was just cheap.
“Typically, it becomes more enjoyable once you exercise some control over the dream. It is, after all, constructed from you,” she said, not looking at me.
I considered this. I’d accepted that this was a dream pretty quickly, I realised, but then again once she’d mentioned it I’d just sort of known that it was. Dreams were jacked, man.
“So I can just make stuff?” I asked.
“If you have sufficient control and will, yes.”
How does one exercise willpower to exert influence on the dream world around them, anyway? Is there a muscle you flex? Is that muscle your brain?
I thought about the best donut that could possibly exist. I thought about it super-hard.
A donut appeared in my hand. This was delightful.
“Sweet, okay now I see the appeal,” I said, eating the dream-donut and enjoying all of the immediate benefits one got from eating an actual donut.
I heard the clearing of a throat. Luna was staring at me. The remains of the donut promptly puffed to nothingness.
“Ah, sorry. Miles away. Did I dream you up as well? Or is that rude to ask?”
“You did not. I am real. I have entered your dream because I wanted to ask you some questions.”
“That sounds serious. Do you do this a lot?”
Again, I was being very accepting but somehow I just knew she wasn’t stringing me along. If I stopped to think about this the pain in my head came back, so I quickly found that it was best to just roll with it.
“No. When I enter a dream it is typically to counter a nightmare or assist in introspection, often at the same time. This is...a personal matter. Of a sort.”
“Oh. Okay then.”
What did assisting in introspection mean, exactly? I’d ask later, if the opportunity arose.
Luna circled around away from the edge of the cliff to face me. Did I feel nervous with my back to a cliff, even in a dream? No. Heights were never a big thing for me. That, and the drop had shortened considerably from when I’d last looked over it, and it was now about two foot. Figure that one out.
“My sister has been distracted these last days, performing her duties with a perfunctory attitude that is most unlike her. She has also been quite secretive about how she spends her time alone. Some of her subjects are starting to talk.”
I didn’t know what to say to this, so said nothing. Apparently this was the right decision.
“What do you know of my sister?” Luna asked.
“Celestia? Uh, not a whole lot.”
This was true.
“What is she to you?” Luna pressed, now starting to circle me as I stood feeling tense.
“Friendly? She’s very nice. Looking after me. The awake-me, I mean. I’m in a bad way and can’t be moved.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Well, yeah. I haven’t seen anyone else but her. The doctor checked me out while I was still unconscious. Or in a mini-coma or whatever happened to me.”
Details hadn’t been especially forthcoming about what state I’d been in on arrival or what had happened between then and me waking up in that bed, but what would I have done with them anyway? I assumed they were bad, and I was still alive, so who cared? Not me, that’s who.
Luna considered this quietly, pausing before turning about tail and circling me the other way. I fidgeted, because at least in my dream my body didn’t ache so much that I couldn’t fidget.
“What are you?”
Ah, these questions again.
“Human,” I said.
“You are not from Equestria?”
Ugh, that name. Still not over that. Even in my dreams.
“Nope.”
“You are from ‘Earth’?” She asked, speaking the word as though she found it as offensive as I found Equestria.
“Yep.”
“How did you get here?”
“No idea. Memory loss.”
“Your name?”
“Can’t remember that either.”
Celestia’s questioning hadn’t felt quite so much like being mugged. That, and she hadn’t been inside my head to do it. This seemed a more polite way of doing things to me, but that’s me. Perhaps this sort of thing was normal here?
My lack of useful information seemed to be starting to frustrate Luna, given that she stomped a hoof and frowned even more than she had been to start with.
“Sorry,” I said, uselessly. This was ignored.
“You say she has been looking after you?”
“Yeah. Was there when I woke up. Brought me soup, that sort of thing.”
Best leave out the bath, I thought. Not as if telling her about it would add much anyway. It’d just raise more questions, and not any ones I wanted to answer. Or even think about.
Not that Luna was paying attention to me at that moment. Rather, she seemed to be talking to herself and unhappily at that. I only notice when she was about halfway though.
“-and for this she neglects her subjects? Such trifling diversions cannot-”
I felt obliged to interrupt. Partly because I wanted to, mostly because what I’d heard her say jogged something in my head.
“Wait, you said ‘subjects’. You said that before, too,” I said. She had, I just hadn’t noticed or really thought much about it. Either way. Luna looked a little irritated to have been pulled back into a conversation, but not so irritated she ignored me.
“Yes,” she said.
“Why would she have subjects?”
Luna’s look was one of pity, and not the pleasant kind. The condescending kind.
“What is it you think my sister is? Or does?” She asked.
“She told me she works at the palace. Or a palace. There may be more than one but she just works in one, I don’t know.”
Luna looked more irritated, though not so much this time, I felt.
“Did she now…” She said, glaring and then just trailing off into silence. I cleared my throat.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah she did,” I said.
“She didn’t happen to say what she did at the palace, I take it?”
“Just said she worked there.”
Luna muttered something too quietly for me to hear and shook her head, something which in no-way affected the rippling of her mane. This was odd to watch.
“She and I are to have words. I shall leave you to finish your dream.”
“Oh, okay, cool. Hey, before you go I had a question,” I said.
But Luna wasn’t there anymore. There had been no obvious state of her leaving or being about to leave. It was actually kind of hard thinking of her having been there in the first place.
“Huh. Dreams, eh? That was weird,” I said.
“Yeah,” said my friend, who was there.
I shook my head and looked back out to see again. The sea was cold now, the cliff gone and the weather grey, because we were in Hastings. It was Christmas. There were donuts. Maybe that’s where I’d got mine from? Unclear.
“Wonder what this one meant…”