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// Current Music: A Rope of Sand 
// Story: Nightmares: They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To 
// by darf 
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Lyra and Bonbon shared a small house in Ponyville. Getting the place was easy, because renters in Ponyville didn't ask a lot of questions, and for all they knew the difference between 'special friends' and 'lesbian life-buddies' was negligible aside from an late night noise complaint, and so that was the arrangement and had been for some time.

Lyra and Bonbon shared a bed in their small house, that was just big enough for the two of them while simultaneously being small enough to encourage nightly cuddling. The bedspread was a colorful mix of pink and green and blue, a swirling pattern of intertwining candy-looking lines and blooming flowers.

In the bed, Lyra was lying, cuddled up in a blanket that had wrapped around her like a cocoon, rocking back-and-forth slightly like a filly gently lulled to calm by its mother. Bonbon was in the bed too, beside Lyra, overtop the covers. She had one hoof on Lyra's back and was rubbing it up and down slowly, occasionally giving extra attention to the base of Lyra's neck, where it was stiff and there was a lot of tension and Lyra sometimes made cute little 'mew' noises when Bonbon touched her there, and that was too hard to help.

"Start by telling me what happened," Bonbon said matter-of-factly. She reminded Lyra of a nurse, for some reason, with her 'look of concern' and 'motherly demeanour' and 'bedside manner' and for some reason this conflated in Lyra's overwhelming but mostly hidden desire to attend medical school and also to play Munchhausen and coax nurse Bonbon to not leave her side for the rest of the day. But that wouldn't have been that hard in the first place, nor would it have required a dream-inflicted illness.

"It's really hard to describe in actual words," Lyra said, still rocking slightly. Her eyes were unfocused, staring down at the bed but also somewhere far off in the distance, like a magic eye picture only she could see. "Every time I try to picture exactly what it was like, a bunch of mush gets in the way."

Bonbon nodded. "Lugubriousness," she said knowingly.

"That's a really good example," Lyra said, sighing. "Do you even know what that word means?"

"Hush, hun. We're talking about your dream."

"I don't wanna talk about the dream! It's a giant mess. And every time I go to sleep it comes back, worse than the last time..."

Bonbon gave Lyra a big hug and kissed her on the forehead.

"It's just a dream, hun. It can't hurt you for real."

"It's hurt my sleep schedule," Lyra said, grumbling and looking at the clock. 7:14AM. No reasonable pony would be up to watch the sun rise unless they absolutely had to, Lyra thought to herself. It felt good to think a thought unmuddled by dreamy soup and the constant sensation that one was forgetting everything that had happened to them perpetually. Vague memories of a buzzing, whirring noise... and something about a breadbasket?

"The term is 'breadbox'," Bonbon said helpfully.

"There. You're doing it again. Everypony keeps doing it." Lyra buried her face in her hooves, eyes wide, trying to stem the tears of frustration that resulted only from bashing your head against a metaphorical Sudoku for fifteen days straight. No temp pay was worth this kind of permanent existential dread.

"Lyra, sweetie, can you please just tell me what was going on?"

Lyra sighed again. "Alright," she said. "I will try my best."

"Twilight and I were working on something. Some kind of project. It was in her basement."

"Does Twilight Sparkle even have a—"

"Please. I'm trying to get through this and it's very difficult."

"Oh." Bonbon held a hoof to her mouth and nodded. "Sorry, hun."

Lyra gave a slow nod and let out a long, deep breath. "Okay. So."

"Twilight Sparkle and I were working on some kind of project in her basement. I don't remember what it was. There was some kind of orange thing involved. But as we started to work on it, the machine started falling apart... and saying all these weird things that didn't make any sense. Stuff made out of normal words that was just, like, thrown into a blender and spit out at random."

"What kind of stuff do you mean?"

"Well, it kept trying to tell us what kind of music was playing, for a start. Despite the fact that there wasn't any music playing in the first place."

"It was trying to give you a soundtrack to your dream?"

Lyra nodded.

"Yeah. And every time I would think something, it was like there was a little echo in my head saying it back to me, and then arguing about what it had just heard itself say."

Bonbon's eyes went a little cross as she tried to work out the logistics of Lyra's description. "That's... I think you lost me a little bit. You were hearing voices?" Bonbon scrunched up her nose in concern. We're still not sure about that one, it said.

"There. It happened just now. You didn't hear that?"

"Hear what?" Bonbon said. The bedroom was quiet. Very hushed pony voices and hooves wandering ushered through the tiny cracks sealing the windows. The fridge hummed from the kitchen. Quietly, Bonbon let out a little cough.

Hear what, she said?

"There. That. It's like... it's like your thoughts are thinking about themselves."

"You're kinda starting to scare me, hun." Bonbon sat up straighter and took a big breath into her chest. "It's just a dream, after all."

"That's the thing though," Lyra said, sitting up to match Bonbon's posture and shaking off a bit of the blanket that had wrapped around her like a cocoon. "It isn't just a dream. It's a  bunch of pictures and words that stick around in your head even after you wake up, and when you go back to sleep, and in all the little bits inbetween you try not to notice."

"Like when you're in the bathroom and you can't help but stare at the mirror?"

Lyra nodded. "Sort of. Exactly. Maybe. I'm not sure." She looked down at her hooves, eyes drooping. "I just feel really confused. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do."

"Let's start here," Bonbon said, and hugged her tight.

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