//------------------------------// // the dreams in which i'm dying are the best i've ever had // Story: Exit Light, Enter Night // by alarajrogers //------------------------------// Tears for Fears, Mad World He dreams of ponies chasing him. Ponies with pitchforks, ponies with whips. Ponies three times his size, made of shadows and fear. Ponies carrying torches, ponies with magic in their horns ready to grab him and throw him, ponies with rope and chains. He is running, always running, throwing various magical tricks behind him or in front of him. He makes portable holes and runs through them, then closes them behind him. Ponies slam into tree trunks or cliff faces and bounce away, dizzy, as he laughs and escapes. But then in front of him there are always more ponies. Different ponies, with the same intent, like a hive mind that marches in lockstep. He can never figure out how they are communicating with each other, or even if they are. They all look alike; when shadows devour their color and their cutie marks, he can't tell any of the ponies apart. They're all the same, horrifying creatures trying to catch him, and he never knows why, or how they keep finding him. Most nights he just runs and runs until he wakes up. His tricks hold them off and they never do catch him. Other nights they drag him down and throw him in a cage. They beat him, they chain him, they scream at him and batter him with sticks. He gets away sometimes; other times the torment goes on until he wakes up. The worst dreams are the ones where they have a ponyquin, a stiff hollow pony-shaped thing, and they catch him. Sometimes he just barely manages to get away. But when the ponyquin's in the dream, that's not usually what happens. Usually, they grab him, and as he struggles and screams and tries to bite them, they force him into the ponyquin, and he feels it crushing him around his body, forcing him into the shape of a pony, smashing the fingers of his paws into a solid hoof, shrinking his long, flexible tail into a tiny bundle of hair. It doesn't hurt physically -- the dreams of the beatings awaken the echoes of remembered pain, because those were things that actually happened to him, but in reality nopony ever shoved him into a ponyquin and morphed his body to fit it, and he's experimented with voluntary shapeshifts and they don't hurt. The horror of the dream is that when he feels himself changing, when his body is reshaped to fit the ponyquin, he becomes the ponyquin. Locked into an alien form that all around him agree is the only form anything that talks should ever have, and no matter how much he screams inside, all that comes out of his mouth is cheerful singing, like the ponies do. When he wakes from those, he's usually screaming, and he usually finds Luna, either snuggled at his side or at his door coming to bring him water and curl up with him. He has no idea how she always knows, but it helps. He's closer to Celestia than he is to her baby sister, but Celestia sleeps like a log, and he's not allowed to sleep in her room, whereas no one has forbidden Luna to come to him at night. Other times he dreams of strange, mysterious things, creatures in impossible colors made entirely of a thousand eyes and mouths and wings and feet, things that speak in a language that reverberates in his bones. When they come, the air turns to jello and the angles bend and twist, reality itself reshaping and becoming bigger, bending around them to accommodate them, and sometimes when they touch him he finds his body dissolving, turning into a colorful liquid, or mist. Even Luna doesn't understand when he tells her about those dreams. She thinks they're bad dreams. He admits they sound frightening, when he describes them. But they aren't scary at all, quite the contrary. It feels wonderful, when he has one of those dreams. It feels like going home.