Ponies across Equestria are troubled by their nightmares. What does it all mean? WAKE UP.
The bits that creep into our sleep are pieces of another world. Sometimes they're more real than the world around us. If everypony in Equestria was having trouble sleeping, what would happen next?
A series of short stories/vignettes about the nature of fighting against your nightmares.
Commission for COMMISSIONER UNNAMED UNTIL APPROVAL.
And Perhaps, Buried in the Shore, a Mirror of Lapis...
Scene: Celestia and Luna are asleep in their four-poster beds in their bedroom at Seaward Shoals1. It's early in the morning, around 6:00AM, and both ponies are snoring softly.
Luna's snoring stops rather suddenly. She's awake, in her bed, kicking away the blankets like they're smothering her. Her eyes are still shut—no, now they're open, and she's stopped thrashing, just pulled the covers off, staring into the darkness towards her sister's bed. Panting, run somewhere in the aether that's left her out of breath.
"Celly," Luna whispers. "Wake up."
Celestia shifts a little in her bed, but continues snoring.
Luna sighs. "Celestia," she says, this time louder. "Please wake up."
"Hmm?" Celestia's voice is motherly and official-sounding even trudging through the swamp of early-morning slumber. She raises her head from her stack of frillowy, decorated pillows and looks towards her sister's bed. "Luna? What is it?"
"Celly... I feel like I just had a really bad dream."
"Oh dear." Celestia sits up in her bed a bit, and adjusts her mane, tucking a few stray strands behind her ear. How alicorn manes manage to stay so billowy and ethereal is a matter for scientific documentation elsewhere, preferably at high pay. "Was it the same as last time?"
Luna nodded.
"I dreamed that... we were really little. And you were playing with the castle set, and I wanted to play with it too, but you wouldn't share. So you... you..."
Celestia tilted her head with a concerned expression.
"...you banished me to the moon."
"Oh dear," Celestia said again. She finally got up from her bed, made her way to Luna's side, and sat down gently on the night-black quilt dotted with stars that covered most of her sister's bed. "You really can't get that one out of your head, can you?"
Luna shook her head back and forth furiously, as though attempting to dislodge the nightmare through her ears. She succeeded only in ruffling her mane more than it already had been after her night-vision runaway. "Unh-uh."
Celestia put a hoof around her sister's shoulder and brought her close. Outside the bedroom window, the window howled silently, carrying the sea-breeze and a handful of leaves off into the unfamiliar distance.
"I feel like... I feel like it really happened. Like I was there. Like you... you were yelling at me, and everything was big and dark, and I..."
"There there," Celestia said, pulling her sister even closer, squeezing her in tight. Celestia's mane hovered down over her sister's face like a cloak or mask, and as the two of them hugged, it became more and more difficult to tell where the outline of one pony started and the other began. Swirling green and pink rainbows merging with the blue-black starry night, mixing the stars and sunshine into a blur of shimmering mane and alicorn coat.
"Do you promise you'd never do that to me, Celly?" Luna asked, her voice shaking slightly. She rocked back and forth as she held on to Celestia, bobbing slightly, like a plastic bird drinking water.
"Of course. Of course I promise. You're my sister," Celestia said, patting Luna's back, staring pointedly out the window at absolutely nothing.
"You'd never send me to the moon, right?"
"Never."
"You wouldn't banish me for a thousand years, would you?"
"...Are we really going over this again?"
"I don't remember. That's all I wanted to say."
"Luna, how could anypony hope to remember what had happened every day for a thousand years? Even I forgot most of it... after a while."
"That must be nice for you."
"I had no choice, Luna. The power of hatred in you was overwhelming. There was nothing I could do to return you to your former state, to take away the strength of Nightmare Moon that had stolen you away."
"Not so strong that you couldn't banish me, but strong enough that you couldn't save me. Do I have that right?"
"You're getting all upset over semantics. We've settled this long ago, and now you're just facilitating bad feelings about a grudge for what I've already apologized for unendingly. You made the choice to accept banishment the moment you decided to lash out against me, as though you were no longer my sister."
The room was dead still, air lingeringly uneasily like the crackle after stepped on skeletons. Luna's breath shook as she inhaled it into her chest, and her chest shook too, but then only slightly, her eyes closed, searching for the hold that would allow her to steady and continue.
It was like that, then. It had always been like that.
It was her fault then. It had always been her fault.
It was a one-way tunnel, with the light always on her sister's side.
It was a comedy of self-indulgence, Luna praying at every moment that her suffering was more intense or valuable than anypony else's.
But that was the tail-end of the nightmare. Where had it all began?
"I want to know what you did when I was gone," Luna asked, tucking her head tightly to her chest. She pulled back on the bed, away from Celestia's sisterly embrace, and Celestia pulled her hoof back, letting it rest lax against her side.
"I ruled Equestria missing you every day," Celestia said somberly, staring down at the bedsheets. The kaleidoscope of stars and moons and all-encompassing darkness.
"I lived on a diet of pebbles and dust. I fought voices in my head that told me to cut myself. I prayed every night for an entity more powerful than my own sister to kill me instead of leaving me to mark days in the dirt that were left until I could breathe real air and speak to something other than the dead silence of an eternally empty rock. I dreamed a million times of death."
"Better to let you banish me instead, to submit to the darkness that had overwhelmed you, then?"
"Then what is a choice, sister, when you had all the faculties of your own senses, and any hope of mine were gone and buried by nightmare magic?"
"Your choices lead you to the darkness!" Celestia shouted back. "And at every moment you imply, 'I had more power than you'. The Elements of Harmony chose to assist me, my sister. They aided me in doing what was right."
Luna collapsed into her blankets and huddled into herself, shivering desperately.
"They... they chose a thousand years?" Luna's eyes had begun to stain with tears. The flashbacks were coming again. The empty craters and forever expanses of white dust. The glow of the sun each day, blinding her from below, the moon's surface playing her punishment in the part of a mirror. Spinning every day, alone, to wait to learn she had suffered enough. Sobs, and wracking breaths.
"Luna... you're making all of this up. It wasn't like that. You were happily suspended in time and stasis entirely. No eating rocks. No time to think. No need to contemplate or dwell or regret your mistakes endlessly."
"Then what could I have learned, frozen for so long? What could be the point of a prophecy to rip us apart, to endure only in a way those on the border of immortality might even be capable of enduring?"
"Well... one thousand is a nice, round number," Celestia said thoughtfully.
Luna wept noisily into her pillow.
Celestia took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She stared out the window of the bedroom, looking for a hint of the sun over the ocean horizon. There was a shimmer there, maybe... but mostly, the weather just looked like clouds.
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.
"Am I really the ruler of all of Equestria?" she asked out loud, to nopony in particular.
Where was she? Throne room.
Bed? Nah.
Sleeping? Your guess.
"What about mortality and irreconcilable differences and the integrity of the universal plot?"
The universe shrugged.
What universe? it said.
This was getting bad. Twilight Sparkle was an alicorn, and she knew some things. She had powers and she could accomplish her goal. She had frozen ponies in place and travelled through time. She'd grown a mustache once.
"If this is a dream, I can just close my eyes to wake up," Twilight said matter-of-factly. She did just that. She tried to remember a piece of advice she'd once heard, about looking at a clock, and then looking at it again. The hands would move, she told herself. Nopony could fabricate the hands on a clock accurately...
Oh. Or you just put them wherever they went when it might have been a certain time. Hell, you could take them off, if you wanted. Twilight's clock had five hands, and all of them were pointing at 'One'.
"This is neither convenient nor particularly metaphorically useful," Twilight said, exasperated. She looked around the room to collect a sense of her bearings and resulting scenery.
War-room. Did Equestria have a war-room? It had a room with a big mapped table in front and little pins stuck into it and a bunch of empty chairs sat around that looked like they could have been occupied by the head of nations in a pinch or just some dolls or stick-figure drawings Twilight had done up that happened to be there now. The paper-doll for the kingdom of Griffonstone was drooping slightly. More hot glue?
"You can't make me think things have happened that haven't happened yet," Twilight said, her voice steady. "If something goes wrong, friendship will always help us find a way through."
A rolodex of cliches wheeled past. What if they're gone? What if they pass away? What if there are secrets and lies and hidden agendas and at the end of the day nothing can be compatible except power and the desire to use it?
"This is a really bad philosophical argument so far," Twilight said, exasperated. "It's like you haven't even taken an intro course in socratic reasoning."
This is supposed to be a nightmare, it said. The fabric of reality isn't going to get in the way of terrifying you.
"I'd argue that any actual reality is ten times more terrifying than whatever it is you've cooked up now. Rules are a lot scarier than no rules, in my opinion." Twilight 'hmmphed' and looked down the general atmosphere of the dreamscape she was in with contempt. The dreamscape rippled slightly, sending waves through the furniture and surrounding walls.
You're going to have to wake up eventually, it said. Then you'll regret this. You'll regret everything you did. You'll regret all the kingdoms you didn't build, research that was never finished. You haven't learned to play that pipe organ and it's been sitting there for five seasons. You'll come back and let us know what you did wrong...
"Please go away," Twilight Sparkle said. "I'm trying to get my beauty sleep."
Rainbow Dash was asleep on a cloud. It was a cumulonimbus. White in color, as they often are.
Halfway through Rainbow Dash's nap, at about 11:35AM, it started to rain, lightly. Drizzle wasn't quite right, but cats and dogs were also out of the picture. Rainbow Dash's mane went from spiky and standing out to slicked back and water-dark in a matter of a few minutes. Her snoring continued as the rain clouds began to part.
12:03PM, Rainbow Dash grunted and spun in her cloud, kicking a chunk of the puffy mass out into the air, where it dissipated into smaller and smaller fragments before eventually vanishing completely into the nothing-esque mechanics of separation at an atomic level. Rainbow Dash opened her mouth and began to snore loudly.
2:47PM. Rainbow Dash is delivered a piece of mail by Derpy, who, despite her reputation for clumsiness, seems to know how to track down any pony in Ponyville regardless of where they might usually be. Rainbow Dash's head was in the clouds more often than not, but her body might be somewhere else entirely, and Derpy seemed to be the only one poofy-headed enough to outsmart the lackadaisical Wonderbolt. Derpy smiled and left the small pile of fan-mail Rainbow Dash had received next to her cloudy pillow. Rainbow Dash snorted and turned, dislodging the pile, and Derpy took the time to straighten it out for her before flying off to her next job.
"Mmm... Soarin', you made such a good apple pie..." Rainbow Dash murmured to herself and licked her lips as she turned in her cloud, wrapping the layers of cotton-candy like strands around her body, nestled into a soft, rainy shell above the citizens of Ponyville.
4:23PM. Rainbow Dash's nose is prickled slightly by the aroma of a passing pony's lit 'cigarette'. She smiles softly to herself and imagines kicking a giant pineapple into the sun. The explosion would have been blinding, had it taken place in real life.
7:33PM. The local time is seven-thirty-three. Everypony's super happy. Everypony's super happy. Seven-thirty-three, PM.
10:11PM. Rainbow Dash wakes up, looks around for her clock, can't find one. Notices it's dark. Goes back to sleep, yawning loudly.
12:00AM. Midnight. Rainbow Dash is sleeping.
3:57AM. Rainbow Dash wakes up.
3:59AM. Rainbow Dash goes back to sleep.
What... you thought there was going to be more here?
I Stopped Because Real Life Had Become Worse Than Fanfiction
Discord and Fluttershy were sitting together under a large fruit tree of an unspecified nature. The tree had large, purple and orange fruits hanging from its branches by stems, and Discord plucked one and studied it for a moment, shining it on his non-existent shirt before taking a big bite and letting the juice spatter all over the ground and elsewhere nearby.
"Mmmm... you know, I always say, there's nothing quite as refreshing as a bumblefruit picked straight from the vine. Well... nothing legally as refreshing, anyway," Discord said. He studied the bumblefruit in question for a moment, noting the tiny seeds bundled at the center and the rich, juicy fruit-meat surrounding it. He took another large bite.
Fluttershy giggled. "Oh, I don't know. I think Applejack's summer cider might give it a run for its money."
Discord rolled his eyes. "Pshaw! Dear Fluttershy, I'll have you know that Miss Applejack's apple cider isn't even officially endorsed by the Equestrian Cider Council! Though, that is due largely to the discontinuation of the council about two-hundred years ago..."
Fluttershy giggled again, and took in a deep breath, gathering the smell of the colorful flowers around the grove and the strange, sweet scent of the bumblefruit trees.
"This is nice," Fluttershy said, smiling at Discord.
"Mhm, yes, very nice, I agree," Discord said absentmindedly, picking out the seeds of his bumblefruit with a griffon claw. "And I suppose it will still be as nice once we've woken up, won't it?"
"Well... I guess that depends on which one of us is dreaming, doesn't it?" Fluttershy said, grinning sweetly.
Another sigh. "Yes, that's very true as well. Are you suggesting that I'm the one who's teetering on the verge of waking up?"
Fluttershy closed her eyes and nodded softly. The pink of her mane cascaded down and around her face like a lemonade waterfall.
"I was under the impression that dreams in Equestria would have been handled by now... doesn't that Princess Twilight Sparkle of yours do anything these days?" Discord asked, huffing and puffing out his chest like one of those pigs from that one book about the perils of DIY housing construction.
"I'm sure she's doing quite a lot," Fluttershy said. "I don't know that promising no bad dreams ever again was part of her ruling proclamation."
Discord scoffed and shook his head. "Well! She won't be getting my vote this re-election season. What is it, in... twenty-five thousand millennia? Hah! She'll have something to think about for millennia twenty-six, if I have anything to say about it!"
Without warning, Fluttershy had appeared beside him, pressing another ripe, unopened bumblefruit into Discord's claw.
"Do you want to share this one?" Fluttershy asked, smiling up at Discord.
"Oh," he said, studying the pristine purple fruit in his palm. "Of course, of course I do, dear Fluttershy. But you see, this is where the dream, always..."
The breeze. A soft hint of yellow, covering the glade and green. But nothing more.
Berry Punch stirred groggily in what felt like her bed. What felt like sheets. Her whole body was warm, like she'd been sleeping in a sauna. One of these damn quilts tangled around again...
She dislodged after a few kicks. The pillows had made their way to the floor overnight. Bedside glass of water luckily not knocked over. Bedside bottles not so lucky.
First she checked for broken glass. There was none of that. Her hoof winced, all the same, remembering.
Then she checked the time. 2:52PM? That can't be right. She'd gone to bed at...
Had she gone to bed?
Berry Punch made her way to the bathroom slowly, dragging her hooves along with her body. Nothing to drink so far this morning... so why was everything so far behind?
She got to the mirror. The same one that was there yesterday. Would be there tomorrow. Stuck out her tongue, long, looked at the long white patches. Pulled down the skin below one of her eyes, bloodshot. Sandpaper, or cardboard boxes, she'd been chewing on them last night. Or she'd been finishing the last bottle of...
Slip. She caught herself on the towel-rack, but that didn't have anything to catch itself on. The bathroom floor, cold tile, and the slightly damp, sticky towel falling on top of her, followed by the light metal bar. Thwack. It clattered noisily as it hit the ground, rebounding off Berry Punch's head.
The toilet seat was up, and somepony had thrown up in it. Berry Punch wanted to give them a piece of her mind.
Fridge. There was water in there, maybe ginger ale. Maybe another bottle. Berry Punch got up from the bathroom, slowly, with considerable effort, and started towards the kitchen. She kicked absent-mindedly at the towel clinging to her leg, and sent it flying against the bathtub along with the metal bar, clanking loudly against the porcelain. Berry Punch winced and put a hoof to her forehead. Painkillers too, somewhere...
Bedside. Why did it feel like staggering? Move one hoof. She would tell her head, and then it would... move one hoof. Eventually. She watched it. She could see the little trickle of energy move from her eyes to her head and all the way down, watched it go, slowly lifted the hoof and hovered in air and moved it forward and planted it uneasily on the floor...
Stutter. Shake. It would be easier just to go to sleep right here.
She made it back to the bed, but began to fall before she wanted to. Hit her head on the headboard, clunk. Feels like one of her teeth is arguing now.
"Bed," she says out loud, reaching for the scrambled blankets, falling helplessly forward, hooves scrambling for a hold. She finds the bed. Stumbles next to it for a minute. Slowly, arduously, raises one hoof and places it atop the bed. Slowly, arduously, raises another hoof, and places it there. Throws herself forward. She's in.
Yesterday there was somepony there... somepony she was talking to. She remembered sitting up in her bed, bottle in hoof, pillows tucked between her and the wall. Eyes watering, unfocused, staring into somepony's eyes.
"What did you do yesterday?" they had asked her.
No good at thinking. Or remembering. Berry Punch took a sip of something that tasted unlike water, and that was perfect for her. It was the tingle of her tongue, her brain firing to process whatever had been left on her tastebuds and would soon wreak havoc on her liver. If she said the brand, it would bury into her consciousness, and creep up at inopportune times. If she kept just a bottle there, it was much safer.
"You were here yesterday, I think," Berry Punch said, swaying lightly back-and-forth under one of the scattered blankets. "Didn't we play Jenga?"
The pony, who was too blurry to make out now, but at the very least was coloured some kind of way, pink and blue, maybe, shook its head. It shook, anyway. Blurred lines. Berry Punch began to sway more enthusiastically, balancing herself barely with a hoof on the mattress.
"It's not yesterday yet," Berry Punch said, raising the bottle and eyeing its fill line. Same, higher, or lower. Well, lower. She took another drink.
"This isn't a dream," the voice said. "You're not going to wake up from this."
"That's what you said last time," Berry Punch said, swigging back the last of her drink and throwing the bottle haphazardly onto the bedroom floor, where it landed with a clank before skidding along into a pile of neighbouring bottles, settling with the soft chime of glass rubbing glass. "But I did wake up. I'm pretty sure."
"You don't know if this is being alive or dead," the pony said, the border of its body wiggling insubstantially.
"It's the same thing either way," Berry Punch said, and hiccuped. "I woke up once before and there was nopony there. I stopped waking up and nopony came to find me..."
"What does it taste like?"
"Huh?"
The pony raised an ethereal hoof towards Berry Punch's new bottle, that had slipped into her hoof without her even realizing it. Like a magnet that had found its missing pole.
"Oh... peaches. This one is... it's peaches. Peach."
"Peachy," the pony said.
Berry Punch nodded. She unscrewed the lid, and the scent of fermented fruit bundled up into her sinuses. Her nose wrinkled before she tilted her head back and took a long swig of the new, fruity beverage. She coughed as she pulled the bottle away, sputtering slightly, and sending a tiny fleck of peach-flavoured alcohol in the direction of the pony at the foot of her bed. It pass through, landing somewhere on the already slightly-sticky floor.
"They need me," Berry Punch slurred, rocking slightly now against her pillows and headboard. "I have to be standing... uh, somewhere, tomorrow, for a thing, with the, uh..."
"Who?"
Berry Punch woke up. The room was empty. Well, there was a bed. There was her. What was empty? She took another swig of the bottle.
Gone now too.
There was the bed too, always, and it was spinning. The warm-hot against the cool-inside, she was laying in it, letting her head rest against what was probably still a pillow, feeling her stomach dance and churn and beg not to go back to sleep. The vision fuzz, or her eyes crossed, or remembering somepony very far away waving at her from over the horizon...
"My stomach hurts," she said simply, and began to throw up into her bed.
