I wasn’t sure how I managed to get myself showered, dressed and to my appointment on time. There had been a mad search of my apartment for the book, but I hadn’t been able to find any sign of it. After several minutes of insanity-fueled searching, I remembered the picture I took of the book before I went to bed and it was still there. I hadn’t made up the memory, the picture proved that I had put the book in the drawer and locked it. That knowledge allowed me to calm enough to get myself ready and out the door, though my legs felt wobbly and everything still felt a bit too surreal.

“So what’s been going on?” the counselor asked, a cliché clipboard full of paper in hand. Her office was filled with inspirational sayings meant to give you courage to pull through hard times. The picture of the golden retriever being hit on the head with a tennis ball with the caption of “You can always try again” did not help to alleviate my uneasiness.

“Um, a lot I guess,” I said, unsure of where to begin.

“Well, start from what you think the beginning is,” she said encouragingly, “It’s okay if it isn’t exactly where your trouble started, just go with what your gut is telling you.”

My gut was currently telling me that it seemed way too coincidental that my counselor looked a little too much like the pizza girl I’ve terrorized and she owns a prominent picture of a golden retriever that looks about as dumb as Bubbles. “I guess it started about two years ago when I was taking a history of the occult class, I found myself… I guess… obsessed with the idea of werewolves.” I flitted my eyes over to her face and she did not yet look horrified. “The details are a little fuzzy, but I started obsessively learning about them and thinking that they were maybe real. I lost a lot of time to reading books and visiting forums all about them.”

Over the duration of my hour long appointment, I laid out just how pathetic my life had become. It was agony as it came out of my mouth, I knew how it must look to someone on the outside of it, she had to feel an overwhelming sense of a mixture of disgust and pity for me. I managed to give her a gist of everything from the beginning to the current issue of my nightmares. I left out everything about Alan and magic the best I could, that could have probably been several other sessions on its own.

When my time was almost up, she stopped me, her hand seemingly cramped from all the writing she did. “Sorry to stop you there, but we are almost out of time. You certainly seem to have been holding in a lot, do you have someone you can trust to talk to?”

A brief mental image of Daniel emerged, but I quickly tossed that idea aside. “Not really, I have a friend, but he’s not really that kind of friend.”

She nodded understandingly, “Okay, well I’d like to see you back next week, but it seems to me that your nightmares are really bothering you. I have some information that you might want to try to see if it helps.” She thumbed through a set of files on her desk and pulled out several sheets of paper stapled together and handed it to me. “There is a special kind of meditation that people swear by to cause something called lucid dreaming. I’ve read that it sometimes helps people with recurring nightmares confront and resolve them. I know yours aren’t exactly the same scenario each time, but you have a similar theme happening, so it might be worth a try. I’ve had some patients try it out and have liked it, but it’s completely up to what you’re comfortable with.”

“I guess it’s better to try than stay on sleeping pills forever.”

“Definitely, hopefully this can get you off of them eventually and back to some sort of normal sleep.” She was genuinely smiling at me, I guess she had probably seen a lot worse, that idea was soothing to me.

I scheduled another appointment for a week later and left the office feeling a little more hope than I had felt in a long time. Maybe all this weirdness in my life could be resolved with some therapy and the right approach. I didn’t know how exactly to parse Alan, Bubbles, and the talk of magic into all of this, but maybe I was just now coming out of some sort of temporary insanity. I shuddered to think, but maybe Daniel had been right all along.

For the rest of the day I studied the packet she had given me, it was full of different techniques for inducing lucid dreaming and warned that it might take several attempts to find a method that worked for me. I was nervous at the thought of potentially having to experience several nights of nightmares before I figured it out, but it was probably worse not to try at all in the long run. I settled on trying out the method of keeping my eyes completely open while trying to fall asleep for the method that night. I had mostly calmed down about the missing book, maybe I would find out during lucid dreaming that I was sleepwalking and moving things around, the most logical answer had to be correct.

That night I settled in to bed with the fluffiest blanket I owned and a large mug of warm milk with a little sugar and cinnamon. Whenever I had trouble sleeping as a little kid, my mom would come into my room with the warm milk mixture and stroke my hair after I finished it until I fell asleep, I almost wished she could have been there, I didn’t quite know how sleeping with my eyes open was going to work. Half an hour after downing the drink, I felt sleepy enough, so I pulled the fluffy blanket up around my neck and snuggled in, eyes wide open. Several minutes later, my eyes felt heavy and groggy, but I was still too uncomfortable to make headway. The final thing that I could think of to make myself more comfortable was to make myself nude. I found myself hoping that there wouldn’t be some freak fire in the night and I wouldn’t end up shivering and embarrassed in the parking lot while the other tenants judged me more than they already did. The change certainly seemed to help and I quickly began to float between the feeling of awake and asleep, as my mind wandered towards more dream like thoughts, I began to quietly chant under my breath. I was unable to stop or change what I was saying, I helplessly repeated, “dreamwalker, control.”

A few moments later, my dream self was transported to Alan’s cluttered living room. Bubbles jumped up as I appeared on the couch, tail wagging madly as he let out small, chirpy barks. I marveled at how well the method had worked on the first try. I could tell that it was a dream and I somehow understood how to control what was happening, there would be nothing holding me down or preventing me from speaking in this dream. To confirm my feelings, I stood up, walked over to Bubbles, and gave him a pat on the head while I told him that he was a good boy. It was uncanny how real Bubbles fur felt against my hand.

“You learned quickly.” Alan stood in the doorway separating the living room from the kitchen. “It took me a few tries before I figured out lucid dreaming, of course you’re not fully in control yet, but practice a few more times and you will be..”

I looked towards him and focused on turning him into anything else, I thought maybe he’d make a handsome seal. Though I felt that I had complete control over my surroundings, he stubbornly stayed human.

“That doesn’t work on other dreamwalkers, I shudder to think what would happen to our physical bodies if we could. The big clue that you still have a bit to practice is that you woke up here and not in your own bedroom, you started dreaming of this room and ended up here. Though you should be able to have control over most things around you, try transforming the coffee table.” He motioned to the coffee table, expectantly. With a bit of focus and creativity, I made the coffee table sprout a luxurious coat of golden retriever fur and a long snout to match. The coffee table gave a happy bark and settled in to mutual grooming with Bubbles.

Amazed at the ability to control the environment, I turned my attention to Alan. “So I can do that to anything here?”

“Like I said, except other dreamwalkers. People tend to be off limits unless they’re someone you’ve completely made up.” To illustrate his point, he cast a glance at a stack of books and it became a very shapely brunette. With a furrow of his brow, she toppled over into several plates of cold spaghetti. “You can change certain things about you though, like clothing.” He said with a deep cough.

I looked down and realized that I was still naked. I quickly imagined what my pajamas looked like and they appeared around me. “Sorry about that.”

He waved away my embarrassment and took a seat on the couch. “So how does it feel to have cast your first spell?”

“Spell? I don’t think this has anything to do with magic, I am just lucid dreaming.”

His eyebrow raised. “You weren’t trying to use magic to get here? Those lame lucid dreaming techniques worked for you? I mean, they’re not wrong that lucid dreaming is kind of a thing, they’re just wrong on method and what exactly it is.”

I shrugged and sat into the arm chair across from him, but not before making it twice as fluffy and luxurious. “I just fell asleep with my eyes open, I guess I was kind of chanting towards the end, I couldn’t really stop it so I was probably just dreaming at that point.”

“Chanting? What were you saying?” He asked, leaning forward eagerly in his chair.

“Uh, I think it was ‘dreamwalkers, control’ over and over again.” As soon as I said it aloud, I felt confusion over having said the word “dreamwalkers” before hearing it from Alan.

Alan sat back in his chair, a look of amazement on his face. “I’m not sure what that means.”

“What does what mean?”

He shook his head and let out a loud belly laugh. “I knew you were going to be an interesting case, but I couldn’t have guessed this. Listen to me,” he emphasized, “you need to get over your fear of learning about magic, get out the papers I gave you, and just do it. Trust me.”

“Trust you? I’m talking to you while lucid dreaming, I just turned a coffee table into a sentient coffee table-shaped golden retriever. None of this is real.”

“Sure, and I won’t show up at your door exactly at 9am tomorrow. By the way, I’m also totally not kicking you out of this dreamworld.” Alan stood, thunderously clapped his hands together, and I started to fall as the world around me disappeared in a flash of light.

I tumbled through the air, darkness as far as I could see. It felt like I fell for several minutes, no end in sight until I made out the outline of my bed far below me. As I tumbled closer, I saw myself still asleep, eyes wide open. I let out a cry of fear as I realized that I was going to crash right into the image.

I woke up with a loud gasp for air, my throat and eyes burned. I threw off my covers and was a bit relieved to find that the clothing hadn’t come with me, the experience had been surreal enough. My room appeared normal around me, nothing seemed to have the same dream quality, so I felt fairly certain that I was indeed awake. The barest amount of morning light shone through my window, it was very early in the morning. It seemed strange that I would have been asleep that long when the whole exchange had felt like it happened in a matter of minutes.

I stumbled, still sleepy to bathroom and ransacked my medicine cabinet for eye drops. Sleeping with my eyes open all night was going to be a pain, it felt like my eyelids were glued open. I managed to find an old bottle and groaned in relief as moisture returned to my eyes. Once the discomfort had been taken care of, I could think more clearly about the unease I felt about my first lucid dreaming experience. It certainly had been better than the nightmares, but I felt very disoriented and the real world seemed to feel a tad more strange. I couldn’t put my finger on it, I was certain I was awake, but the real world seemed a bit less color saturated than it should even though it didn’t really look any different.

It seemed useless to try to go back to sleep after all that, so I got dressed and made some instant oatmeal. Putting some food into me made me feel a bit better, the sensation of reality being off seemed to fade slowly as I sat eating and watching dumb videos on the internet. After binge watching for much longer than I intended, I stretched and glance at the clock, it was a few minutes until nine. Once I made it past nine, I would know just how messed up my life would become.

I pulled my desk chair out of the bedroom and plopped myself right in front of the door, alternating between staring at it and the clock. I held my breath as the hand on my watched ticked down to 9am, then past. I let out my breath and waited another minute before shaking my head. I didn’t know why I even thought it could have been true, I really was struggling to separate the fantastic from the real. I put the chair back in its rightful place and returned to the kitchen to rummage for a snack that probably didn’t exist. I was going to have to suck it up and either find a job or go back to my ramen only days very soon. A knock on the door made me jump, but I felt confident that more than five minutes late meant it was just a coincidence.

My face dropped as I opened the door to a very disheveled looking Alan. He had Bubbles in tow, who also looked like he’d had a rough night.

“Sorry we’re late, someone thought that the coffee table was still a friend and spent a long time licking all the lacquer off of the legs trying to groom it, then puked everywhere. Just… everywhere.” Bubbles burped loudly, then hung his head in guilt. “I had to make sure he had really stopped before we left. He still threw up a couple time on the way over, so sorry if he’s not done.”

I stepped aside and let them in, Bubbles groaned loudly and flopped over as soon as he was clear of the door. “Are you sure he’s going to be okay? Maybe you should have taken him to the vet.”

“He’s ingested much worse and survived. Plus, like I told you before, I’ve figured out a reviving potion for him, he’ll be fine. I couldn’t neglect to show up when I said I would, even if we are a little late.”

“So that was actually real? We actually spoke in my dream?”

“In the dreamworld, yes, subtle difference.” He corrected.

“Whatever, either way, that’s insane and impossible.”

“You believed that men could change their entire biology to become wolves for years and yet you can’t believe that there is an astral plane we can travel to in dreams, despite there being possibly more evidence for it?”

“Yeah, but I also don’t think they’re real anymore, so your point is moot,” I countered.

“Oh they’re real, just not often on this plane,” he said flatly, like it was the most normal statement in the world.

I sat slowly into the couch, covering my face with my hands. “Please don’t tell me that.”

“Sorry if I left you feeling like they weren’t real, that wasn’t my intent, it was merely a luring device. If you want to actually see a werewolf, you just need to dive deep enough into magic.”

“You don’t understand,” I muttered though my hands, “I just got done moving my entire collection of research to a storage unit, I gave up on all of it.”

“If it helps, most of what is written about them is completely wrong. I’m guessing that the vast majority of your time keeping up with research and sightings was completely meaningless. I mean, the whole being controlled by the moon part of it is just completely false. At least the one I know isn’t controlled by it at all.”

“When were you going to tell me that you knew one?!” I cried, causing Bubbles to worriedly whimper.

“When you stopped acting like magic isn’t real and that you can just ignore all of this and it’ll go away. Once magic finds you, it will never leave,” he stated and walked off into my kitchen. “How do you not have a coffee or tea pot? I don’t understand how you live.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t know how to cope with the idea that werewolves and magic could be real. “How do I know this is all real? I need something for certain, concrete that I can point to and know that this isn’t all just a series of convincing hallucinations.”

Alan popped his head out of the kitchen. “You are really resistant to this whole thing. You’ve spent so long believing in the paranormal and yet when you get confirmation, you think you’re crazy? People call me weird, but here.” He walked over to me, opened the bag he had carried in, and placed the book missing from my desk drawer into my hands. “Had Bubbles hop through from the dreamplane to our plane long enough to grab the book. Very tricky and dangerous, he’s just stupid enough to fail his way through it, still figuring out how he does it fine each time.”

I stared at the book for a good long moment, there really was no other good explanation for how he had managed to get it. Not that the explanation that a golden retriever had walked across astral planes to get it was rational or sane.

“It’s all true. Magic, werewolves, vampires, centaurs, they all exist. Mythical creatures are often greatly exaggerated, most of those I’d met are less awesome and more asshole, but they do exist. I won’t even get started on how stupidly magic is usually portrayed. Here, I can give you a taste of it.”

He grabbed two coffee mugs from my cupboard and sat them on the coffee table in front of me. He lowered himself to his knees, then covered each mug with his palms. “Cover your ears and hum.” I must have looked at him strangely, because he clarified. “If you hear what I say to perform magic you may never be able to get my words out of your head and you’ll never be able to perform this on your own.”

Skeptically, I shoved my fingers in my ears and began to hum the national anthem. His lips began to barely move as soon as I started humming, it looked like he was trying to prevent me from even reading his lips. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his hands shook as he griped the mugs. Just as I had gotten to the rousing conclusion of the anthem, he stopped chanting and threw his hands back from the mugs which let out a puff of steam. I pulled my fingers from my ears and he let out a loud “ta da!”

“That’s coffee,” I said, unbelieving that it had actually worked.

“Yes, it is, not great coffee though, take a sip. Make sure you believe it’s real.” He was right, the coffee was pretty lousy. “I haven’t fully perfected the spell yet. To be fair, magic can be pretty impractical for everyday things. Why spend weeks perfecting a coffee spell when you can just buy it? That’s part of my theory of why magic has fallen out of favor over time, technology made magic impractical. So my coffee is bad diner quality, but it’ll do in a pinch.”

“Okay, so magic is real, I guess,” I admitted. “That doesn’t bode well for me, I already have an addictive personality for the strange and fantastic.”

He sipped his coffee and grimaced. “You’ll be a great magician then. You have to be obsessive about learning or you never will. I used to have more of a life, believe it or not. I actually had a rowing scholarship and was a promising neurobiology student.”

I looked over his withering physique, I was pretty sure that I could take him and that was not saying much. His scraggly beard and long greasy hair also did not scream academia or sports. “Are you sure that was you?”

“Positive.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and passed me a picture from it. It was a picture of a much cleaner and bulked out Alan. “I used to be hot, but prices to pay and all that.”

“You’re not really selling this whole thing.”

“I think you’ll disagree when it dawns on you that you might be able to eventually make yourself immortal or at least live way longer than you should. I used to use diet and exercise to try to extend my life, but I realized that without magical intervention I could succumb to something I didn’t even know about, like a recessive heart problem despite whatever I did.” His face became sad and he set down his coffee. “If only my dad had been the one to find the journal in time, maybe he could have gotten that for himself. 35 is way too young to go.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, it was almost ten years ago. I just don’t want to go the same way and if history tries to repeat, I only have 5 years left to figure it out. I’m getting closer though.” He wiped a tear away from his eye quickly and tried to pass it off like his nose itched. I could tell that he really didn’t want me to notice.

“How close are you?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“It’s actually kind of hard to tell. I have to be very careful of testing things on myself and it’s not like I can just test it on someone else, everyone will have their own subtle nuances required for it to fully work for them. I have… tried some things on some ‘cadavers,’” he emphasized with air quotes, “but it’s hard to translate that to the living me.”

“Cadavers? Dead people?”

“I may have dug up a body or two fresh after burial to test a few things. Remember how when we first met that I mentioned that people tend to come back as zombies? Yeah, now you understand how I know that.”

“Do you just kill them again or leave them? I think people would be really pissed if you resurrected grandma just to put her down again.” Daniel was not wrong that Alan seemed a little creepy.

“Um, it’s complicated to say the least. Tell you what, if you really want to know, the next time I hear of a good candidate, come along with me and you can see yourself. Reality so much weirder than you think.”

“I think I’m beginning to tell.”

“Not even close,” he said with a shake of his head, “it’s so much worse the farther you get. Certain things are no longer scary and everyday mundane things become terrifying, I actually get scared by the thought of how many people in the world don’t see the world for how it really is. People would not take casual strolls alone anymore, I can promise that.” With a shudder he stood, took both of our cups and put them in the kitchen sink, then gathered Bubble’s leash. “Consider getting a dog. Not a cat. Cats can see supernatural things much easier and have no problem with ditching you to get eaten while they save themselves. Dogs are dumb enough to be brave.”

“I can’t have pets in this building.”

“Fix that when you can, trust me that you won’t want to live alone and living with someone who doesn’t understand the magical world will not work either.” Before I could protest or reply he had dragged Bubbles out of the door and was closing it behind him. “Have to run, will explain at some point, get to practicing.”