In Minhyun’s presence it was possible to leave one’s own dream and enter the connecting scape. A disturbing experience for Ren who had not expected to feel completely lost once he stepped out of his dream.

A void – white but not blindingly so, diffuse and fog-like with no definitive direction or volume.

The strangest thing was perhaps to see his dream from the outside. A fractal-like scaffolding of sorts, fading into the void, held his dream’s fragments in place. The frozen landscape with the sanctuary still inside and the starry sky overhead – spotty and unfocused where Ren’s attention hadn’t been during his time inside – shrunk to the size of a diorama as Minhyun took him along.

“It’s the middle of the day,” Minhyun explained, “So there isn’t much going on. You should see it in a city at night. It’s an adventure without comparison.”

Aware he was still clad in a strange tunic, Ren tested his lucid dreamer abilities and created himself a new outfit just by looking down on himself the second after he thought of the items. Dim black clothing, comfortable but appropriately tight fitting for a journey.

***

The first dream was a living room. Bleak, earth tones, a bit dusty.

About three fourth of the room existed, the rest was so defocused that the white void seemed to be taking it back. All in all it looked like something between a theater backdrop and an unfinished level in one of Junior’s games.

A boy was crying in an alcove, barely visible behind a curtain. His sobbing was the only sound. Japanese was even harder to understand if the speaker was weeping. “They took her”, he mumbled, “mom is gone.” Those words were repeated often enough to make out.

“Can we help him?” Ren asked. “Not in the dream I mean. In real life. We should find out if his mom was really kidnapped.”

Minhyun shook his head. “Look at the furniture. This style is from decades ago. We’re seeing the childhood dream of an old, old man. Probably from the war.”

Now that it had been pointed out, the age of the scenery was obvious. Ren trusted the other boy’s expert judgement and they flew away. This was a research mission after all.

The next dream was a house of strange geometry, definitely not Japanese, Korean or Western style. The woman, whose dream it presumably was, tended to something that could have been a bookshelf or a potted plant at the same time. There were a few other strangely textured pieces of furniture whose purpose wasn’t apparent – was that teakettle dancing? –, but the thing Ren noticed the most was the total absence of sound.

For a moment it had been difficult to pinpoint. The void itself didn’t make any noises, but when he realized that he couldn’t even hear his own voice anymore it became clear.

“I think” Minhyun said – through a link –, “she’s deaf in real life. Let’s look at this from above.”

They flew out of the dream and looked down on it, strengthening the half-finished-backdrop-analogy Ren used to stay oriented. He wondered if Minhyun was linking with him in the real world and talking from the outside or if he was capable of nested links. He further wondered which of those possibilities would have been more amazing.

“Try sensing her,” Minhyun said with an inviting gesture.

Ren did what he always did to sense others. Simply letting the ambient information drizzle his way. This time that didn’t work as planned. But something was there.

“It’s vague,” Ren said, “I’m getting something but it’s not from her. I don’t know. Is it possible the emotions are somewhere else around here? A core of the dream perhaps? Or a tether to the sleeping person?”

“Now that I think about it,” Minhyun said, “the woman you see down there, pruning her bonsai bookshelves, is merely an avatar. She not the person dreaming and possibly not even an image of her. Actually, with the reds and greens being so washed out to almost brown I’d guess the dreamer is likely male. Perhaps this character is a famil-“

“Your point is?”

“Right,” Minhyun said, shaking his head. “It’s not the people in the dream. It’s the whole dream itself that feels the emotions. Any character is at best a representation of an aspect or a fleeting role assumed by the dreamer.”

That sounded about as sensible as any other explanation. Ren tried again, this time deliberately sensing the environment as if it was a single entity. The drizzle focused in the same degree as his awareness expanded across the shifting fragments below.

“Woah,” he said slowly. “I can see everything. It’s so different. I suppose when we sleep we’re working through the stuff we experienced during the day, so this is a lot more… fluid, even evanescent. These experiences aren’t meant to become memories.”

Minhyun smiled at him. “You figured that out fast.”

“I also go to sleep sometime you know. I have regular human experiences.”

“I know, I know. Of course you sleep. When you aren’t busy with Junior, experimenting with different posit-“

“Let’s just move on, shall we? …Actually, what do you know about me and Junior? We haven’t even made that official. Wait, you don’t go into our dreams, do you?”

“You’re right, we should move on.”

“Minhyun!”

“Moving on now.”

***

There were more dreams and each one was different and unique and disturbing in some way. Ren had to admit that even knowing what people felt during waking life, it was infinitely stranger what their subconscious could cook up, untamed by rationale.

There were dreams in grayscale, where children rode on demons; dreams made of music; some full of blood and despair; some full of conversations that made no sense and whose participants changed every few moments; one where empires of black rose and were defeated by white ones just to start the cycle anew, happening entirely on a Go board; even senseless amalgams of shapes and noise.

By the end of their run Ren had learned to read the feelings of impossible worlds, perceiving the emotional depths of landscapes and architecture.

“Ren?”

“Yes?”

“I think we’re long past the limits of your reach. The dreams here are so plenty we can’t possibly be using the few huts around the dojo. This is the city.”

They had made it. They had proven that working together could expand Ren’s reach. Back in the real world several hours must have past.

“One last thing,” the empath said, “before we wake up. I want to see if I can make Conmotes in here.”

He grabbed the dreams and shaped them into desires – compressing the layers between individual sleeper’s experiences. But nothing happened. Ren spent a few more moments trying but even though he felt as if the Conmote had successfully formed, it slipped from his grasp a second after creation and failed to show up at all.

Minhyun sighed. “I guess your plan didn’t quite work out how we wanted it. But this was just the beginning of our experiments. Next time, maybe we can see if I can hijack your empathy to expand my link to a cluster the size of your reach.”

“Sure. So… How do we wake up?”

“That’s the fun part. Aaaand… woops!”

Minhyun shoved his friend to topple him. Ren dropped out of the scape.

When he opened his eyes, the two of them were completely surrounded.