"So, is this the kind of scenario in which a janitor seduces a housewife?" Chanyeol asked and looked around the wide hall. None of the actresses who walked around wore anything that looked like an apron, and no one took notice of them standing around aimlessly, but there was a built-in kitchen set close-by, so Chanyeol probably just jumped to conclusions.  

"Is your dream to become an actor?" Chanyeol asked and made an tiny awkward pause at the word 'actor', when there was no answer. The guy in his overall seemed to shrink even more, and  looked as if he tried to hide behind the broom he carried.
At this rate he probably wasn't too eager to wake up anytime soon, not after knowing that his old classmate, her brother and some random other boy in a high school uniform had seen that his dream world apparently was a set.
It clearly didn't help that they were all taller than him, too. They must have seemed like a SWAT team to him.

"This is my job," the guy said, and before Chanyeol had a chance to get even more excited, he added. "I work part-time for a cleaning company. This is one of our clients."

"So that's why you never talked about it," Juri said, and her words had an even bigger impact on the world around them. All the actors and staff members around them dropped to the ground and moved as if they had painful cramps.

Juri shrieked and stumbled backwards, when the actresses' limbs got twisted and stretched out. Their bodies slowly changed into those of oddly spidery creatures.

Juri screamed, and disappeared, as she woke up.
Kai sighed. "Sorry about that," he muttered, and followed her.

Back in the hospital she looked at the sleeping boy as if she couldn't believe that his dream had not been cuter.

"What was that?" she asked in confusion. "Just what the hell is wrong with him?"

Kai shrugged. "Nothing. That's what dreams are like."

"But," she began, and must have realized that she had been too naive. Unconsciously she had seen some of the dreams of her family members, people she knew much more closely than a boy she was friends with, so she must have assumed that everyone's dreams were like theirs. But her family wasn't normal to begin with.
"So where the hell did your stupid friend suddenly come from?" she then asked furiously, and looked around as if he could turn up at any moment. "I mean, it can't possibly go well with him around, can it? You should know better than to invite him along, Jongin. Seriously, I didn't ask you to help me, so that you and that idiot can have some fun. I can't do this myself." She looked at the sleeping figure that only seemed to exist because it was connected to humming machines.

"I need Minseok to wake up," she quietly said.

---

It had been a little over three weeks since Kim Minseok had fallen into a coma after being hit by a car. One of his job was to deliver Chinese food on a bike at night. The driver had been drunk.

Kai's second oldest sister Juri and him had been classmates in high school, and even now that they both attended different universities they were still friends. When she heard that he had been into accident, she had immediately rushed to the hospital, and when he just hadn't woken up for weeks, she had done something she wouldn't have done under normal circumstances. She had asked her brother for help.

Juri knew that it was possible to walk into dreams, and she knew that she sometimes did so herself. But her grandfather didn't take girls serious, and she had never seen the advantage of dreamwalking, probably because Kai sometimes made a fuss about her invading his privacy.
"I rather sleep peacefully than to be so aware of my dream, I can't sleep at all," she would say.

Things changed when her only way of connecting with someone was through their dream.

"His mother told me that the doctors don't know why he doesn't wake up," she said and sounded so miserable, Kai couldn't just ignore her. "His body is fine. It just doesn't make sense. Why would he prefer to sleep?"

---

Juri's consciousness began to seep into Kim Minseok's dream like water from a leaking pipe. She was furious and confused and hurt, and the ground shook. The spidery creatures the actresses had permanently turned into were swept away by a storm, and Kim Minseok himself looked panicked at the influence Juri had on his world. His thoughts were unfiltered, and her forcefulness caused his mind to turn into an even greater mess.

"Just what is wrong with you?" she yelled again. She kept repeating the question, no matter how often Kai told her that there was no such a thing as 'wrong' in a dream. No one had to apologize for their subconscious thoughts, and people who weren't used to intruders, had no control over what they showed.

But Juri wasn't rational. She was driven by her own wishes.

"What's so great about all this?" she asked and aggressively pointed at the creatures making obscene noises in their pain.

Kim Minseok tried to escape into another memory, but Juri grabbed the back of his overall and held him back. The way she towered over him seemed  to scare him a lot more than anything his dream showed.

A new memory crashed into the old one. The set was overlayered by a crammy Chinese restaurant. A skinny waitress came by and threw a delivery jacket over his shoulder and handed him a metal box that contained a noodle dish. He hesitated, because Juri still didn't let go.

She had already gone too far.

"Noona, don't you think that you've done enough?" Kai asked, although it wasn't meant as a question. Had she not been his older sister, he would have thrown her out of the dream already. The only reason why he agreed to accompany every time was that he feared her doing even more damage on her own.

"No," she said, all the while glaring at Kim Minseok. "No, I do in fact not think that I've done enough. Because this idiot still hasn't explained himself."

Kim Minseok blinked. The waitress angrily pushed the metal box at him. "Ah, sorry, I'm on my way," he muttered, and just walked right through Juri.

"Minseok," she exclaimed, and was about to dash after him, when Chanyeol interrupted her.

"You might kill him if you're too pushy," he said and sat down at one of the tables in the restaurant, right next to a girl eating a doodle dish. A camera of the other dream space stuck out of it, but the girl didn't seem to mind. Her chopsticks slid right through the cables.

Juri gave him an odd look, and stopped.

"Noona, let's go," Kai said.

---

Juri didn't give up, but after a while she began to understand the things she saw.

Each of Kim Minseok's dreams showed him at work or at university. He cleaned sets and toilets and empty office buildings. He delivered noodles, always close to being run over by terrible drivers. He cleaned car windows, peeled onions, missed his last bus home. At night he studied, in the morning he delivered newspapers. There were no breaks, no happiness, no smiles.

The only memory that ever seemed to bring him some peace was the one in which a car hit him and gave him a chance to have a break.

"You're tired, aren't you?" she asked when he lay at the side of the road, barely conscious. His body seemed unharmed, although the bike was in a terrible state. The problem was the impact on his brain.

He rubbed his head and closed his eyes. "Yeah," he quietly said, and took a deep breath before he rolled on his side and got up. He changed into his overall and left the road to enter a skyscraper with large open spaces. Day changed into night, and he was still caught in his endless cycle of study and work.

"Is that why you don't want to wake up?" she asked when he mopped  a floor until it became transparent. Under it were another memory and another Kim Minseok with another mop.

She sighed, and he paused.

"Look, Minseok, I might not visit you again," she said, and he blinked. "But that doesn't mean that I'll forget you. You can take your time, but I hope you know that there are many people you keep waiting."

She liked him.
But she knew the rules, and she finally understood why she wasn't supposed to see the insides of someone who really meant something to her.

"We'll be there for you when you come back," she smiled.

Kim Minseok nodded, and went back to work.

---

Juri sat at the kitchen table and yawned when Kai entered the room. She looked at least as tired and worn out as he felt. They had argued in his dream, when she barged in by accident.

It had been a while since she had last seen his dreams, so it must have surprised her when she entered a mess of memories and thoughts. She usually hadn't even seemed to notice that her mind was wandering, but this time she had stopped and watched.

Kai's dreams were in a terrible state, because he barely managed to sleep. Now that he was conscious inside his dream world, he involuntarily caused it to grow more vivid and detailed.

"Did you tell Grandfather?", she had asked, when a younger version of her taught a younger version of him how to ride a bike. "Does he know that you don't sleep?"

Kai had shaken his head, and had tried to hold his memories back. It was embarrassing how normal his world had become.

"I mean, I'm no expert at this," she had frowned and looked around. "But isn't it dangerous if you're awake in your dream? You might lose your sense of reality."
Her gaze had stopped when it had met that of Chanyeol who had watched them from a corner. Even to her it must have seemed obvious that something about him was slightly different.

"I know what I'm doing," Kai had said, although he hadn't been so sure whether he really did. It had taken him all his might to make the memories disappear. They had faded away until only the pale version of his room and Chanyeol hade been left.

Chanyeol had flinched when his presence became even more evident.

"Why is he here?" Juri had asked in confusion, and when Kai had just avoided her, she had got furious. "What the hell is he doing in your dream? Why is he always around? Is that why you're not sleeping?"

"That's not it," Kai had begun, but that was exactly what it was.

The real Chanyeol was lost, his impostor had taken his body, and the only one left Kai could still talk to was the one he only saw in his mind.

He liked to think that he needed to consult him to make sure that he would find the real one faster. But in the end that probably just was a lame excuse, because the Chanyeol in his mind couldn't possibly know anything he didn't know himself.

Juri meanwhile misunderstood him. It was too dangerous to tell her the real reason why Chanyeol would be in his mind, so she just assumed that he was real.

"He's a hypocrite and you know that," she said when they left the house and walked to the train station. "He told me to stay away from Minseok's dream, because I'm not supposed to enter the mind of someone who means something to me. But isn't that exactly what he's doing now?"

Kai acted as though he couldn't hear her.

"To you it's probably not that obvious, Jongin, but your dream was a mess. I've never seen you like that."

He looked at his feet and at the grey street they walked on.

"Look, I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I don't want to watch you lose yourself, just because you allowed someone to break into your mind."