It was just a dream. I wish I could believe in that lie. But dreams did not lie and it would be abundantly clear after this mission if I got permission to stay in my community. 

I had never been a particularly good student when it came to dream walking. While I was being bullied at school for still reading at half the level of someone my age, my sister Sophia had been a flawless creature. We had grown up in a community that was known to the country as the Spiritual Guidance, and she thrived in it. We did dream walkingn a session where, in a drugged state, we could wander in someone else's dream and interpret the things they were dreaming. We saw it as the best way to learn about one’s soul and living life according to what it was telling us it wanted and needed. In later years, the most down-to-earth Dream Walkers, like Sophia, thought we could use our skills to pay the bills, and the advertisements on social media had people from all over the country travelling to us for guidance. As Sophia used her charisma and marketing skills to enhance our trust with the world, she was considered a vital asset to our growing bank accounts. My confidence shrunk in her presence, but when she noticed that I shunned myself out of sight from the teacher’s disappointed looks, she stood beside me and clearly announced that I would too be the greatest Dream Walker anyone had ever seen someday, and if her questioned her, they might as well fire her from her position. 

One time, when I was feeling really low, she locked us in a wardrobe to be completely discreet. She taught me a trick she had mastered without anyone knowing. She took an apple, drew something on it that I couldn’t see, and asked me if I consented to her dream walking in my dreams that night. Those were the rules of dream walking, it had to be consented to. Of course I nodded, so in my dreams that night, I saw her holding out the apple for me to see. I took it from her hand and turned it to reveal a big heart on it. The next morning, she asked me what she had drawn on the apple. 

“A heart”, I said. 

A smile as big as her hand beamed across her face. “Now think about that next time Susanna at school is being mean to you. Not many people would be able to see nor touch the apple, Helen.”

“Isn’t it only because we are related? The teacher’s told me siblings can connect much more easily in dreams.”

She frowned. “It’s still really hard, why do you think our dream walking community is so small?”

Those were the days. Whenever any of my classmates shunned me aside in group assignments or my teachers sighed at me, I still saw that apple every night in my dreams and was reminded of a brighter future, somewhere down the lines. Now, as I walked in her dream, it felt like I wasn't even welcomed. All around me I saw nothing but a black void, it had no damn thing to hold onto to keep my restless body from pacing, and it was so cold. The only thing I could see was the gun that lay a few feet away. I must have dropped it when I was here last time. Despite there being no light in here, the gun glared at me with its glistening metal as I sprinted to it and kicked it. It flew a couple of yards into the darkness, but still never stopped shining. I screamed, when suddenly my fury was interrupted by an intense feeling that someone was standing behind me. I whipped around. Behind me stood Sophia. 

“Cold blue ice” Sophia murmured, looking at her feet. “Too quiet. No, when was why…” she slurred. I frowned, but then I remembered that as she was sleeping, she probably wouldn't make sense in a dream. 

“Sophia…” I didn’t mean to whisper, but I barely dared to face her. She looked terrible, with pale, sweaty skin that showed off her veins, but her eyes glowed like fire. 

“Shut up”, she sneered. 

Her fury got me thinking of what would happen if she saw the gun and understood its former purpose, so I mustered up the most soothing voice I could while retracing my steps backwards to where I had thrown the gun. 

“You will be okay, Sophia. This is not your fault, you just have to explain to-

“My fault? How could this be my fault? I have not done anything to be ridden of all constructive thinking and fears, and I’m supposed to take the blame?”

I retracted as fast as I could until I fell backwards. She came storming after me and pulled me by the collar, shaking it.

“I woke up one day and it was like nothing mattered! I didn’t see any point in protecting myself or anyone! I see, you want me to tell that to the teachers, to the customers, so that I will be banished from the community! Well that will go fast, as you wish!” She squinted her eyes in an effort to force herself awake, but I yelled. 

“No, wait! Stop!”

“Why?”

 I prayed her rage would blind her of what was going on as my hand furiously searched for something metallic. But suddenly I touched something so fast that it steered out from behind me and caught Sophia’s attention. 

“A gun? What the hell is a gun doing here?”

“It’s not what it looks like-”

“I have never seen that gun before. How could it be here then?”

I didn’t dare to breathe. When she picked up the gun she looked genuinely concerned. 

“You were the only one I taught that trick to. No one else knows how to materialise objects from the waking world in a dream. Why did you do it?”

“Please…” I tried but my throat clogged in tears. “Don’t tell anyone. They will kick me out, they will kick us both out!”

Dinners, any family gatherings or dream training were a thing of the past for Sophia. Since last year ended I had barely spent time with her as a sister. She would say she was eating outside, or going on walks, or going with her new boyfriend or her friends, to avoid spending time with me, our family or the teachers. But when I talked to her friends at school, they said that they had barely hung out since sixth grade, and they had never seen her with a boy. After such a day she would get into a fight with our mom about how she needed more money, but that was where it broke for both my parents. She only caved in after dad gave her the deal of showing off her dream walking skills in exchange for money. The nights when she actually slept in her bed, I crept up to her bedside and prayed, but it was hard to focus when the tying knot in my stomach only was proven right as she would toss and turn and moan and whisper incoherently. Our family and teachers held a meeting every evening to discuss her downfall and it often ended in a heated fight, because no one knew what the reason was, or how to fix it. 

“Look”, she said. “I know I haven't been the best sister lately. You have probably been told to dream walking in my mind to find out what I have been up to. But since you are clearly hiding something, I feel like things will continue as they have gone if we don’t sort this out right now.”

I felt like my heart was about to beat out of my chest. 

“I did-”

“Yes?”

“You don’t know what it was like! They were relentless! Susanna and her friends would chase me all over the school! They caught me once and stripped me and boiled water to wash over my head. I had to do something!”

She stared. “So what did you do?”

“I couldn’t do it with anyone else. You are my sister, i could more easily get into your head-”

“You got into my head without permission? Like, dream walked?”

I felt as though I was falling through quick sand. “I’m sorry…”

“Just tell me what you did!”

“I used your trick and got the gun in here. But as soon as I found it, I didn’t want to use it! I just saw something that scared me, and then a hundred things that scared me, and I used the gun as protection.”

Sophia went silent. Her eyes flickered as if she was trying to keep up with all the racing thoughts in her head. 

“Is this why this place is empty? Because you killed all of my nightmares?”

“I didn’t know you had so many nightmares…”

“Is this why I have been feeling so nonchalantly about my own safety?" 

“What have you been doing this year?” I whispered. 

“Drugging myself, mostly. Car-hopping. Stripping. Anything I felt like.”

She said it like she hadn’t given it a second thought. 

“Did you never get in any trouble?

“Of course I did”, she said. “I got mugged a lot. Caught with the police. I just always thought of it as a one-time happening. I didn’t think that because it had happened once, it could happen again.”

The links were painfully obvious. She lacked the ability of mapping out the world according to her negative experiences. All the monsters in her mind were dead by my hand and had not come back, by the look of this black void. No fears held her back like they had done over a year ago, so she didn’t understand the point of being careful.

I slumped down. If we came back and neither of us had a solution to how to fix her problems, the community would banish us both. 

“Oh don’t even think like that”, Sophia hissed, like she read my mind. “This is your fault.”

“I’m so sorry, Sophia.” I looked up at her, expecting to see hopelessness. 

“And I suppose you didn’t think to tell anyone early aout this disaster, because you knew that what you were doing was wrong? Getting into a non-consented mind. You’d rather left me to my faith? Don’t say you didn’t know why I was acting this way.”

She turned her back on me. The darkness almost seemed light compared to hers. For a long time we didn’t say anything. 

“You’ve put yourself in trouble, Helen. You can choose between two options. Either we wait here until we wake up, and you go back to the real world without any evidence that what you have achieved here will have an effect on my behaviour. You can watch me from the window as I commit all sorts of heretic actions and have no say in it. You will be considered a disgrace to the spirit community and no one will stop the bullies from continuing their reign over you. Our reputation will go down the drain. I know you won’t be able to go that route.”

She fixed her eyes on me for the next part. 

“Or you can accept the role that you have given yourself. You are the culprit of my bad memories now. Or rather, no memories at all, good or bad, but you are the unpleasant revelation to what’s wrong with me. That I will make sure to remember! I’m not even sure I could forget about it. I will hunt you down, day and night, year after year, until one of us dies. But you will take it because that means that they will get their Sophia back. She will finally have a sense of purpose, something worth fighting, and you won’t have to deal with the shame. No one will know what happened while you were in my brain, I promise.”