Chapter 97

Zoey’s consciousness expanded, one awareness traded for another. She floated from high above, formless, with pinpricks of light bursting into existence beneath her. Tens of thousands of them, varying colors, linked by spindly, trailing ribbons connecting the points in a spiderweb of dizzying complexity.

It took a second to organize her thoughts. Having a moment ago been chemically knocked unconscious, she had to fight off a fogginess in her brain. It lifted slowly. She found herself floating, without a body, above the sea of lights and interconnecting ribbons.

She tried to make sense of it.

‘Open the consumer’s mind to the dream world’ had been the potion’s description. So this was that, then? The dream world? Were each of those colorful lights a dream? The mass floated too far away to make out in detail. Could she move, somehow?

It came naturally. Her formless body drifted, guided by her intent, descending into the ocean. While from above it had looked like the lights were all at the same elevation, as she approached, she saw that wasn’t true. There was a depth, with some orbs higher and lower, though not by much. The sky, and the space above the mass, however, was empty.

The pinpricks expanded into orbs as she neared. Strangely, the ribbons stayed the same size, despite her descent, not growing with her shifting perspective as they should. It was a disorienting effect.

She did her best to ignore it, growing vaguely nauseous. With the nearest orb nearly on her, she focused on that, instead. The glassy, misty sphere grew until she could make out details.

A scene played out inside the orb’s depths. Fascinated, Zoey finished closing the gap. The image was discernible, though not clear. It seemed to be a stress dream, the unfortunate subject—a middle-aged woman with short brown hair—having an animated, heated conversation with someone important to her.

She could almost hear what they were saying. Zoey pressed a little bit closer, and—

And bumped her head. Not that she had a head, being a formless, floating construct of thought, but that was what it felt like. She’d been rejected from inspecting the orb—the dream?—closer. Or perhaps from entering it.

She wondered why. The orb had a yellow tint to it. Did the colors mean something? Looking around, other lights—some near, some far—had different hues and of varying vibrancies.

Zoey watched the woman’s dream for a few moments, running her fingers—her mind’s fingers?—across the glassy-mist pane, questingly, testing for weaknesses or a way in. But Zoey was barred from this one. Surely not all? It would make this adventure rather anticlimactic.

Considering her class, Zoey had a suspicious how this would work. If there were a category of dreams she were allowed to slip into, what would it be?

Zoey turned away from the yellow-tinted orb. She floated upward, leaving the previous behind, and scanned the ocean in front of her.

Sex dreams. Obviously, those would be the ones Zoey could invade, or had some sort of affinity toward. How did she identify which those were?

Were the colors identification? Describing the type of dream? And maybe the saturation described the intensity?

What color would sex dreams be?

Pink, Zoey settled on, eyes falling onto the nearest. She descended back into the sea of pinpricks and lines, approaching the orb.

Her theory over color categorizations was proved in short order. Inside the vision—foggy, as the previous, but clear enough to see—a blonde woman was being thoroughly handled by three men. Zoey paused, despite having expected something of the sorts, then politely withdrew. Beyond not wanting to join in on that scenario, for obvious reasons, she’d rather find a dream that was more in the ‘beginning’ stages than the ‘well into them’.

Plus, more even than the prospect of getting to play around in strangers’ dreams, she found herself intrigued by the landscape in general. The dreamworld and how it worked. She wanted to explore more before diving in.

The previous orb had been deeply tinted, which would line up with her suspicion that intensity of the hue meant intensity of the dream. Deep pink, to represent the woman’s erotic dream that had been well underway.

Ascending to get a better view, Zoey searched through the ocean of spheres, then, identifying a lighter pink one, pulled close.

Her second guess was right. Or at least not proved wrong, since two points of data couldn’t guarantee anything. But this dream, a softer hue of pink, featured two men trapped in a closet together. Zoey got the impression it was a memory being relived. The dream hadn’t actually taken the turn toward what it was obviously leading to. Zoey assumed once it did, the hue tinting the misty sphere would darken considerably.