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James read somewhere years ago that you can tell if you’re dreaming by finding a clock and examining it closely. Apparently, in dreams, clocks never look quite right. The hands will spin counterclockwise, or the numbers will be all out of order, or the whole clock will shrink or grow or jump off the wall.
So James started paying attention to the clocks.
At first, it was a bit of a joke with himself. Haha, wouldn’t it be crazy if it turned out this was a dream and I didn’t know it?
Then it became a slight worry. Things have been feeling a bit unreal lately, is it possible this is just a dream?
The real problems came when the clocks started to behave strangely.
It starts small. James looks at a clock and for a brief moment, and it appears a bit misshapen. He pauses, curious, then stares at it longer and finds that it may be sliding down the wall just a bit. Startled, he blinks, and the clock goes right back to normal.
This happens every so often, and each time, the clock slides down the wall a little further before James can blink and bring it back to normal.
The eighth time it happens, James is alone in his bedroom writing a letter to his mother when he pauses in thought and looks up to check the clock. As is now common for him, the clock starts to slide down the wall, and James blinks it away. Only, the clock didn’t blink back to normal at all.
James blinks again—still sliding. Then again and again and again, and still the clock slides down the wall, dripping lower as if it’s melting towards the floor. Finally, James looks away then back to the wall, where the clock hangs in its normal position.
Before he can let out a sigh of relief, it starts sliding down again. And now James is getting frightened. This was never supposed to happen! Is he dreaming? James looks around the rest of the room, empty of people except for himself. Everything here looks norma—
What was that?
There, in the corner of his eye, what was that?
There! He almost didn’t notice it, but there’s a figure right in the periphery of his vision. It’s silhouetted in shadow, so tall that it touches the ceiling. James can’t see it fully, but it is terrifying. James tries to move his head so that it’s in the center of his vision, but every time he moves his head, the shadow figure moves as well.
Okay, that’s okay, it just means I’m in a dream. I must’ve fallen asleep writing to Mum, nothing to worry about! And if I’m lucid in this dream I should be able to control it! Fear is still clawing at his chest, but James is a Gryffindor, through and through, so he steadfastly ignores it.
The first thing he does is try to fly. It’s his favorite thing on a broom, so of course he’d like to fly without one! He imagines it perfectly in his head, how it would feel to float in the air, no ground or broom below him.
It doesn’t work.
He tries jumping for a bit. That also doesn’t work, and he laughs to himself about how he must look, jumping in an empty room. He takes a quick peek to the side and confirms that yes, the shadow figure is still there. It’s only lurking, not doing anything harmful, but James feels unsettled all the same.
Alright, so maybe he should try to banish it from the dream. In hindsight, maybe he should have tried that first, but he got too excited over the thought of being able to fly.
James tries to think the figure away, and still it stays in the corner of his eye. He tries to think harder, shutting his eyes tightly, thinking at it go away, go away go away.
When James opens his eyes, he doesn’t notice the shadow figure. He starts to smile in relief until he realizes—there it is again! Right in the periphery of his vision.
James thinks now would be a great time to wake up, so he pinches his arm.
Nothing.
At this point, James looks back at the clock. It is once again sliding down the wall. Okay, so definitely still dreaming. If I go to sleep here maybe I’ll wake up in real life? It’s worth a try, anyway. It is only 8:49 PM, according to the falling clock, but James would rather just wake up at this point.
He climbs into bed and falls asleep easily.
When James wakes up, the first thing he does is check the clock in the room. He stares at it for several seconds, but it doesn’t appear to be moving. Back to reality, then.
Two days later, it happens again. He’s doing a routine clock check and it all goes the same exact way it did before. The sliding clock, blinking not working, looking away not working, the shadow creature. It’s such an odd dream to occur twice, and the oddest thing about it is that it doesn’t fully feel like a dream. Yes, James feels a bit strange and unmoored as in a dream, but the images around him—save for the shadow figure—are much clearer than they typically are in his dreams.
This is concerning, a little.
But what is he supposed to do? It’s all very benign. Maybe someone is just playing a harmless prank on him and charmed him in this very unusual and specific way. Maybe there really is a creature in his room, the likes of which James has never heard of, that somehow has the uncanny ability of always staying in the corner of his eye. (He should ask Regulus about that one; he's the biggest magical creature enthusiast James knows.) Regardless, it’s not really a big deal. He might as well just let it slide.
James would probably give it more thought if more pressing matters weren’t taking up his attention. He’s 22, navigating co-parenting, best man duties for Sirius, and a secret, borderline-obsessive crush on a certain Regulus Black. It’s a lot. Weird dreams or visions cannot be the center of his attention right now. He doesn’t have time for that.
It gets worse. Everything does, really.
James loses himself, but his friends are there.
Five months after the clocks begin sliding, James is diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder with Psychosis. He comes to the conclusion that clocks are not a good measure for him to determine whether or not he’s dreaming.
The shadow creature all but disappears from his life, but clock hallucinations regularly recur every so often. During one such recurrence, James becomes so frightened and enraged that he smashes every clock in the house. Sirius comes back to their shared home and sets about making special clocks for James. They are beautiful and ornate and, most importantly, covered. The clock faces can only be seen when the covers are opened with a gentle spell. It helps tremendously.
This doesn’t solve the issue when James is out of the house, but he finally feels free of the clocks at home, and a blanket of safety he didn’t know he’d been missing now covers the place.
Years later, James still keeps the clocks to a minimum. Therapy has helped him stop obsessively watching them, but James still dislikes clocks. He does, however, like the mid-sized black covered clock in his and Regulus’s bedroom. Regulus commissioned it from Sirius for his own room when he heard about James’s issue with clocks, before the two of them even got together. It hangs in the corner of their room furthest from the bed. Both James and Regulus have perfected the cover-opening spell wandlessly.
James will never be the kind of person who can look at a clock to tell if he’s dreaming or not, but he is the kind of person who has loved ones that will go out of their way to make him feel more comfortable, and he is perfectly content with that.