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“Why am I hearing student rumors about you being in their classes?” Hob demanded, hands on his hips. Dream, lounging on the couch in his office, didn’t deign to get up. “Is there some kind of Dream lookalike on campus I need to be aware of? Or are you just tormenting them again?”
“Tormenting your students is only one of my many activities,” Dream drawled. Hob frowned disapprovingly, which Dream found quite amusing. “But this is not one of those times. Am I not allowed to explore the university?”
“Well, you aren’t actually enrolled here, but I’m sure you’ve found a way around that.”
“Nobody dares to question me.”
Hob shook his head, but the admonishment in the gesture quickly ceded to fondness. “I’m sure they start daydreaming too quickly. What classes are you taking, anyway?”
Dream smiled, pressing his hands together. “For now, that is my secret.”
Hob sighed, but ultimately smiled. “Alright, you. Be all mysterious if you must.”
Dream would. He was no longer such a mystery to Hob as he had been in the past, nor did he want to be. But it was good to hold some things for himself. And it was always fun to keep Hob speculating.
Hob would learn about his newfound human hobbies soon enough, anyway.
Crafting with his hands was… meditative. Dream understood, then, why humans spent time trying to banish their many thoughts and daydreams with stillness and silence – he had become so used to the cacophony that lived within him that it was startling to feel it recede to the background. Startling, and peaceful, a moment of clarity for deep focus and reevaluation.
Dream’s mind, such that he had one in the traditional sense of the concept, was a constant flurry of sounds and images, words and feelings, colors and memories. All thought, all imagination, all dreams, all nightmares touched him and lived within him. Dream was used to this and did not find it disturbing, he supposed it was in the way a longtime city dweller may become used to the incessant traffic, chatter, music, and humanity.
Losing it had been disturbing. Waking in Burgess’s cage to absolute, total silence inside his own mind had been one of the most disturbing things Dream had experienced in the past millennium. The Dreaming had been gone from his awareness, the songs of the dreams, too. The silence, the pure utter silence, a century of it – it was the one time in his long existence that Dream had genuinely feared he might lose his mind the way Delirium had, that he might fall into the slipstream simply for having nothing to latch onto. Ultimately, he’d had to ground himself in the meager physical sensations of his prison to avoid it.
Now, Dream was free again to drift in the Dreaming as he so wished. And the meditation of physical creating was not the horrible silence of having something fundamental ripped out of him. Rather, it was like stepping from the crowded city streets into an empty field for the first time in ages. Still, there were the buzzing insects, and the whispering trees. But the hardest edges of the clamor were distant, a memory.
It was peaceful. Peace was not something Dream experienced often. Strange, to be finding it more and more frequently here in the waking world.
He focused on the clay in his hands. It was a slippery medium – literally and figuratively – liquid and wanting to find its own shape rather than the one Dream had in mind for it. It was already all over his hands and arms, but he didn’t mind. Better to be mired in the creation while creating.
He worked, letting the pleasant haze of focus fill his mind. The art room was surprisingly easy to work in; Dream had expected to be annoyed by the presence of others in his space, but as it turned out, the focus of so many minds on creation built an ideal atmosphere for it.
He put his project together carefully, patiently letting the clay have its fits and disagreements. How fun, to work with something that talked back, in its own language. Dream had really been missing out on physical art; he’d have to keep working on rectifying that.
The day slipped by. By the time Dream had the piece the way he wanted it, night had fallen. He set it aside to dry – this would take a few days, and then it would have to be fired, as well. How thrilling, he thought, to be forced to wait to see his finished work.
He had been indulging himself for a while, and should return to the Dreaming to make sure nothing was awry. Before he did so, he stepped briefly through to Hob’s flat to say hello.
“There you are,” said Hob, sitting at the kitchen table with tea and a book. “I was starting to think you’d wandered off.”
“I wander, but I always return,” said Dream, bending to kiss him.
“I know.”
“But I must go to the Dreaming, I have left it awhile.”
Hob sighed. “I figured as much. Come back soon, hm?”
Dream hummed in response, and Hob tugged him down into a proper kiss, holding him close for several long moments before letting him go.
“I’m so curious what you’ve been up to, but I have a feeling you aren’t going to tell me because you want to be all mysterious,” he said when they parted.
“You feel correctly,” said Dream.
Hob waved him away. “Go on, you. Go be brooding and secretive in your realm so I can miss you more than I do already.”
“You desire to miss me?”
“Well, considering having you here all the time is a losing game, and not something I’d ask of you anyway, I figured I might as well lean into the thrill of missing you and getting you back,” Hob said. He looked up at Dream with a smile that was knowing, fond, tinged with the slightest melancholy. In that look, Dream felt understood, in both his wandering, and his constancy.
“You will have me back,” he said.
“I know, love. Now go on, Lord of Dreams, your royal duties await.”
Dream caressed his cheek, and then vanished.
Several days later, he had collected his sculpture, hardened from living clay into permanence. Now that it was complete, he was not certain what he was supposed to do with it. Dreams, once completed, went off to perform their functions, to continue evolving. This was static, completed. Dream was at a bit of a loss.
He took it to Hob’s office. Hob was annotating a book when Dream arrived. Notes for lecture, Dream supposed. Hob looked up to smile at him when he came in, but he seemed engrossed in what he was doing – until his gaze caught on the sculpture in Dream’s hands.
“That’s pretty. Is it a raven?”
“Three, in fact.” They twined in a flurry around each other, a carefully balanced triad that appeared off-kilter but held itself upright nonetheless. Figuring out the weighting of it had been an interesting challenge.
“Where did you get it?”
“I made it.”
Hob looked at the sculpture again more closely. “What, in the Dreaming?”
“No,” said Dream, placing the thing on Hob’s desk. While he was happy with the end result of the work, his interest in it was rapidly waning. Unlike his creations in the Dreaming, this sculpture was not alive, it did not move and think and affect the world around it, and there was little of interest in something so static. Unlike the Dreaming, where he had to focus on crafting the right dream, the right nightmare, had to be cognizant of the end result, here, the interest was solely in the creating. “Out of clay.”
He wandered over to Hob’s bookshelf, pulling out a text he hadn’t seen on the shelf before and flopping down on the couch to page through it. He held a vague awareness of all books that had been written, found them drifting in humanity’s subconscious, but he had hardly read all of them with attention.
Hob had picked up the sculpture and was now staring at it, running a finger along the delicate, glazed wings. “You’re really just going to drop an expert-level sculpture on my desk and go lie on the couch?”
“What else am I to do with it?”
“What--? Where--?” Hob spluttered. Dream really didn’t know what was so perplexing. “Dream!”
Dream just raised an eyebrow at him.
Hob sighed and put the sculpture back down, delicately. He came over and perched on the couch by Dream’s hip, taking Dream’s hand in his own. “Every day a new facet of you,” he murmured. “I guess I just didn’t realize you were an artist.”
“I create dreams.”
“I know, but I didn’t make the connection with human art forms.” Hob smiled at him ruefully. “Doesn’t help that you’ve been hiding these skills all this time.”
“I have not frequently indulged in art in the waking world, in the past,” Dream admitted. “At the time, it did not seem valuable, when there were dreams to create. I have inspired more art than I have made.”
“Oh, I’m sure you have.” Hob nudged him teasingly. “So many times, in centuries past, I’d be wandering in a gallery and find a painting or a sculpture that I’d swear was of you.”
Most of the limited time Dream had spent in the waking world had been around artists. Occasionally, he had deigned to serve as a more direct form of inspiration. “I am certain you were right.”
“Well, those artists might have gotten to paint your portrait, but I got you to take a selfie wearing cat ears, so—”
“Hob Gadling—”
Hob leaned down and cut him off by kissing him, warm and fleeting. “Tell me about your sculpture.”
Dream tugged him down so Hob, too, was lying on the couch, half blanketing his body. He liked the weight of Hob over him, it reminded him that this was the plane of the physical. As did working with the clay.
“It was… a satisfying exercise,” he said.
Hob propped himself up on one elbow to look at him. “Really? That’s what you have to say about your masterpiece?”
“The finished piece is unimportant,” argued Dream. “If I want to create a masterpiece, I will make it of dreams.”
“Alright, so why are you doing it, then?”
Dream thought how best to articulate the many sensations that arose in him when he created – and how it was different with the physical media of this world, in comparison to dreams. “In the Dreaming, I create with my will. I shape the Dreaming to my needs. It is part of me, and it responds. This is not true of material in this world. It is outside of me, and I must learn to communicate with it. I must remember… how it is to be physical.”
Using his hands… it was not that Dream never sculpted by hand in the Dreaming. But guiding thought and fear and whimsy into a being with the gentle touch of his fingers was so different from feeling the earthy weight of the clay resisting his attempts to shape it. Clay was earth, absolute physicality, the opposite of dreaming. And Dream felt electric and brazen daring to mold it.
“I appreciate the unique challenge,” he concluded.
Hob was still looking at him, a fond look having taken over the question in his eyes. He kissed the corner of Dream’s mouth. “You are a wonder,” he sighed.
Then his expression shifted.
“Hang on. Is that the class you’ve been sneaking off to? Sculpture?”
“Beginner sculpture,” Dream told him solemnly.
“BEGINNER--? Jesus Christ. The other students are going to throw you out a window!”
Dream considered the prospect. “That would be amusing.”
“Are you actually following the class?” Hob asked. He still seemed scandalized by the idea of Dream ‘taking’ classes. “Or are you just doing whatever you want?”
Dream tilted his head at him. What do you think?
“Menace,” Hob scolded, fondly. “Why do you even have to go to a class? Couldn’t you, like, steal some clay from someone’s dream?”
“I could. But do not both you and my sister insist on me interacting with humanity more often? I am interacting with humanity.” Or, being in its presence, at any rate. Dream rarely interacted with anyone unless approached first. He would rather stay absorbed in his clay. “Besides, I have found it is good, once in a while, to do things outside of the Dreaming.”
“Ah. So that’s the real homework you’re working on.”
Dream played with Hob’s hair. “Mmm. But it is no hardship.”
Hob took the hint and bent again to kiss him, shifting to lie more fully over him. He cradled Dream’s head in one hand. Dream slipped his hands up under Hob’s shirt. This, too, was a good way to remember physicality.
“If you’re going to insist that you don’t care about that statue,” Hob breathed against his mouth, “then I’m going to keep it.”
“Do as you wish,” said Dream. “I will make another soon.”
“Something even more beautiful, I expect.” Hob bit at his lower lip, then soothed over it with his tongue. “But not as beautiful as you.”
“That was trite.”
“Made you blush, though.”
“Only because you affect me too easily,” said Dream, an admission that Hob looked delighted to have gotten out of him.
“It might be trite, but it’s also true. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on this earth.”
Dream didn’t know how Hob managed to say such things without it sounding like exaggeration or falsehood, but it did not. “I am not truly on this earth. Or of it. You may have to broaden your parameters.”
Dream was not part of this world. But recently, he had been remembering – or perhaps relearning – that through its creatures, their dreams, their thoughts, their fears and hopes, this world was part of him. He remembered it when he looked at the clay staining his hands. He remembered it when he listened to Hob speak.
“Oh, on the contrary, love—” Hob kissed his jaw and spoke against the skin there— “you must be on this earth because you are the realest part of it. Sometimes I think you are the only true thing I’ve ever known.”
Dream smiled, turning Hob’s face back to him and looking at him from under his lashes. “But that, Hob Gadling, is only because you have always been a dreamer.”