Join Jody on a mind-bending adventure that begins when the weirdly realistic dreams he has had since his childhood start coming into the real world! Follow along as Jody figures out what is actually real and as he explores his confused sexuality.

Caution: This is a story that could not exist without sexual content, and in some places that content is explicit. Large parts of the story are not about sex, even though you will know it’s still happening. In some places there are descriptions of the sexual anatomy of alien beings.

Author’s Foreword:

This is a long and complex story which I started writing 18 years ago. I encourage anyone who gets lost to ask questions in the comments and I will try to answer them without spoiling unposted parts of the story. Unlike my prior epic-length stories which are anthologies of loosely related stories, Jody is a single story of 128,000 words, to be posted serially in 31 parts, of which this is the first. A longer version of this foreword describing the writing process appears in the book page this story lies under.

I’m Jody Davis. Twenty-five, white, male, five-eight, 175 pounds, with hair so dark brown you’d think it was black unless you caught it just right in the sunlight. And reasonably physically fit, though I’m not some muscle-bound hunk like some of the guys I work with who do physical labor.

When I was studying to become a petroleum engineer, I didn’t realize it was going to lead to me living in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. It’s not even a town, just a camp the company set up so we have somewhere to live within an hour’s drive of all the wells, and there I have a pre-fab house. They call them mobile homes, but they are not really very mobile. My home is not an RV, just a house that can be loaded onto a flatbed trailer and moved somewhere else.

The camp includes a store and a restaurant. There is also a pond nearby where some of the guys fish, including ice fishing when it’s cold enough but not so cold you can’t even stand to be outside any longer than strictly necessary. Outside the camp, there are nothing but oil fields and forest for at least 50 miles. The store and restaurant owners are paid by the company to be here just so we have them. I think the company paid to have cell towers put up so we would have the internet. The well sites are scattered over a large area, and they have internet at each of those sites, too. And we have a satellite-based cable TV system. We get about 50 channels, including the local ones from Fairbanks. Nowhere near what we’d get in any real city these days, but it provides entertainment.

There’s a town about 60 miles away. It has a long Native American name, so everybody just calls it “Town” unless we are trying to have something delivered there. It’s not much of a town, but I can buy stuff beyond the mere essentials in the company store. And there’s a post office. Our camp is so far from the nearest post office that we don’t even have a rural route. Everybody I work with has a post office box in the town. So I can buy anything through mail order, and eventually pick it up there. It even works with stores that won’t use US mail and request “no PO boxes.” I just have to put my name and the address of the post office and they’ll receive it for me. On my day off, if one of my orders has been delivered, I can go pick it up. Letters go in the box, packages I have to ask for at the desk, so I have to be there during the 5 hours, 6 days a week that the desk is open.

That usually means Saturday, so I order stuff early in the week and go get it the next Saturday. When I’m in town, I also make a stop at the grocery store to pick up bulk food at half the price of the company store. Price isn’t all that much of a concern; I’m paid well to live in the middle of nowhere. But when I am there, I do it. Sometimes I buy clothes or other things while I’m in town, too.

One of the things I learned very quickly was an essential is my electric blanket. No amount of insulation keeps this place really warm in the winter; the walls just aren’t thick enough. The first one I got was a cheap piece of junk, though. I quickly learned it was simply two thin blankets, with a heating coil wound around between them, and stitching to hold the two blankets together running between the bends of the heating coil. The heating part worked fine, but the stitching was crap. Fortunately, my mother taught me how to sew when I was a boy, just because I was curious about the things she did. I’m never going to make my own clothes, but I can mend seams and put on buttons, and I originally thought that was all I’d ever do. But I tried to sew the blanket back together when some of the coils started poking out the edges. It worked for a little bit, but more of the original seams broke and pretty soon there were too many of those places for me to patch up, in addition to it being loose and bunching up in spots in the middle. So I just bought a better quality blanket.

Another problem is there aren’t any women. The crew for the wells are all men. A few of the guys were married before coming up here and brought their wives, and we don’t mess with them. Several others are gay and have paired off. Even in the town, there is rather a lack of women. The ones that are there are married, wearing their rings to show it.

There was actually a time I wondered if I might be gay, but by the time I had gotten up here I figured out I wasn’t. So I used my hand; I assume that was true for the other single guys, too. At some point, I upgraded to a Fleshlight.

Later still, I got more creative. Or I was bored, and it was something to do. Maybe both. I stuffed one of my old shirts and a pair of pants with the pieces of the two sides of the blanket that had fallen apart. I put the Fleshlight through the fly of the pants. I recycled the piping that ran along the edge of the blanket that might have helped keep it together if it was sewn properly. I made a sort of belt out of it that ran through the belt loops and some strategically cut slits in the shirt tails, which helped hold the parts together. This was a usable sex doll, but I modified it multiple times.

It should have breasts, right? I wanted to pretend I had a woman. I was not afraid to walk into a woman’s clothing store and buy a bra, and I knew how to estimate the size, so I did that and stuffed it to make the doll’s breasts. I experimented with different ways to give it nipples, such as sewing on small extra bits of the blanket in the right places.

But a woman is warm, rather than just being the meh temperature of clothes and blankets. I ran the old blanket’s heating coil (which still worked) throughout the doll. The blanket had been only six by six feet, but the coil ran all around within it and was almost 40 feet long, so there was enough to run it through both arms and legs with plenty left to heat the torso.

Plugged in and on the lowest setting, it gave the thing the warmth of a real body I could pretend to cuddle with. But I still had problems with the shirt and pants sections not staying together. The makeshift belt only did so much. I dealt with this by replacing the covering that was my old clothes with a woman’s bodysuit with full legs, one of the many things I had delivered. Then I thought it was perfect.

There was never anybody else in my house, so I often left it there in my bed, though it was turned off unless I planned to use it. The bed was really small, so I threw it on the floor when I wanted to sleep. Eventually there was a night when I fell asleep on top of the doll while fucking it, and that night changed everything.

I have always had an active imagination. I invented an imaginary friend when I was 4. That’s not unusual. There was a girl named Pansy who didn’t want to play something or other with me, and in my head I invented a girl named Nancy who did play that game. What was unusual was that I never really forgot about her. I don’t pretend like she’s sitting in the room with me now. But I remember the times when I was little and did pretend she was there. I remember those events as well as, maybe even better than my memories from the same age with real friends. A big reason for that is that she lives on in my dreams.

Everybody has weird dreams. They’re things the mind puts together out of random stimuli, little fragments of memory, and other stuff we still don’t understand. Characters in dreams could be your real friends, famous people, characters you know from fiction, or faceless nobodies. And I have characters like those in my dreams, but I also have Nancy. She grew up with me, in my dreams. Sometimes she was my companion, the best friend I wanted Pansy to be. Sometimes she was my rival. Sometimes she would only make a brief cameo, but frequently she was the central character of the dream, alongside me. Sometimes I’d learn from her; she is smart, sometimes smarter than me, and could give me a fresh viewpoint on things. And once I was a bit older, she was sometimes my romantic partner. Somehow, don’t ask me how, I played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with her before I ever saw a girl’s parts in real life, and yet what I saw matched what I later confirmed I was supposed to see. This activity with Nancy didn’t keep me from getting real-life girlfriends later; it may have actually helped, in a way.

Nancy ended up with “girl next door” looks. Five-five, about 140 pounds, blonde, and pale skinned with a few freckles as she still appears in my dreams frequently. But even now, Nancy doesn’t always play the role of my lover. She can still be my rival or a platonic friend. She’s never me, though. No, if I’m a girl in the dream, I’ll be Victoria. But that’s a story for another time.

There are also other characters my weird mind invented, more fantastic ones, some of whom aren’t even fully human, who inhabit my dreams. But Nancy is the immediately relevant one, because I fantasized I was fucking Nancy that night I fell asleep on top of the doll, and Saturday, July 1 I woke up fucking Nancy. In the place of the doll was a real woman, but she was the one who had grown up with me in my mind and in my dreams.

“How? How are you here?” I asked Nancy.

“I don’t know, but you did it. You brought me to life somehow. And I’m cold!”

Nancy was cold once she was no longer covered by my body and blankets, because she wasn’t wearing any clothes.

“I don’t have any women’s clothes, but you’re welcome to wear anything you can find.”

She went to the bathroom first, and came out a few minutes later and started going through my clothes. She wasn’t crazy about wearing my briefs, but she put them on, followed by the thermal underwear which were a mainstay of living up here. Even though it is technically summer, mornings can be cold up here and this one had howling winds that made it feel quite cold even inside the so-called house. Socks, a shirt, and pants finished an outfit, and while my pants didn’t fit her right, they were tight at her hips and didn’t fall down. My sandals gave her some kind of footwear, but it was clear they were too big for her.

“So what do you want to do, now that you’ve made it into the real world?”

“Eat first. All we did last night was fuck and sleep.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember that, and all our dreams together. All the way back to our playtime when we were four. When we were a bit older, sometimes you fed me after school, but otherwise, I can’t remember how I ate.”

“You lived somewhere, with a family who fed you, right?”

“Um, I guess. I can’t really remember them.”

“Well let’s assume you did. People don’t grow up to be nice, healthy-looking adults like you without eating regular meals.”

I got the milk from the mini-fridge and poured us both bowls of cereal. Not one of those dorm room fridges where the freezer is just a metal shield around the part where the cold air comes out. The mobile home was too small for a full-sized fridge, but it came with one that was as wide as one of those cube fridges, but about 4 feet tall with a real freezer section with a separate door in the top foot or so. Of course, in the winter, I could stock up on frozen stuff and just leave it outside in an ice chest in the snow. But it was July now, and not too bad a day despite the chilly morning. We’d probably be OK outside with only light jackets that we could take off in the warm part of the day.

It was also my day off, so I had the whole day with Nancy. Saturday. I don’t always have weekends off, but it’s the norm. The guys who maintain the wells and pipelines might have to work any time of the day or night, and usually work shifts so there is always someone around, but us engineers tend to work daytime Monday to Friday developing new wells and retrofitting existing ones that have gone dry. If the drilling crew encounters something unexpected, or if the oil that comes out of the well isn’t the quality they expected, or if there is some disaster that leads to them shutting down the pipeline, I might be called in to help at other hours. Even so, that usually meant I worked on Saturday or some evening and took off the next weekday I wasn’t urgently needed. I didn’t have any urgent message on my phone, so I expected to have all of today and tomorrow off. If they needed me, they’d call me and I’d go where they asked. But there was nothing to do here besides sex, so we got into my truck and headed to town.

Nancy was most upset about not having proper clothes. But she was understanding enough to appreciate that I lived in a tiny house with not a lot of room to store extra clothes, and also that anything that wasn’t machine-washable would require a long trip into town to take it to a dry cleaner and a second trip to pick it up. So she was satisfied going to Q-Mart and getting some basic clothes. Q-Mart was Town’s main store, the Q standing for the long Native American name nobody ever liked spelling out in full. It had comparable quality and types of goods to Wal-Mart, but less variety within those types, serving Town’s few thousand residents and however many more people like me lived in the surrounding area.

I basically pushed a cart and let Nancy lead the way around the store. She picked up just one short-sleeve blouse and shorts, knowing that even in the summer there were few days above 70 degrees. The other stuff was long-sleeve, and several pairs of jeans. She also picked up one dress, a somewhat heavyweight cotton one that made sense here. And a couple packs of panties, bras, and stuff to wear under everything else to keep warm, which was rather different for women. And two pairs of shoes, sneakers and some shoes with a low heel she called pumps. I knew about all this stuff, in part due to my dream experiences, but there was no way I could have gone around a store and picked it all up the way she did.

Nancy knew her sizes, and while she tried some stuff on, she got most of it right the first time. I wondered about this. If she didn’t remember things that didn’t come up in my pretend-play or dreams, like her parents, why would she know her sizes? But then I remembered a specific dream I had not long after our first dream-date, when we were freshmen in high school. There was a day she was proud of having graduated to a B-cup bra, and pulled down a sleeve to show me the new one she was wearing. I guess that implied awareness of her other sizes.

This memory reminded me of how weird it was I had dream-dates in the first place. Some of the first ones were like practice dates, where you and a close friend who you really don’t want to get involved romantically with go on a date so you both can practice how you’d act on a real date. I didn’t actually have a person like that in real life, but somehow this worked. Nancy gave me useful feedback that improved the real dates I went on later. In fact, I wouldn’t have had a problem getting my last girlfriend to marry me right out of college, except she didn’t want to move to Alaska.

When Nancy was done trying things on, we each picked up various other things we thought we needed, including condoms. If Nancy was real now, I figured she could get pregnant. Nancy grabbed tampons and panty liners. I hadn’t ever bought those but I understood the necessity of them.

Eventually we made it to the checkout and I paid for the cartload of clothes and other items. I could easily afford the few hundred bucks all the stuff cost. It was going to be harder to figure out where to put it in the house. Before we left the store, Nancy took the dress and other items to go with it from the bags and went into the women’s room at the front of the store to change. She returned with a bag containing all the stuff of mine she’d taken off.

After a stop at the post office where I picked up one package and the regular mail, it was time for lunch, and I drove to the burger joint nearby and we ate. She suggested going to the arcade afterward. Nancy knew the town as well as I did because a number of our dream-dates since I moved up here had taken place in the town. Other dreams were set back where we grew up, or near my college, or sometimes other places like Hollywood, New York, or London, not to mention the literally out-of-this-world dates. So she knew the one arcade in town; she’d been in there before. At least she’d been in the virtual equivalent in my dreams, but when I was dreaming of a place in the real world the dreams were usually pretty faithful to reality.

And I had been in there several times as well, but this was my first time with a companion, in real life, anyway. We spent a couple hours there playing two-player competitive and cooperative games I could only have enjoyed before with random strangers. And we went into the photo booth, kind of a relic now, but it still worked, two bucks to get a strip of four photos. I grabbed some more stuff at the food market before leaving town, as I always did. There was a food store in the camp, but everything cost about twice what it should. I made the long drive back home afterward listening to Nancy reminisce about various events from my dreams.

I made space for Nancy’s stuff by collapsing my clothes down. Instead of socks and underwear, thermals, shirts, and shorts in my four drawers, the thermal tops and thermal pants shared with the shirts and shorts, with some extras of each stashed with the underwear, and that gave the bottom drawer over completely to Nancy’s clothes. Her jeans hung in the closet with my pants. There were just enough empty hangers for her dress and my work jeans when they were washed. It would be tight when everything was in there.

I’d bought a bit of extra food, some of it not needing refrigeration, which was good, because I had trouble cramming all that we had bought in the tiny fridge, and ultimately decided a couple items that didn’t fit were tonight’s dinner.

We ate dinner, and then I let Nancy lead the way toward us having sex. The kind of tender, slow foreplay we did was something often absent from our more recent sexual dreams. We did that in our early dreams about sex, but more recently, it seemed like when we thought about sex we’d be instantly ready and then just do it in various positions for hours.

As Nancy opened a condom and prepared to roll it onto my erection, she commented, “You know, we’ve never had sex with a condom before.”

“I know. And I know why.”

“We were always in your dreams before, and I couldn’t get pregnant there.”

“Right. Well, you probably could have if we wanted it. Except you were just as likely the next dream to be playing a different role and the pregnancy forgotten.”

“Yeah. Are we going to lose that now that I’m here? The way we were sometimes rivals, sometimes platonic friends, sometimes lovers?”

“We got to be rivals in some of the video games today. I think we can still do that.”

Grabbing me by the dick, she said, “OK, enough talk.”

It was a challenge finding a comfortable position to have sex on the tiny bed which was really only made for one person, but we eventually did, and we stayed there afterward and fell asleep that way. And Nancy was in my dream again.

I woke up Sunday, July 2 in bed with the doll, my dick inside the Fleshlight.

“Huh,” I thought. “Did I imagine all that with Nancy? That she came to life and spent all day yesterday with me doing things? That I bought all those clothes for her?”

No, I quickly concluded. The clothes she had stripped off were still lying on the floor, intermingled with mine. Her other clothes were in my bottom dresser drawer or hung in the closet. I was wearing a condom, which I never did with the Fleshlight. I usually just washed it out afterward.

I remembered the photos we had taken, and searched for them. Yes, the photos existed, showing me with the young woman who had until yesterday only lived in my dreams and imagination. A straight photo, a silly one with tongues sticking out, one with us kissing, and one where we were giving each other rabbit ears.

So she really did come to life. But only for a day? Did I waste all that money on her clothes?

I kind of wasted the day away watching TV and stuff, though I did fill my bag with laundry, including Nancy’s stuff, and took it out to be washed. That laundry service was all we had for doing laundry here, but it was included with the camp fee along with the water, sewer, and TV. Electricity was billed separately.

I fell asleep fucking the doll again Sunday night, but it wasn’t Nancy I dreamed about. I was Victoria in the dream, and unlike most Victoria dreams, this time I was fucking a guy.