The character in my dreams was not as common as Nancy or Victoria, but I was still quite familiar with her. Mona was a witch, a sorceress, whatever. A woman who did magic using a magic wand.

Mona had never been my sexual partner. I think she started showing up in my dreams when I was about 9, as a composite of several different magic-using characters I had heard of. Even though I sometimes used the word “witch” to describe Mona, she wasn’t a wicked witch. She was a witch because she did magic and followed some of the witch tropes like flying on a broomstick and wearing a pointy hat. In the dreams she appeared in, she was usually my protector against evil magic-users or whatever other danger I and my companions got ourselves into.

Mona was older than me; she was already an adult when I first dreamed of her. That of course did not prohibit us from having sex now that I was an adult, but still we never had. She pretty much only showed up in that one role, unlike Nancy who could show up in many different roles, and Victoria who was there in any dream in which I was, for whatever reason, female.

Despite all that, and despite not remembering a dream where we had sex last night, on Wednesday, July 5 I woke up with my condom-encased dick in Mona. This reassured me that what I was experiencing was real, as well as that it worked if I was wearing a condom. She looked the way she looked in the dreams: an imposing woman, five-eleven and perhaps 200 pounds, with a somewhat pinkish cast to her skin, and hair I’d assumed was dyed since it was the same bright red as the clothes she always wore.

Mona woke up with me, and she didn’t mind at all the position we were in.

“Ooh, Jody, I didn’t realize you felt that way about me!”

“I am not sure that I actually ever did, Mona. But if you enjoyed it, feel free to consider that a form of payment for all the times you protected me.”

“Er, um, maybe?” Mona didn’t seem like she really liked that idea.

“Sorry, it was a joke. I really don’t know how we ended up having sex, but if you liked it we can do it again.”

“I would take you up on that offer.”

“Just not now, because I have to get ready for work.”

I got up out of the bed, noticing that the plain white cotton sheets I’d put on it two days ago had turned into red satin sheets.

“Did you change the sheets, Mona?”

“Huh?”

“They were white when I went to bed.”

“Well, no, I didn’t do that.”

Mona searched the bed a bit before climbing out of it.

“In fact, I don’t seem to have a wand, so my magic will be pretty limited. I think I can still do this.”

She waved her hands around her naked body, and her usual outfit appeared on her, a typical witch’s robe and pointy hat, except they were red rather than black.

“Pretty good for no wand,” I replied. “In fact, really good for doing any magic at all in the real world.”

“The real world, oh, hmm,” Mona said, trailing off in thought.

“Do you understand my situation here?”

Mona concentrated for a moment and then replied, “You live and work in this cold wasteland, and there isn’t much to do here except watch entertainment programs and sex. That is why you continue to have detailed dreams about me and other characters you invented in your childhood.”

“Yes. And I’m going to work today and I need you to stay here and out of trouble. There’s food, a bathroom, and the entertainment you mentioned. Do not have sex with any of the other men here, nor even change their clothes. I’m not really sure what they will think if they see you. Some of them already know I live with a woman, at least some of the time, but I am pretty sure they don’t know that the woman I live with changes from day to day.”

“How many other women have you brought here?”

“So far, only Nancy and Victoria.”

Mona let out a deep laugh. “Victoria? Isn’t that you? Isn’t that just your name for yourself when you’re female?”

Mona was more aware of things than I realized. Of course Mona had come to Victoria’s rescue as often as she’d saved Jody, but those were always in separate dreams, on separate nights. But then, these characters didn’t always stay in separate dreams. I could be Victoria in dreams together with any of the other characters, and Nancy was in a lot of the dreams as well. And Nancy understood my dual nature. A lot of the characters probably knew about one another if they had the collective knowledge of all the dreams they had been in.

I responded, “Yes. It was pretty weird having her here with me at the same time. That never happened in the dreams, but I just had both bodies that day, and by the end of the day I was pretty good with moving them separately and together.”

“Why none of the others?”

“Because this just started happening. My world doesn’t have magic, or at least, it didn’t a week ago. Somehow, it’s now possible for the doll I sleep with to become someone I dreamed about during the night, and stay that way until I sleep again. I’m not aware of this happening to anyone else. At least, I haven’t seen it mentioned on the national or Fairbanks news.”

“Fairbanks?”

“Yes, that’s the nearest real city, but it’s pretty far. Too far for us to visit today. Probably too far for you to visit even if you can fly on a broom.”

“You know those are magical broomsticks, right? If you don’t have magic here, you wouldn’t have one of those, and I didn’t bring one.”

“I was just saying in case your limited wandless magic allowed you to summon one. You might be able to get to the town. It’s got a few thousand people and a couple dozen stores of various types, as opposed to this camp set up by the company, which has one store, one restaurant, the housing management office, a company office, and maybe 40 houses like this that one or two people live in, some of them vacant. That’s all. There’s miles and miles of nothing out there beyond the camp. So if you don’t know where the town is, don’t go without finding out. You’ll just get lost, though at least this time of year you won’t freeze to death.”

“OK, I get it. In any case, I don’t think I can summon anything from further than the closet, so I’m not going to be doing that.”

I went through my morning routine. Mona had already found the cereal and milk by the time I finished showering and dressing, and had it waiting on the table for me. I tried to think of when in all the dreams Mona would have encountered anything like my breakfast. I couldn’t remember eating breakfast with her, but maybe she saw me or one of the other characters eating breakfast. Or maybe, though a witch, she lives less different a life from regular people than I would think.

I showed Mona the TV’s remote control before I went to work, to keep her occupied. She had no problem using it. When I got home, Mona was still there watching something on TV.

“How was work, Jody?” she asked.

“Nobody got hurt,” I replied.

“Do people usually get hurt at your work?”

“No, but given how much went wrong today, I was surprised no one got hurt. None of those wrong things being my fault, I should add.”

I started making dinner, and Mona came over and was glad to help out. She knew surprisingly much about cooking in the real world for someone I would have thought always just waved her wand to make dinner.

While we were eating, Mona set a small red purse down on the table.

“Where did you get the purse?” I asked.

“Oh, one of your other women left it here. I wanted to go shop in your one store, but she didn’t leave any money in it. There was only a tampon and an empty wallet with a card with my picture on it.”

I replied, “Ah, it was Nancy’s purse, but I see you’ve made it yours. She bought that stuff Saturday. Can you show me the card?”

Mona retrieved it and showed me. It looked like a sample ID, but it had Mona’s name and picture.

“Remarkable! Mona, when they make wallets they put a card like this where the ID is supposed to go, to illustrate the function of that card holder. But it would normally just have an outline representing a generic person and a generic name, not your name and picture. Was it like this when you found the purse?”

“Yes.”

I showed her my Alaska driver’s license so she could see what a proper one looked like.

“OK. I can see the difference. Thanks. Also, thank you for having clothes here in my style.”

“Huh?”

She went over and opened the closet and the one drawer with Nancy’s clothes. All the clothes Nancy had bought had been replaced with the bright red of Mona’s outfit.

“Can you change it back?”

“I didn’t change it at all. The only magic I’ve done here was to summon an outfit from the closet and put it on my body.”

“Weird. Maybe you changed it without realizing when you arrived.”

Through the evening, I questioned Mona about how she knew the things she knew. She said she had a maid who cooked her meals, but she was capable and had cooked meals in the past, and some cooking shows she watched today reminded her of those skills. The other things all came from specific dreams I recalled after she mentioned them, including, in one dream, that I had mentioned my typical breakfast to her when in dream-time I’d been with her overnight, and she summoned it for me.

Mona was as eager for sex as I expected, so eager in fact that she didn’t strip. The robe had a belt holding it together, with a wide overlap, but with that removed, it was split all the way down the front. She reached between the two sides of the robe and pulled down the red panties which matched the rest of her outfit, and lay back onto my bed, pulling me with her. I didn’t refuse her. I only managed to stall her long enough for a condom, and she summoned that with her wandless magic. It was red. But as it got late, I closed my eyes and tried to pretend she was Nancy. Though Mona was smarter than I had expected, I needed someone with Nancy’s more common-sense smarts to help me make sense of all that was happening. If I fantasized I was having sex with her, maybe I’d dream about her, too.

It worked! On the morning of Thursday, July 6 Nancy was in bed with me.

She was surprised by the different house, so I had to explain what happened. We were both surprised by her clothing. Instead of Mona’s red robes, she was wearing a blue dress. She was surprised she was dressed at all. So then I had to explain everything that happened with Mona yesterday.

“And then I managed to dream about you when I was trying to do so, and you came today, rather than the doll being here for a day.”

“And why did you pick me?”

“Nancy, you are aware of how things work in the real world. Even though we are sometimes in magical places in dreams, we are more often just where I live. Where we lived, growing up, since I always imagined you lived nearby, even though I apparently never imagined your family. But you know there’s not magic here. There wasn’t, until last weekend when the doll became you for the first time.”

“I see. So you want me to try and understand how far this goes? If there is more to it than just the doll?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t expect you to be able to find out everything, but help me understand what you can. There’s more, with your clothes and the sheets changing. Nancy, what’s your bra size?”

“36C.”

“When the doll became Victoria, the bras you bought were 36D.”

I showed her where they were kept now, since she hadn’t been here since the move, and pulled one out.

“And now it is indeed a 36C. I didn’t check the size when Mona was here, but everything was red, including your purse.”

As I said this I noticed the purse sitting on the shelf in the bedroom where I left my wallet and keys and such. It was back to looking like Nancy’s purse, not Mona’s red one.

“Well that sounds like Mona. How much was red?”

“When Mona was here yesterday, your purse and all the clothes turned red. Our bedsheets, too. She claimed she didn’t do it, and that the only magic she was able to perform without her wand was to summon clothes from the closet and have them appear on her body. But I didn’t believe it, because something had to have changed the clothes. And now...”

I opened the closet and the other drawers with her clothes, and wasn’t exactly surprised at the result, having seen the purse had switched back.

“Everything’s back to normal.”

I picked up and opened the purse. Inside was the tampon and wallet, but now the ID had changed to a very realistic looking one.

“Well, not quite normal. Yesterday, this card looked like the sample ID card that comes in wallets when you buy them, but it had Mona’s name and picture on it. Now it looks like a real driver’s license for you. Did you ever put any sort of ID into the wallet?”

“No, I can’t remember doing so.”

I looked at it more closely. Nancy Smithson was her correct name. And the address was ... interesting.

“It looks like you did live near me, and apparently still live there, except I think that number doesn’t exist.”

I hadn’t been back to the old neighborhood in years, so I couldn’t be certain that was still true, but I pulled up the address on Google Maps.

“See, it takes you here, to the end of the street, because that’s as close as it can get. In Street View, you can see 1745 on one side of the street and 1746 on the other. The next houses on the street have smaller numbers. There’s no 1788. I lived at 1742, so I would know there was just the one house past mine and then the end of the street.”

“Huh. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember my family, because they were imaginary.”

“Well, you were my imaginary friend.”

“Not any more, though, right?”

“Right. At least one of the other guys saw you come home with me Saturday. You’re as real now as the wives some of the men here have. Just not as consistently real.”

I got myself ready for work, and Nancy had breakfast waiting for me when I was dressed. I pulled two twenties out of my wallet and handed them to her.

“Oh, you don’t need to pay me,” she said.

“It’s not pay. It’s just in case you need something. Mona wanted to check out the store here in the camp yesterday, but was disappointed to find there was no money in the purse. There isn’t much there to buy, anyway; just food and some essentials like your tampons at double the normal prices. And I bought enough food to last the two of us the whole week, and two of the days I was alone here, so there should be more than enough food already. But if there is some other essential item you forgot, the store might have it and you can buy it.”

“Ah, mad money. Thanks.”

I went over the rest of the things that happened. Nancy was aghast by one revelation.

“You had sex with Victoria!? Isn’t that like, worse than incest?”

“She’s not my sister. She’s ... well, me from a parallel universe, I guess. So I see what you mean, but she didn’t come from my parents. Let’s call them and ask.”

It was better to call them now rather than after work because of the time zones making it later in Florida, so I did.

“Hi Mom, Dad. I have my friend Nancy with me. Nancy, say hi to my parents Anthony and Sue.”

I handed her the phone and she said hi, and when they were done greeting her she handed it back.

“Nancy and I were trying to investigate my family history. You never had any other kids, did you? Or any siblings who might have kids that could be my cousins?”

They both confirmed they didn’t have other kids. Sue had a sister and Anthony had a brother but both died as children. They had no other siblings.

“Thanks. Bye.”

So I told Nancy, “There. I have no siblings and no first cousins. Me having sex with Victoria isn’t incest.”

Nancy still looked a bit skeptical, but I went to work, leaving Nancy to ponder the pile of observations I had collected for her.

She had a list of comments, questions, and ideas for me when I came home.

“First off, there’s no widespread thing reported on the Internet where dolls are changing into formerly fictional characters, people are performing real magic, or anything of that sort. If it’s happening outside of your house, it’s not happening enough to get reported.”

“OK,” I replied.

“Now, if I remember your summary correctly, you were fucking either the doll or the woman it had become as you went to sleep every night since this started except the night the doll was Victoria, and you dreamed of one of the female characters every night.”

“Yes. It’s been you in my dreams every night except the nights before the doll became Victoria and Mona. They were featured in the dreams those nights.”

“OK, then I think you have to be fucking, and you have to dream of someone other than who the doll currently is, if it’s already alive. In other words, you can’t have the same woman here two days in a row.”

I thought for a moment. “OK, that makes sense. I mean, I don’t see the reason for the weird restriction, but I think it matches my experience.”

Nancy continued, “All the things that changed belong to one of the women the doll became, in some way. The things I bought, even though you paid for them, you bought them for me. The sheets, you gave them to Victoria to put on the bed. Victoria and I are just used to normal sheets, and pretty normal clothes, but we know Mona has that serious red thing going on, so everything was red for her. ID can change for every person, and you know where I’m from and I got something realistic for it. Mona is from some other world where they probably don’t have ID, and she got something generic. And while my clothes are normal, did you notice what dress I am wearing?”

“Oh, yeah! That’s the one you wear in a lot of the dreams! You’ve worn it, or ones made from the same fabric, ever since you were a little girl, probably in half the dreams you appeared in.”

“Yes. I didn’t buy one of these, but something I bought turned into this after previously being red for Mona, and whatever Victoria would wear. Now, we can test this by packing this purse with items that might change. You said Mona wanted a magic wand. Let’s give her a fake one. Maybe it’ll be real when she gets here.”

She put a pencil into the purse.

“Nah, she might actually use a pencil. I can do better.”

I ran out to my truck for a moment and came back with an unused package of wooden chopsticks. This came with a meal I once got in town while on the run. I ate the food that time with a plastic fork and did not use the chopsticks, and the unused package had been sitting in the truck ever since. I opened the package and separated the chopsticks.

“A single chopstick,” I announced, giving one to Nancy to put into the purse. I put the other away in a kitchen drawer.

“Great! Any other ideas? The cash and my spare house key are already in here.”

Out of the junk drawer where I’d put the extra chopstick, I pulled an empty key ring. Empty, save for a little bear ornament.

“This was a gift one of my girlfriends in college gave me once. When I was dating her I had all my keys on it, but I moved them over to a key ring with a flashlight that the company gives everybody when they start working here. Useful, since for a few months of the year there is so little daylight that I leave the house and come back at the end of the day both in the dark. We might see what this ornament looks like for each woman.”

I handed it to Nancy, and she put the key on it and tucked it away in her purse.

“Good idea,” she said. “We can probably find more things in town next weekend.”

Nancy and I fucked in bed again that night, but I wasn’t sure who I should summon next. Summoning was how I thought of what was happening now after the experience with Mona. She summons things she owns and certain limited categories of things she can create with her magic, and I summon one woman each day with mine.

I knew I wanted Nancy back Saturday to do more shopping, but tomorrow was an open slot. I could try to bring back Mona again, but it didn’t seem critical to do that right away, and I thought it was more useful to get somebody else. Still, there were so many of these dream characters I hadn’t brought forth yet that I was unable to make a decision, and I just let my dreams wander naturally.