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.

When I awoke, Victoria was there in the place of the doll. Remember when I said her story was for another time? I guess it’s “another time” now.

Victoria came along a bit later than Nancy, but not too much later. I had definitely been Victoria before my 6th birthday. I had my first real birthday party in real life when I was 6, with a guest list made of most of my kindergarten classmates, along with a few other neighborhood kids who weren’t too different in age. Naturally, Pansy didn’t attend. The following night’s dream featured Victoria’s birthday party with most of the same kids, plus Nancy. I know that wasn’t the first time I dreamed of being Victoria, but it’s the earliest one I distinctly remember. Hearing all my classmates sing “happy birthday, Victoria” was very memorable.

My best understanding of Victoria is that she’s the me that would have existed if I had been born a girl. When we were 6, if you could have put the two of us together, the only way you could tell us apart was by our clothes. Put Victoria in a boy’s T-shirt and shorts, and we’d look like identical twins. I knew, though. I knew when I was Victoria, without needing to check myself, and in fact I never did. It’s pretty ironic; I had hundreds of opportunities as Victoria to see what a girl’s private parts felt like, to touch them even, and I never did until that time Nancy and Jody played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” The dreams before that one were not sexual in the least. They were just short snippets, individual scenes. Sometimes I was female in those scenes, and I knew it, and my friends in those scenes knew I was Victoria as well.

In fact, Nancy was actually the one who suggested we play that peeking game, and it changed the dreams ever after. They became longer and more complex, in addition to unlocking the possibility that they would be sexual. But just the possibility; for years they rarely involved any sort of actual sex or masturbation, or nudity beyond what I saw while showering. The long dreams soon spanned, as far as I could tell, an entire night’s sleep, and just that; after sixth grade I never needed an alarm clock because I’d always dream exactly until whenever I wanted to wake up. In some of my adventures, such a dream could span weeks of dream-time, but in the more down-to-earth type of dream, the time that passed within the dream was an entire day’s wakeful time.

When I was Victoria, those one-day dreams started out with me stripping out of a nightgown and showering. But then I’d get Victoria dressed and there was no more nudity after that in those dreams. Still, it was enough for me to notice her body as it developed. Jody and Victoria quickly ceased to look like twins, but still like brother and sister. These days, Victoria is five-six, 140 pounds, with the same coloration as me including the black-except-in-the-right-light hair, but curvy.

The first year after Nancy and I peeked at each other’s bodies, there were only a few more encounters in any way sexual in my dreams, all between Jody and Nancy. After that, Jody got into it with other characters. After I started high school, Victoria had sex too, but not in the way you’d think. Victoria was either having some form of sex with another woman, or with one of the characters who frequented my dreams who was not exactly human. In fact, though I’m familiar with the feeling of having something penislike in Victoria’s vagina, I can’t remember a time before last night when Victoria fucked a guy, that is, a regular male human being. Not that she would have had any trouble getting one if she wanted.

The continued appearances of Victoria in my dreams made me wonder about myself. It prompted a phase of self-reflection and experimentation. What does it mean that I dream of being a woman who has sex with other women and alien beings? At first, I didn’t know what to think, but it led me to learning in the real world the meanings of all the terms encompassed by LGBTQ. So did these dreams mean I was trans? And specifically a trans lesbian?

While this made me think about it, my explorations showed me I didn’t feel any desire to be a woman in the real world. It wasn’t that I was afraid of the hormones and surgery and all the other issues with transitioning to become a woman in real life. It was simply that I didn’t feel like I needed to be a woman in real life. I was comfortable as my male self. When I experimented by dressing my real-life body in women’s clothing, it felt wrong, even though I had no compunctions about dressing Victoria in similar clothing in the dreams. It was right for her. Nor did I feel wrong just being Victoria; that was just as right to me as when I was Jody. I could accept being either male or female, but trying to force one upon the other, nope, not gonna do it.

So I decided I wasn’t trans. I had learned a bunch of other terms as well, but I didn’t find one that fit me. At one point I thought genderfluid might apply, sometimes feeling male and sometimes feeling female, right? But when I looked into what that meant, I realized that wasn’t right either. Genderfluid is more like trans some of the time, in the sense where trans means you feel like you’re in the wrong body. I never feel like I am in the wrong body. I just feel comfortable in whichever body I am in at the time. It’s just the opposite of genderfluid; my mind always matches my body. I think there isn’t a word for that because people in the world don’t have bodies that change like that; it was only in my dreams. Whatever this was I gave up on figuring out, because I was enjoying just being normal. By junior year of high school I had completely abandoned the idea of being bi-trans, or genderfluid but the other way around, or whatever this is.

So in the real world, I was straight cis-male Jody. I had begun dating girls like any of the other straight guys were doing. But I felt like I knew girls better because of the Victoria dreams. I knew what it felt like to be a woman because I’d lived hundreds of hours as Victoria in dreams that felt as real as my life outside the dreams, save for the fact that I was in a different body. Even though Victoria didn’t date guys, I understood better how to treat a woman due to having been one in many very realistic dreams.

But it was only a portion of the dreams that were so realistic. Sometimes I was in exotic places. Sometimes I was in exotic bodies, non-human ones. But even when I was in one of the non-human bodies, if I was in a female one, I was Victoria, with all her knowledge and history, as if she’d just jumped in the make-me-a-Sea-Woman booth that day. But Sea Women are a story for another day. Today is about Victoria.

I started Monday, July 3 waking up lying on top of Victoria. When I got up off her, the feeling was so strange I almost fell out of the bed. In addition to the sensations I expected to feel in my penis and my body, I could also feel the penis pulling out of my vagina. Her vagina, but I felt it as a part of me. Somehow I was feeling from both my body, that is, Jody’s body, and from Victoria’s body at the same time. That was weird, on top of the fact that Victoria was here, outside the dream.

When I got up and walked across the room, Victoria remained in bed, motionless. I looked back at her and reasoned that, if I felt sensations coming from Victoria’s body, then maybe I was Victoria, too, and she was lying there because I had to move her body. Thinking about the feelings I had felt that came from her body, I tried to focus on being Victoria. I found her vision, and my real body stumbled as I tried to reconcile the two different points of view. But I got it together surprisingly quickly, and the two images combined into an almost complete view of the room with two points of focus. If you’ve never seen with two pairs of eyes pointing in different directions at the same time, you wouldn’t understand this, but imagine being able to see behind yourself at the same time you’re looking forward.

Victoria’s focus was up on the ceiling because she was lying on her back in bed. I tried to move her head to look at me, and I succeeded in moving it a little but the change in the combined vision made me dizzy and my real body almost fell over. So I stopped, stabilized myself, and then tried something less intense, moving one of Victoria’s arms.

That was better. Her arm was initially out of my view entirely, but as I raised it, it came into my real body’s view and then into Victoria’s view as well. I was able to rotate the hand and move the fingers and see that they moved like I expected them to. I put the arm down, and that was a shock as well, because it fell across Victoria’s breasts. The nipples are very sensitive, and I’d basically banged the whole arm into both of them at once. I moved the arm down so it rested on Victoria’s stomach instead.

Feeling a bit better prepared, now I turned Victoria’s head and managed to get it looking at my real body, so we were making eye contact. My combined view now encompassed everything in the room save for what was immediately behind each of my bodies.

Over the next 15 minutes or so, I gradually worked on more motions with Victoria’s body and got her to a position sitting on the edge of the bed. The next big step was standing. I was a bit unsteady at first, but by this point I was no longer having trouble keeping my real body balanced while doing these movements with Victoria. The balance in Victoria’s body was different, yet in a way that was familiar, because of all the times I’d been Victoria in dreams. I was quite familiar with the feeling of walking or running with Victoria’s breasts. Her balance was top-heavy compared to Jody’s.

Step by step, I slowly started walking Victoria toward me, and a couple minutes later she had crossed the six feet or so there was between us. I hugged Victoria and kissed her, which created more interesting sensations. I’d never been grabbed and kissed the way Victoria just was; when I was Victoria in romantic dreams, she always took the active role. If I’d been trans and straight, and had wanted to date a guy, then Victoria’s body would probably have been very excited by what she was now feeling. But I wasn’t, and instead, however much my real body enjoyed it, the only nice feeling I sensed from Victoria was that both of me were together.

Both of me needed the bathroom. I could feel that urge, twice. The two of us held hands as I walked us together for the first time, though it was only for a few steps. When I got there, I decided to get Victoria onto the toilet first. Then, the awkwardness was not in moving her body but in the tight space. At least there was always something to hold on to.

Despite all the time I’d been Victoria in dreams and all the things I’d done in those dreams, I’d never actually used the toilet as a woman before, because of one of those rules of dreams. I only feel like I need to use the bathroom in a dream when I need to use the bathroom in real life. I’d even gotten as far as getting Victoria sitting on a toilet once or twice before I woke up and took care of my business in real life. It’s very common for my dreams to end that way, and yet, they never ended early. Once I started having the all-night dreams, this would only happen when I wanted to get up anyway.

So I didn’t actually know how to pee as a girl, but when I tried to do with her body what I do to release the pee from my male body, it worked and the flow started. When Victoria could pee no more, I knew I needed to wipe her up. I knew what girls were supposed to do, even though I’d never done it; Victoria had learned all those things somehow, even if I didn’t experience when she learned them. I had learned them by “remembering” them during times I was Victoria.

I grabbed some toilet paper and wiped, but as I did I realized there was more than pee down there. It looked like I had come inside Victoria last night. “Shit,” I swore. I was going to have to start using condoms with the Fleshlight if I was going to keep making the doll into various women. Though if she went away at the end of the day like Nancy had, maybe it wouldn’t matter.

Using Jody’s body, I wetted a little of the toilet paper at the sink to help Victoria clean up. Once Victoria was clean, I took my turn, but I just stood to pee, with Victoria standing behind me, hanging on to my sides. I didn’t think there was any hope of me getting out of here on time if I tried to shower Victoria, but I left her sitting on the toilet again while I showered quickly.

Actually peeing from my real body, from both bodies, even, made me more certain this was real. I was really Victoria in real life, in addition to being Jody. Most guys’ reaction upon waking up in my situation would probably be “Woo-hoo! I can fuck her any time I want!” or “Oh, shit! I don’t know anything about being a woman.” But for me, it just seemed like the next stage in my development. While I did hope to have some sex in ways that both of my bodies enjoyed, I wasn’t worried about actually being Victoria, and my main thought during the shower was “Why did this have to happen right now, when I’m trying to get ready for work?”

After drying off, I got both of me back into the bedroom. Now I was in charge of getting Victoria dressed. Fortunately, this was an area where the dreams had provided actual experience. After I started having longer dreams, one common type of dream started out with me as Victoria, naked or in her pajamas, and I had to get dressed for school or work. Such dreams then went on with the rest of Victoria’s day.

This was pretty ironic. Saturday Nancy just had to wear whatever of my clothes, and I went out and bought clothes for her. Apart from what Nancy put on in the store, the first time any of them are going to be used, I was going to have to pick out and put on clothes myself. Even more fortunately, I discovered that Nancy’s clothes fit Victoria. Even her bra fit; I saw the tag on the one I picked out said 36D. Was Nancy really that big, a D cup? I knew it was right for Victoria, and indeed, it fit Victoria well, but I thought Nancy was smaller. Other than that, Nancy and Victoria were close to the same size, so I shrugged off the weirdness there. I had Victoria wear a new pair of Nancy’s panties and a short-sleeve pullover blouse and shorts. I put on my typical work clothes.

Next we made our way to the combined kitchen and dining room, which were at the other end of the small house. We passed through the entry area opposite the bathroom and then through what passed for a living room to our destination, and I carefully eased Victoria’s body into a chair at the table. I grabbed the cereal and milk and prepared it for both of us.

Using Victoria’s arm to feed her was easy enough, but I took turns feeding myself a spoonful and feeding Victoria one. I wasn’t sure I was yet up to doing that for both of us at the same time, but one could chew while I fed the other.

I checked my phone for messages. None, which meant I still had to head out to well 10 per previous plans. I needed to leave at 7:15 to get there by 8. It was now almost 7. What was I going to do with Victoria? I couldn’t take her with me. I’d be out there all day. All the other wives and girlfriends stayed in camp, or drove to town on their own or whatever. I decided to just lay her down in bed. That was the easiest way for me to make sure she didn’t fall or anything. I packed my lunch and got ready to go like I would any other day, ignoring Victoria.

I made it out to where I was supposed to be, and got on with my work. By the time the site lead called for coffee break a little after 10, and those of us working at the site lined up at the coffee pot, I realized I needed to tend to Victoria. She needed to pee, and was also thirsty. I managed to get her to the toilet before it was my turn to fill my coffee cup. Once I was sitting and drinking, I cleaned up Victoria, flushed, dressed, and got her to the kitchen to get some water.

At my lunch break, Victoria needed lunch too, and I was able to make her a sandwich. Afternoon coffee break was much like the morning one, but Victoria also needed to poop. This was another thing I’d never done in my dreams, but the muscle movement was the same. When I went to clean her up, I realized Victoria had been taught at some point, though I had no idea when, that women had to wipe from front to back to avoid getting poop in the vagina. Yuck! It made sense, though; I had gotten poop on my balls before, and while that was annoying to clean off, letting it get back inside the wrong hole was a whole other level of gross. Fortunately, the lack of male equipment made it easy to wipe that way.

Having Victoria here was certainly something I hadn’t planned for. If I’d thought things through, I would have realized that she would need the kind of care I was giving her during my work breaks, but I was rushing to get to work. Victoria was as real today as Nancy had been Saturday, and had the needs of a real person. Fortunately, when Nancy was here, I’d bought extra food, thinking I was going to have her here all the time.

I tended to Victoria once more just before leaving the well site, and laid her back in bed for my drive home. I arrived in the camp’s parking lot just before 5. Before I made it into my house, Pedro drove up beside me. Pedro was the housing manager at the camp. I don’t think he’d ever seen the doll, but since I’d never invited anyone in with it out where it was visible, he was the only person who might ever have seen the doll that had become Victoria today. But that wasn’t quite what he asked about.

“Hey, did I see your woman moving around in your house today?”

Stunned, after a moment I answered, “Yeah, probably.”

“Steve told me he saw you come home with her Saturday.”

“Is there a problem with it?”

“I was just wondering if you wanted to move up to one of the double-wides.”

“Oh,” I responded, realizing this was actually a good thing. “Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.”

They only offered the double-wide houses to couples. They only had so many of them. Some couples were straight couples, some were gay couples, but there were always two people. But the fact that at least two other men had seen Nancy and Victoria as a separate person from me was evidence that this was all real and not my hyperactive imagination or a hallucination. I hoped it wasn’t just an unusually long and detailed dream.

I went inside and called “Hey, Hon,” to Victoria, so that she would look independent from me, before bringing her to the door.

“They’re offering us a bigger house,” I said in her direction.

I had never before spoken as Victoria, not in real life. But I summoned her voice and said, “Oh, that’s nice.” She didn’t sound very excited, but I figured this was the minimal amount of interaction that would seem reasonable for a couple.

Pedro said to Victoria, “You want to come look at it?”

“No, I trust Jody.”

I didn’t want Victoria to look at it just because I didn’t want Pedro to see how unsteady I was trying to do things with both bodies at the same time. I was good with her body now when I wasn’t moving mine, though. I had Victoria go back inside and close the door. Pedro led me over to one of the double-wide mobile homes that was available. It was actually only 20 feet wide versus 12 for the one I had, but the name meant it was moved here in two pieces that had to be assembled on site. Not that we were moving them. Most of the time they left the same houses here and just rented them to the people who needed to work here, but it was possible to move them in and out when they needed more people working here, or in another part of the state. There were at least twenty extra utility hookups here that had never had houses. The remains of traffic cones that had been scratched and slit open by ice over multiple winters marked their locations.

The new house looked good. The bed was actually big enough for the two of us to lie on. The house looked clean and I didn’t see any problems with it, so I went with Pedro and signed new rental papers. The house was going to cost 50% more, the water/sewer service a third more, and the electricity was billed by usage rather than a flat rate, but would no doubt increase. He gave me a stack of moving boxes, and told me I could leave them by his office when we were done. Also, he provided a set of cheap sheets that fit the larger bed; they were standard “double” bed sheets, so I would be able to buy more at the store instead of the custom cut-down twin sheets the tiny bed in the other house needed. Why do we have such stupid names for bed sizes anyway? Two names that mean “two”, and they are both for smaller beds than the two names that mean one person.

I took the boxes back over to my old house. I tried to practice using both bodies at the same time, and I managed to have Victoria stand at a box helping to arrange things in it while Jody gathered stuff and brought it over to her. She also held open the door to let me carry boxes out to the truck. In an hour I had all our stuff moved over to the new house. This one was made for two people, so there was no shortage of storage space for clothes. Victoria, or Nancy, or whoever my companion was, had room for a whole wardrobe instead of just what I’d bought Saturday. Well, she did if that wardrobe was the size of mine, or only a little bigger. Women had more clothes, but would my women, perhaps present intermittently, need a larger wardrobe here, where there was nothing to do? Probably not more than the space available here, anyway.

I made dinner for the two of us a little later than we expected, but we enjoyed it. After dinner, I worked on putting away the things I’d brought over. To get more practice using Victoria’s body, I gave her the sheets, and then, using her body, I put them on the bed. I also put most of the things away using her body.

So now it was time for the big question. I had never had the opportunity to have sex with Victoria because we were always in separate dreams, so this was my first opportunity. I knew my body would enjoy sex with Victoria. But would Victoria’s body enjoy it? I wasn’t going to be that “woo-hoo” guy from my thoughts during this morning’s shower. If we were going to have sex, I was going to try to make sure both of my bodies enjoyed it.

Victoria had had various kinds of sex in dreams, including vaginal penetration in certain ways, but I could not remember a time, besides last night, when it was with a perfectly normal male human. I wasn’t even sure Victoria liked guys. Victoria had had lesbian sex with Nancy and other women, and whatever kind of sex was possible with many of the non-human characters. But I did know that she had been penetrated by some kind of organ, anyway, and enjoyed it as a sexual experience, in a way that my male body could not.

I put a brave face on Victoria and resolved to try it. About 8:00 we stripped, trying to be sexy about it like a striptease. My dick was hard as a rock at the end of this, but Victoria wasn’t dripping wet. In fact, it seemed like her body wasn’t excited at all. I went inside her mind and sought out wherever it was that held her feelings about this.

This was a surreal experience. I was navigating around inside her mind like it was a maze, and I was just as lost as if I was in an actual maze. But I learned a lot. I learned where in this maze things were organized. I had found some of these previously on instinct, such as her centers of sight, balance, and motor skills. I used those as landmarks as I encountered various sorts of memories, and her feelings. Emotions. Her sense of anger, which was absent. Her sense of friendship, which was strong. Her sense of boredom, which was active just a tiny bit. Her sense of envy, I think, which was active a little. She envied the way I had control of all of these in my own mind but was fumbling trying to find them in hers. By chance I stumbled across her sense of smell, which might be useful in what was coming.

Finally, I found her sense of love, which was strong, and her sense of lust, which was weak. But at least I would know if I was getting her interested. I had her put the condom on me, and that didn’t do anything for her, either.

What did help was the hands-on foreplay, especially clitoral stimulation. I got Victoria’s juices flowing, and felt the sexual stimulation rising in her mind. With her in that state, I put it in her. And it did feel good in the end. Both Jody and Victoria enjoyed the sex, but something about the experience just failed to satisfy Victoria. If I had to rate it, the experience was a 9 out of 10 for me, mainly because I couldn’t help Victoria enjoy it as much, and a 5 out of 10 for Victoria. After I came once, and I had gotten Victoria to her female orgasm three times, I got the impression that Victoria wasn’t interested in continuing. So I stopped, cleaned both of us up, and just went to sleep, the two of us actually able to lie without being pressed against each other on the larger bed.

I dreamed about Nancy again, but I woke up beside the doll on Tuesday, July 4. I had the day off for the holiday, and I spent most of it thinking about what had happened in recent days. I ate my meals alone, like happened pretty much every day before the last few.

While it was Independence Day, it wasn’t like we were in a city that would have a professional fireworks show. Also, this time of year it doesn’t get fully dark here until midnight because of how close we are to the Arctic Circle. Somebody did set off some fireworks, but it wasn’t all that exciting.

When I was getting ready for bed, I debated whether to fuck the doll tonight. I had had sex with either the doll or a girl it turned into several nights in a row now, and I didn’t feel like I was so addicted to sex to need it every night, despite how little there was to do here. But it seemed like fucking the doll was how I was making it happen, and I wanted to test fucking the doll with a condom, so I did that tonight.

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.

The character I dreamt of that night was one of the many not-quite-human species my wild childhood imagination had invented during the period after I had learned how sex works and was imagining other ways that it could work. Aries was not the ram from the zodiac, but a member of a species called the Sea Men. The pun on semen wasn’t intended at the time I named these people. They’re actually based on the seahorse!

Sea Men (and Sea Women) are a humanoid species with blue skin and some small fins that help them swim. They aren’t mermaids, in the traditional sense. They have two arms and two legs, and they have lungs, not gills. They live either on land near the sea, or near the surface of the water where they can still get air.

Sea Men impregnate Sea Women in the way people do, but that’s the end of where their reproduction resembles that of humans. Some hours after a Sea Woman gets impregnated, she lays an egg. But a lot of species lay eggs; what’s special is how she does it. Before she does so, her vagina grows outward. When it’s done, the uterus is in her pelvis and her cervix is aligned with the surface of her crotch. The entire vagina is outside the body, looking like a long, thick cock. That organ is actually an ovipositor, existing for one purpose only, to lay her egg. Once that’s done, the changes revert in about half the time it took for the organ to take that shape.

The egg is a little larger than a chicken’s egg, about the size of a duck’s egg. It has a leathery shell like a turtle’s egg. If they want to make a child with this egg, the egg is deposited into a sac on the Sea Man’s stomach. Within the environment of the sac, the eggshell dissolves over the course of a day and the embryo within attaches to the Sea Man’s navel, which acts like the placenta in humans, providing nutrients taken from the father’s bloodstream and removing wastes.

I never had a protracted dream covering an entire pregnancy, but I assumed the Sea Man’s gestation was similar to the human nine months. The child grows to that size, anyway. Rather than having to push the child out, though, Sea Men give birth simply when the fetus grows too large to remain in the sac and its head protrudes. The father places the child’s head on one of his breasts, which have developed in the female human style during the pregnancy. The consumption of father’s milk triggers the separation of the child from the father’s navel, and within a day or so of the head protruding, the father pulls the child out and into the world.

The Sea Women mothering these children have breasts, too; laying an egg causes them to develop, and either being around a pregnant Sea Man or continuing to lay eggs regularly causes them to start lactating. Both parents can feed the child after it is born, but the father also takes milk from the mother during the pregnancy to help with the child’s nutrition. Sea Men and Sea Women are as addicted to sex as humans are, simply letting their eggs fall onto the sea floor as a means of contraception, and as a result, many Sea Women have breasts and are lactating all the time.

In my dreams there is a whole civilization of Sea Men, and sometimes I’m one of them (either as Jody or as Victoria) living with them on the shore and in the water. Those dreams were often sexual, and in them I’ve played all the roles: Man fucking woman, woman being fucked, woman laying the egg, man having the egg laid in him, pregnant man, man giving birth. But initially, I knew only a single Sea Woman named Aries.

I started frequently encountering Aries in dreams just after I was first starting to feel sexual sensations and was trying to figure out my sexuality. I liked the sexual encounters with Nancy, but the other dreams like these made me wonder. In these early Aries dreams, Aries was living in a house with me, rather than at the shoreline, I was in my own human male body, and since I didn’t have the stomach sac, Aries was always trying to lay the egg in my ass or down my throat or hide it in my lunch box or some other such stunt.

Getting Aries poking me in the butt made me wonder if I was gay. I was curious what it would feel like in real life. I went so far as to acquire a dildo and a vibrator back then, so I could answer that curiosity. Ultimately, I decided that I was not gay, at least not in that way. Those toys did nothing for me and I stopped using them, in real life, anyway. Victoria used such toys in dreams sometimes; they worked for her.

Once I figured out I wasn’t gay, this became more like a game. The price for fucking Aries was having to play this evasion game with her afterward. Eventually, the egg came out of her, and I won if it didn’t end up going inside me. Of course, since I never went to the bathroom in dreams, if it went up my ass, it was stuck inside me for the rest of that dream. Usually, though, this happened near the end of the dream and I woke up shortly afterward with the need to poop. There was no actual egg to push out, though, because until very recently these dreams were only dreams and didn’t enter my reality.

Aries was in bed with me when I woke up Friday, July 7. In her typical style, before I left for work and after I had explained the situation here to her, Aries asked for sex without the condom so she could lay an egg today.

“Why? What do you plan on doing with the egg?”

“I promise, I just want to leave it with you as a gift. Maybe one of the other women will find a use for it.”

I decided it was a mistake telling Aries about the other women, but I can’t put that genie back in the bottle now.

“OK, but promise me you will hand me the egg when I get home, and it’s not going to be hidden in my food, nor attempted to be implanted inside me, nor inside any of my neighbors.”

“I promise, I will hand you the egg when you get home.”

I was still worried there was going to be some sort of trick, but we did a quickie before I got ready for work.

Remembering that I was trying to do research, I checked her purse. Sea Women didn’t even carry purses, as far as I could remember; they lived in a society very close to nature, eating fish from the sea. I’d never seen them use money, keys, or makeup. They didn’t have tampons since they didn’t menstruate. They didn’t seem to need the things human women might carry in their purses. So the purse was just the same purse, the money and chopstick hadn’t changed, the ornament on the key ring had become a fish, and the ID card was back to looking like a sample card, though it did have her picture and the name Aries printed on it. However, Aries had lived in a house with me some of the time, so she was at least familiar with some aspects of human society, and I explained the money and keys to her.

She had set out a bowl of cereal with milk for me when I got out of the shower. Of course, she didn’t have one, because the Sea Man diet mostly consisted of fish. My cereal tasted unusually sweet, so I asked Aries, “What did you put in my cereal?”

Her response was simply squeezing one of her breasts so that it squirted a bit of milk, which landed neatly in my cereal bowl. Of course, since Aries was always laying eggs, she was lactating all the time. I considered throwing it out, but I knew her milk was safe to drink, just different, and I went ahead and ate what she had prepared.

Seeing her still not eating, I told her, “I don’t have any fresh fish for you, but there is a pond nearby, and some of the men go out and catch fish there sometimes. There should be times during the day when no one is fishing and you can go catch some, in your way. If you decide to go out there, though, you can’t go naked. Um, let me see what you have to wear.”

Nancy hadn’t bought a bathing suit, but when I checked her clothes, everything that wasn’t cold-weather gear had been replaced with bathing suits. I found two parts of a bikini that matched and brought them to Aries, and held each one over the part it was meant to cover. Even though she didn’t normally wear clothes, she had been around humans in my dreams enough to understand. She put the garments on before I left for work.

Aries was true to her word and just handed me the egg when I got home.

“I’m still not sure what I’m supposed to do with this egg.”

“You could eat it. It wouldn’t be cannibalism for you.”

“Um, no. It’s an egg fathered by me. It’s equally as much cannibalism for me to eat it as it would be for you.”

“Oh, sorry.”

But then I had an idea. I wrapped the egg in paper on which I’d written DO NOT EAT.

“Here. I am giving this back to you. Everything belonging to the women is changing each time I bring a different woman here. Maybe for one of the other women, it will be something useful. Go put it in the fridge so it stays fresh until then.”

She came back with a plate with two fish on it. “I have another gift for you, one you shouldn’t have any qualms about.”

“Did you already eat dinner?” I asked her.

“Yes. Both fish are for you.”

“Well, I only need one fish this size for a meal, so I’ll save the other for tomorrow.”

I cooked and ate my fish. I’m sure Aries had simply eaten hers raw, because that was the way of her people.

Aries pleaded for sex without a condom in the evening, but this time I had to deny the request.

“I don’t know when during the night the change happens, and I do not want to risk impregnating one of the other women,” I told her.

“Awwww. But I understand.”

This time I focused on dreaming about Nancy. I wanted her to be the one to fill out more of a wardrobe for my women, and more belongings that might change for each one.

For the second time, I managed to control my dream and summon Nancy by plan on Saturday, July 8.

Nancy’s keychain ornament was a hippo. I thought that was weird until I remembered that was the game that Pansy wouldn’t play with me: Hungry Hungry Hippos. A little kids’ game about trying to control a plastic hippo and have it eat marbles in the middle of the gameboard before the other players’ hippos get them.

The other stuff in the purse was back to how it was for Nancy the last time, and her clothes were Nancy’s, too. When we checked it carefully, we saw none of it was the stuff we’d bought last Saturday; it was all things she had worn in dreams.

We also looked at the egg. It had changed into some other kind of egg, an ordinary white one, but without hatching it, we had no idea how to tell what. We decided to leave it around and see if it changed again for other women.

Having some more evidence to support Nancy’s ideas, when we went out shopping, Nancy decided we should buy the cheapest clothing available that fit her.

She explained, “It’s going to change to clothes appropriate to each other woman. After the change, when I’m here it ends up as the kind of thing I would wear, regardless of how it started. It only has to be something that could believably be mine.”

So we bought about twice as much clothing as the last time at about two-thirds of the total price. But there were more different types of clothing, and other things as well. Anything Nancy thought a typical woman would own that wasn’t too large or expensive, including some basic makeup. There was a lot more room for it in the larger house.

I did my post office and food shopping stops as well; I was likewise able to buy more food now because of the larger fridge in the new house, which was still small for a family refrigerator, but at the small end of the usual size range.

I was pleased with my apparent ability to control who I brought into the world each day by focusing on them as I went to bed. I wanted to get Mona back, as the most useful character to test our theories. Would the chopstick work as a wand for her? And what would the egg become?

Sunday, July 9 I succeeded in bringing her. As I expected, her entire wardrobe was a uniform red, all in rich fabrics and probably with any one item costing as much as everything we’d bought yesterday combined. Even things in the hamper were changed to her style; Mona day was never going to be laundry day! Her purse and ID were also changed as before. Her keychain ornament was some kind of sea monster.

When I showed her the wand, she was stunned.

“Yes, it’s really a magic wand. Not my wand; whatever magic is making these changes wasn’t powerful enough to duplicate it here, I suppose. But it’s a wand I can use to do some magic.”

She demonstrated by laying out breakfast for two on my dining table, not my cereal, but bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, hash browns, the whole deal.

As we ate, Mona explained, “There are a few fundamental limits on my magic which all the magic-users where I come from are forced to abide by under a sort of magical law, which I won’t be exempt from here, even if I was able to have my usual wand. First off, I can’t make money. It would be too easy to destroy the value of it if I could. Also not substitutes for money like gold and gems. When you see me craft a gold tiara out of thin air, it’s not real gold. Also, I can’t use my magic to steal things. If I summon an existing item, it has to belong to me unless I have permission to use it from the owner. Apparently the clothes you keep here sort of implicitly belong to all the women your power brings here, though, so I can summon those.”

“What about the breakfast? Did you summon it from back home?”

“No, it’s possible for me to create some things. Food, in general, is one of the unrestricted categories I can always create.”

“So could you run a food company just by creating all the food magically?”

“Maybe, but it would be a pretty small food company. Even the magic I am allowed to cast uses up magical energy from a supply I have. The supply is large and replenishes over time, but it’s still limited. If I had my own wand, I could cast bigger spells using more of that magic in one spell, but it wouldn’t make any more total magic available.”

Since I didn’t actually open the fridge for breakfast, it was later when we looked at the egg. I wasn’t even sure it was still an egg, but Mona identified it as the egg of a sea dragon, a creature that exists in her world.

“Is that what your keychain ornament is?”

She found it in her purse.”

“Yes, this is a stylized, cutesy version of a sea dragon. In truth, they are generally dangerous wild animals.”

“Wait, did you save me from one once in one of the dreams?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thank you for that.”

Mona returned to considering the egg. “Sea dragon eggs are highly valued. If you raise a sea dragon from the egg, it will be a loyal pet and fierce protector. But they have to be kept warm; even human body temperature is barely warm enough, and they’d prefer warmer. This one’s surely dead if it’s been in here overnight.”

“I take it, then, that they do not lay these eggs in the water.”

“Right. They live much of their lives in the water, but they hollow out nests in the sand at the peak of summer and lay one or two eggs there, which are warmed by the heat of the sun during the day and by the dragon’s body at night. And people try to sneak in and steal these eggs when the mother dragon’s out getting food during the day. But it’s dangerous, because it is hard to know when one of them is near but underwater. They can easily kill a man if they catch him, cook him alive, even, and without worry of hurting their eggs.”

“Oh, do sea dragons breathe fire?” That was not something I remembered.

“Steam, actually. Which makes them a lot safer to have them as pets; they aren’t likely to start fires. I assume this was some other egg for the other women, since I know you don’t have dragons in your world.”

“Aries laid the egg, and it just looked like an ordinary chicken’s egg for Nancy, but we couldn’t test it.”

She did something with her wand near the egg, but it seemed to have no effect and she frowned.

“I don’t think I have enough magical power with this wand to transport the egg home. So I’d have to find another way, in addition to you getting me a live one. But if you can help me with those two things, I would be deeply indebted to you and I’d be willing to do quite a lot for you with my magic, subject to its limits.”

So we spent much of the day trying to figure out Mona’s limits here more precisely. I did have sex with her, but we didn’t do it as I went to sleep because it was less useful to me to have a woman here on a day I was working when I couldn’t be with her most of the day (and quite inconvenient if she was Victoria).

I wasn’t especially interested in bringing women in during the week, but I did want to give Nancy more chances to do research for me. So after Monday, July 10 alone, that night I fucked the doll to bring Nancy back on Tuesday, July 11.

Nancy had the bright idea of videoing us in bed to see when the changes occurred. I tried to set it up during the day, but I realized I needed some kind of stand to do it properly. Also, even with the video I took, I realized it would be too big a file to hold 8 hours of continuous video on my phone. So I found a camera on Amazon designed to record time-lapse video, only one or two frames per second, and with a built-in stand, which would do what we wanted. With luck I could pick it up Saturday.

Another notable thing on Tuesday was that Nancy needed a tampon. I suppose that in itself wasn’t all that notable, except in learning that my summoned women can have periods just like any others. That said, I remembered characters in dreams having periods, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nancy had expected it, as she had picked those up during our shopping trip a week earlier and they got used for the first time today.

But she revealed the surprising fact that she remembered her time at home alone the days she wasn’t here the last week, though she didn’t remember any such time before that. Specifically, she remembered starting her period on Monday. Until now, she hadn’t remembered any specific event from any time I wasn’t dreaming about her, though it seemed like she implicitly knew some things that she should have known if she grew up at the same time as and down the street from me, even if her house was at an imaginary address on my street.

Tuesday night was even more surprising. I wasn’t fucking Nancy in bed, but I dreamed about her. Specifically, in the dream we were together in my old house, my parents’ house. My parents weren’t there; I don’t know why. It was just us. Nancy wanted to go home, and I followed her up the street. We left my house at 1742, went past my neighbors house at 1746, and then there was somehow one more house on the block I was sure wasn’t there in real life, which was incongruously numbered 1788.

Her parents weren’t there either. I went to look for them, and there simply wasn’t any room for them. Her house looked as big as mine on the outside, but inside there was only a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and one bedroom, Nancy’s. The rest of the house was inaccessible. But Nancy said this was the way she had always remembered it.

At this point Nancy felt the need to change her tampon, and after a moment she called me to come help her.

“Jody, I’m pretty sure this tampon is one I put in at your house. But the string’s been cut. There’s only a little piece of it left inside me.”

She sat at the edge of the toilet seat, legs spread wide, and with her hands holding herself open as well as she could. I could see it inside her, but indeed there was only the part of the string that was inside her.

“Can you push it out with your vaginal muscles?”

“I tried. It’s really wet and soggy and I couldn’t get it to move.”

She demonstrated this for me. It barely moved at all.

“Can you pull it out?” Nancy asked.

She held herself open as wide as she could, and I reached two fingers into her, grasped the cut end of the slick braided cord between my fingers, and tugged at it. It took a few tries, but once it got to the point that the main part of the tampon reached the edge of her body, it all came out in one pull.

“Well I never expected to have to remove your tampon.”

“But that’s a skill you should know,” Nancy pointed out. “Didn’t you ever do that as Victoria?”

“Sure, all the time. But I was her. I never removed another person’s tampon.”

“Right. I’m just glad I had someone here I’ve been intimate with. This could have been super embarrassing otherwise.”

We both washed our hands, and Nancy grabbed a fresh tampon and inserted it without help. Meanwhile, Nancy’s comment made me remember certain dreams. In high school, I had “day in the life” dreams, in which I experienced more or less a whole day from getting out of bed to going to bed again, once or twice a week, about half of them as Victoria and half as Jody. While bathroom functions were excluded, periods were definitely not, though those dreams didn’t fall during Victoria’s period every month.

And Victoria did have regular periods, sort of. When I was Victoria, if I was in my period or it was near, I always knew, though the other dreams that didn’t track the timeline so closely made it hard for me, outside the dreams, to remember when they were. Given that Nancy picked up tampons and panty liners and not the thicker pads, I assumed she used them the same way Victoria did, panty liners on the day the first spots were expected to appear and at the end if she wasn’t sure the period was completely over, and tampons for the main part of the period.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 12, I was in bed with the doll, as I expected since I failed to follow both the fucking rule and the different person rule Nancy suggested. I confirmed the events of the dream by finding the piece of cut tampon-string between the doll’s legs. I placed this next to Nancy’s purse to show her later, but the important thing was that I now knew how to help Mona!

But not quite right away. Wednesday night I dreamed of Nancy again, though the actual dream was unremarkable, and I brought her back into the world Thursday, July 13. She confirmed the events of Tuesday night’s dream; she had experienced it as I did.

She was still confused about her parents, and I got her talking about it.

“I know somebody raised me, fed me, and took me to and from school before I was old enough to walk there on my own, but I sure can’t remember what they looked like, their names, or anything else about them. Later on, when I was in middle school and high school, I remember doing everything on my own. I got up to my alarm clock, showered, dressed, ate breakfast, and walked to school on my own. Sometimes I met you coming out of your house, and we walked to school together. I have some vaguer memories of walking to school with Victoria as well; something is different about those memories, besides that Victoria’s in them, but I can’t explain what.”

“Yeah, I remember walking to school with you in dreams. Some of my dreams were more or less a repeat of the previous day, but you were often in them, and sometimes I was Victoria instead of Jody. I did everything on my own in those dreams, too. When that type of dream fell during Victoria’s period, I remember Victoria using tampons. I don’t actually remember my mom, or Victoria’s mom I suppose, teaching me how to use tampons or any of the other girl stuff, but Victoria knew it.”

“Same,” Nancy commented. “I know my mom must have taught me those things, but I can’t remember it happening. I never saw your mom either. Sometimes we walked home from school together and stopped at your house to play, but I can’t remember your parents ever appearing. We played until we were tired and either I ate with you, or I went home and ate alone.”

I added, “I think in those dreams earlier on, somebody made meals for me, but by high school, it was just like you. I made my own meals, but it wasn’t junk food. My parents in real life had shown me how to cook basic meals, but in the dreams, I cooked everything, the same stuff my mom made for me the previous real day.”

Nancy sighed. “I guess it’s different, having the real-life experience too. I never had that; your dreams were my real life.”

We didn’t have sex Thursday night, to help confirm that’s needed for my ability, and I dreamed of Aries again. She was in my family’s house, the one I’ve been in with Nancy recently. And I decided to explore. There was my bedroom, set up like it had been when I was in high school. And the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. I opened the door to what should have been my parents’ bedroom, and found an empty room. Completely empty, like when you just moved into a new house.

“Huh, my parents’ stuff should have been in here.”

“I’ve never seen your parents in these dreams,” Aries responded.

“Yeah, I somehow didn’t notice that until recently, Aries. But you know what happened the last time I was here?”

“Tell me!”

“Nancy was here, and we walked to her house, which is just two doors up the street. In real life, there’s no house there, and the house next door to mine is the last on the block.”

“Let’s go see if she’s there,” Aries suggested.

We took that short walk, and sure enough, Nancy’s house was there, and she was in it. She joined us and we looked around the neighborhood, and while the other houses were there, they seemed empty. There were lights in some windows, but we couldn’t see anything inside. They all had blinds, or curtains that obscured vision of anything in the house.

Also, we confirmed just how impossible the placement of Nancy’s house was. We went past Nancy’s house and turned the corner. From here, we could see Nancy’s house and the other street’s correct corner house facing the end of the block. Going down the other street behind mine, looking over the back fences between the first two houses, we could see my house and 1746, and not Nancy’s house. The lot for the first house on that side of the block wasn’t any longer than any of the other lots. It was just that the block itself was longer on my side, as if geometry had simply stopped working. From my street, if we did the same bit of looking over the back fences, between 1746 and Nancy’s house, the first two houses on the other side were visible, and between 1746 and my house, those same two houses were still visible! Before this gave us headaches, we went back to my house, and that was the last I remember from that dream.

In accordance with Nancy’s guess about how my power worked, Friday, July 14 I woke up with the doll, and Friday night I did use the doll, and I dreamed of Aries again on purpose to bring her into the doll.

Saturday, July 15, Aries was there, as I planned. At breakfast, I checked my messages and saw that Amazon claimed they were going to deliver my package to the post office by noon. I made Aries get dressed in a one-piece bathing suit, since it provided the most coverage of anything she had that wasn’t clearly meant for cold weather, so that she could go into town with me. It was bad enough that I would have the blue-skinned woman walking beside me; having her be almost naked as well might totally weird people out.

While Aries understood more of the human world than I would expect the average Sea Man would, those dreams with her in my world were almost exclusively at the house, and not going and doing other things, so I expected some of these would be new experiences for her. We went to the arcade to pass the time, and she didn’t do very well because unlike Nancy, this wasn’t really her thing. It was more of a time for me to show her how to play the games rather than competing with her.

I tried to take her clothes shopping, but clothes are really not her thing, either. She wears bathing suits only because she understands public nudity is not generally acceptable by humans. I got her to try some stuff on, but there was nothing she wanted to take home. We ate lunch, went to the post office (my package was there, yay) and I went shopping for food before going back home.

And at no point did anybody seem to think the blue-skinned, finned woman wearing a bathing suit walking along beside me was weird. It wasn’t that they didn’t see her. At one point in the arcade, she dropped a token, which rolled away a bit and a man picked it up and handed it back to her. When I tried clothes shopping, I got one of the employees to recommend something for her, and she was choosing things to go with her blue skin and even aquatic-themed prints. I let her pay for groceries, even though it just meant tapping the card on the terminal, and the cashier handed her the receipt. Everybody acted like Sea Men were just another race or kind of appearance some people have, alongside white, black, Chinese, albino, etc. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this happened in one of my dreams, but this was happening in the real world.

We came home and had sex before dinner so that she could lay an egg for Mona. And I asked her advice about keeping it alive.

“Normally, you’d want to have it literally under someone’s skin. That’s why we lay it directly into the sac. But you say I can’t do that because you don’t want it inside yourself and if I put it inside me it’ll go home with me and not to your next woman. So I think this is best.”

She put the egg between her breasts inside her bathing suit, and kept it there through the time we went to bed.

“That’s good. Mona said the sea dragon egg we’re converting this into also needs to be kept that warm.”

I set up the camera, and set it recording before we went to bed. And of course, I had to be fucking her, and dream about Mona to get the egg to her.

Mona arrived Sunday, July 16 wearing one of her red outfits in bed, since Aries had worn her suit to bed to help keep the egg in place. But she had the egg, and confirmed again it was a sea dragon egg, and alive.

I explained, “Aries kept the egg between her breasts to keep it warm, rather than inside her, because that’s the trick; something inside your body goes home with you. Nancy wore a tampon home that way. And only the part of it actually inside her went with her, so you need to make sure the egg is completely inside.”

“Got it. The egg needs to go inside me, both to keep warm and to go back with me.”

With some effort, she got the egg into her vagina and pushed it two knuckles deep.

“That looks painful,” I commented as she eased one after another of its “spikes” inside her. They were about the size of the pyramidal studs on punk-rockers’ leather jackets, but round rather than square.

“These rigid projections are smooth on the tips, and made of the same material as the rest of the leathery shell. They’re meant to be protection against predators eating the eggs. They’re perfectly safe as long as you don’t puncture them with something hard and sharp, like a tooth. They come out of the mother sea dragon through an orifice no bigger than this, and she never breaks them. It’s perfectly safe to handle this way.”

“What if you break one?”

“The fluid inside stings like hot peppers.”

“I guess no sex tonight, then.”

“Definitely not.”

I shut off the camera, and was going to review it after breakfast, but during breakfast I got an urgent call that I was needed at well 2. So I hurried through breakfast and got myself ready to go out there. I apologized to Mona but explained my work sometimes needs me, and told her I would expect to be back here for dinner.

So it wasn’t until after dinner that I finally got to review the video. And what it showed was that Aries was replaced by the doll as soon as I went to sleep. And she stayed the doll until just as we were waking up she became Mona. That was interesting, and might mean the egg was something else entirely all night long. It looked like during the night Aries’ bathing suit changed into some other clothes, maybe some of the ordinary ones Nancy had bought. And my body was entirely motionless as well, but it still looked like my body.

I visited Mona in the dream that night, at her home, which naturally was a castle as red as her clothes. She had extricated the egg from her body and now kept it in a glass incubator. In the dream (which I now understood to be as real as when she was summoned into the real world) she explained, “It needs to incubate for a couple weeks, and then after it hatches I will want to be here every day to train it. So please don’t summon me during that time. You can visit in dreams like this, as long as I stay in my world the next day. If whatever you ask in exchange for this favor can’t be done in the next two weeks, it should wait until the dragon is trained.”

“I probably won’t even decide on something before then, so I’ll take the extra time to come up with ideas.”

Monday, July 17, my bed-mate was just the doll again. I spent the day back out at well 2 again, but we resolved the problem that day and so they had me take Tuesday off. Since I felt like I had been neglecting her, I focused on dreaming about Victoria that night. Being Victoria had been awkward when I was working, and I’d had other priorities the last two weekends, so this was the first day that was convenient to bring her back since I’d figured out I had some control. It was going to be the first time I had a whole day to enjoy being Victoria.

Did I enjoy being Victoria? I had decided, some time ago, that I wasn’t trans, and I didn’t want to be a woman in real life, but I still had the dreams about being Victoria. But was it just that the fakeness of being cross-dressed that felt wrong to me? I know I didn’t mind being Victoria in the dreams. Bringing her today would give me a chance to see how real life compared to those dreams. That was my goal, to spend today figuring out if I enjoyed being Victoria. If I didn’t, I could let Victoria fade away and focus on bringing the other women into the real world.

The dream I had was oddly boring. Usually when I’m Victoria I’m doing something else in the dream and I just happen to be female, and the female version of me is known as Victoria. Even the first time I brought her into the real world, she was fucking a guy in the dream. This time, Victoria was just there in her house, the same house I’d visited in some recent dreams, except it was Victoria’s house. There were the same rooms in the same arrangement, but in her room there was a closet full of Victoria’s clothes, and certain other items in Jody’s house were replaced by items more appropriate for Victoria. And when I thought about it, I realized that the house was very much like many Victoria dreams in the past. I had needed to dress her many times, and only her clothes were present in those dreams.

In this night’s dream, Nancy was still in her house in the same non-existent location, but the dream wasn’t about her and I didn’t linger there. Aries was nowhere to be found; presumably she was back with her water-dwelling kin. But that was just it. There weren’t any other people. There wasn’t anything to do, really. In the previous dream, the man Victoria was fucking, who I am still not sure was Jody, had been there perhaps because I had just translated my activity in bed into the dream. When I just thought of being Victoria, that’s all I got. I guess if Victoria was bringing stuff back from my world to hers, I’d have it here.

But it made me wonder what would happen if I dreamed Victoria elsewhere. I’d had dreams in which she was a female of the three-gendered Pasthru species and she was still in a normal world, except one that had Pasthrus in it, but other times she was a Sea Woman and living among the Sea Women, or going on adventures in Mona’s magical world, when I was pretty certain this house wouldn’t be part of it. This also made me realize I haven’t dreamed of Pasthrus since this started. But that’s for another time. I wasn’t able to transform the dream, from within that dream, into one of these other places, so the dream ended without much happening.

But I awoke together with Victoria on Tuesday, July 18, as I did on one of the first days after this started happening.

“Good morning, Lovely,” I said to Victoria.

Shifting my focus, I replied coolly with her voice, “Good morning, Jody.”

And there it was, the weird relationship I had with myself. Victoria was a fine partner for Jody, but Victoria doesn’t have quite the same feelings for Jody.

But I wanted this to be Victoria’s day. I’d lived whole days as Victoria in dreams, but how would that compare with real life? Also, the dreams fit 16 hours of a day into 7 or 8 hours of a dream by skipping forward to the interesting parts. At least, the ones I had before very recently could do so. Today I was going to be living the whole thing. So I left Jody in bed, got Victoria up, and took her for a morning visit to the toilet. I know that in dreams when I lived a whole day as Victoria, she should have needed bathroom visits during the day, at least a few of them, but they were always skipped.

I didn’t have any of the trouble I had with her the first time, when manipulating her body in the real world was a new experience. I think that was mostly because I was trying to use both bodies at the same time. When I stopped to learn how to use Victoria’s alone, I figured it out quickly and built up to decent usage of the bodies together by the end of the day.

Next was the shower. This larger house had a shower that, well, it wasn’t made for two, but at least it was large enough I could have imagined Jody and Victoria in there together, soaping each other down. But I don’t think Victoria would want that. No, I took Victoria’s body into the shower and had a long, luxurious shower alone in there, exploring every inch of her body. Not that it was new to me; Victoria had showered in dreams many times before. But the only other time I brought her into the real world was on a work day, and I didn’t feel like I had the time to experiment with showering her before work. So while it was familiar in a way, it was also new because I was feeling her body in the real world. And it felt really nice. Even though I don’t think I would have wanted to be Victoria full-time, I felt comfortable being her, very comfortable. If I had been forced to live the rest of my life as Victoria, I wouldn’t be cursing the event that caused it. It would just be different.

Victoria dried off and I got Jody in front of the toilet, as I could now feel his need was strong. And as I did so, I realized I wasn’t having the slightest difficulty moving both bodies at once. It took me a moment to realize what I’d done. Similar to the way I delved into Victoria’s mind last night to explore her feelings about our sexual experience, I’d gone into her mind and told her to keep drying off the way I had been doing, and she did it. Was it really that easy?

When Jody was in the shower, I directed Victoria to get dressed in the same way, and effortlessly she walked into the bedroom and started looking through her wardrobe. There was a lot more of it, since the second shopping trip with Nancy was after the last time Victoria had been here, and it was the first time I was seeing some of it. Well, in the real world, anyway; every garment I looked at I could remember having seen in dreams before. Most of Victoria’s clothes were still simple and practical, but she had some nicer clothes, and for some reason I decided to dress her in her nicest dress. Or she did; I didn’t consciously pick it. The dress was one that meant she had to wear pantyhose with it, so I struggled with that for a bit, not because I was unfamiliar with them, but just due to the struggle every woman has with them; that had been difficult the few times I had done it in dreams, too. It was definitely easier to let her body do this; I probably would have ripped them doing this the way I had controlled her body during much of her first day here.

Jody took a more no-nonsense shower and was dry and coming into the bedroom while Victoria was still finishing putting her dress on, and he helped her with the zipper in back. I realized that if Victoria was wearing that, Jody had to wear something nice, too, and I’d been practical coming up here and basically had one good outfit which I rarely wore, there being little opportunity for dating here.

As I dressed Jody, and Victoria put on a little makeup, I wondered why I had done that. If this was Victoria’s day, and she didn’t want to date Jody, why did she choose an outfit that was going to make it look like we were out on a date? I wasn’t even sure what we were doing yet, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to spend my day as Jody and Victoria together just sitting around here. People were going to see us, and even though it was Tuesday during the day, we were going to appear to be on a date.

When I looked with my own eyes at Victoria, I saw my date. But when I looked through Victoria’s eyes at Jody, and looked in her mind for her impression of me, I saw a nicely dressed man, but not my date. Jody was someone Victoria could and would get to do anything for her. A servant? A slave? A plaything? Someone for her to manipulate? Was it really possible for Victoria to manipulate me in that way when I could control her every move? It had to be. Why, if she doesn’t see Jody as her date, is she setting up to go on a date with him? Because it certainly is a date: A woman dresses up nice, goes places and does social stuff with a man, eats dinner with him, and then maybe has sex with him... that’s exactly a date. I’ve been on dates with women, both in the real world and with Nancy in dreams. Victoria had also been on dates in dreams, though they were with Nancy rather than with a man. Even if I had only arranged to be with Victoria last night, and only just now arranged to be with her dressed this way, this was going to be a date.

I was uncertain what was happening, but I still wanted to live a day as Victoria, really being Victoria. If this is who she really is, I decided to cooperate in letting her be that person, even if it means I participate in my own manipulation. And even if Victoria’s mind doesn’t admit it, Victoria and I are going on our first date today.

We went to the dining table and Jody set up breakfast. Not that I felt like I couldn’t do that as Victoria, but because that is how this day is going to be. Jody is going to serve Victoria. Drive her into town and to the places she wants to go. None of it would look out of place if we were dating. We ate together, and Jody cleaned up afterward.

After breakfast, I gathered up my stuff, and Victoria’s, to prepare to go into town. I checked Victoria’s ID, which showed the name Victoria Davis on a state ID, not a driver’s license, with the address where I grew up. The keychain was back to the bear ornament it started out as.

We didn’t go to the arcade this time. While Victoria was probably just as proficient as I was at the games, and it might have been really interesting to see how we did in cooperative games, it wasn’t a place to go dressed like this. Instead, Victoria wanted to go to the spa. There was only one in the small town.

Because we had started out early, even with the time to get to town, the spa wasn’t open yet, so I stopped by the post office and picked up my mail, though there was only one thing since Saturday. When we got back to the spa, we were there when they first opened, and nobody else was waiting. Victoria got her nails done, and even Jody was made to look a little nicer, though with no polish.

We got lunch, and we strolled through the park together. Then we went to a movie at the town’s one theater. Because it was hard to have much of a special dinner in the camp, we ate dinner in the one sorta-nice restaurant in town before coming home.

I hoped this night was going to end with sex. I mentally nudged Victoria that way just as we got the door closed, after arriving home, just as I’d done things like nudge her to get dressed and to find out what she wanted to do in town. What would Victoria do?

I didn’t have to wait. Victoria started a striptease immediately, and Jody could only follow. Was Victoria that eager to have sex? The last time it seemed like Victoria enjoyed it, but more or less her body just tolerated what I was directing it to do. This time was different. She was leading the way to sex. Once I was stripped, Victoria pushed my body down onto the bed, and climbed on top. She really was that eager for sex!

What I realized was different was that when I had only nudged her mind toward it, and let her mind control the actual actions, she went about it totally differently from the way she had when I was controlling every muscle. She was in control. She was the dominant partner in the sex we were having tonight.

This was unlike anything I had done before, as Jody. When I had sex with the doll, naturally I had to lead, but when I had had sex with my girlfriends, or with Nancy in dreams, I was also the one leading in those instances. Nancy might suggest sex, but I took the active role in actually doing it, even when I was Victoria. The only experience I had had that was anywhere close to this was when I was playing keep-away from Aries when she wanted to lay an egg in me, but that was so unlike actual sex that it didn’t compare. I didn’t mind. My body was enjoying the different experience, and I felt intense feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction coming from Victoria. And lust. That part of her mind that was so weakly activated during our previous session was maxed out right now.

As I lay there passively enjoying what I’d set Victoria up to do, I put it all together. The thing I did today, letting Victoria’s mind choose activities, is exactly what she wants. It’s her personality, if it’s possible for her to have one distinct from my own. She wants to be in control. She has no problem having sex with a man, as long as she’s the one choosing how to do it and the one making it happen. My little mental nudge to have sex set her off doing what she already wanted to do tonight, and by not going any further than that, I had allowed her to enjoy it to the fullest.

And I never noticed this before because when I was being Victoria in the dreams, I always drove her body like I did the last time I had her here in real life. It didn’t cause a problem because I was only Victoria at those times, and I only had difficulty doing that when I was trying to drive two bodies that way at the same time. And that’s why Victoria only dated women, because that was me. Jody. I only like women, so that’s who I pursued, even when I was Victoria.

Did I know about Victoria’s personality subconsciously when I started down this path this morning? I decided that I did. Similar things happened in some of my dreams, where I learned real-life facts and skills from the dreams because another character in the dream knew them, or even Victoria herself knew them already when I was being her. Some of these were things I couldn’t possibly have learned in real life, like girl stuff that no real-life mother or girlfriend ever taught me... or I knew it before anyone tried to teach me.

I think these dreams are taking place in some shard of reality, an alternate reality that I am somehow able to access. Maybe several realities. But only so many of them, and that’s why the same characters keep coming back. And maybe somewhere out there, there’s a real Victoria with exactly such a forceful, dominant personality.

But did that explain how Victoria could be a Sea Woman or Nancy could be a Pasthru in some of the dreams? Are those different characters from the ones I’ve brought here or are they somehow the same? Do these different realities... intersect? I needed to find out.

I had time for all this daydreaming in Jody’s mind while Victoria was having fun riding me one way and then the other. I was still in control of Victoria’s body, but I had just let her operate on instinct, and her instinct said she would do anything sexually as long as she was in control. She even put it in her ass at one point. When, as Jody, I experimented with that kind of thing I ultimately determined I didn’t like it, but Victoria enjoyed it! And I also enjoyed the feelings her body got from it, though perhaps only because she was enjoying it so much. Jody enjoyed the sex, too, but Jody had never played such a passive role before, and it was a different experience. At least I knew now that I could be a couple with my other self, as long as she was in control.

The Victoria side of me was so much in control Tuesday night that I couldn’t think about anything else, and I arrived in the dream with her, on her bed in her version of my teenage bedroom, in the same position we’d been in, and that’s all the dream was. Hours and hours of ecstasy. And of course I never went limp. Dream sex. So Wednesday, July 19 I awoke with the doll on top of me.

I took a thorough shower and then went through a normal day at work Wednesday, and came home alone for the evening. I remembered that I wanted to explore the other species, and Pasthrus had come to mind multiple times recently, so that is what I dreamed of Wednesday night.

Pasthrus are a species that have three sexes, male, female, and emale. The male and female look like humans, including their sexual organs. The emales are the middle sex, and look a bit androgynous. The key part of them is their sexual organ, which is neither quite a penis nor quite a vagina. If you don’t look closely, you could mistake their sexual parts for male parts, but there are differences. The penis-like organ doesn’t sprout from the base of the pelvis, but actually hangs from the bottom of an otherwise male-looking scrotum. On the outside, it looks like a large penis, but in the back is an opening. The three genders get together for a single nested sex act with these organs in the way that you can probably imagine, and I did imagine it, before I ever encountered porn of bisexual three-way encounters among humans that superficially resemble this.

But definitely only superficially! The emale is unable to achieve an erection on eir own. (Emales use e/em/eir pronouns.) The penis inserted in back provides the stiffening to make the organ that then goes into the female vagina. At least, that’s what they do to get pregnant. The male ejaculation is required to activate the emale sex cells. This activation shortly afterwards triggers the emale ejaculation, which enters the vagina with some of the cells combined and some of the male and emale cells still trying to find each other. Only the ones that have achieved that first level of fertilization are able to fertilize the egg cell.

But they are a very sex-happy race and any two different genders, or two emales, can and often do get together for what they consider masturbation, because these incomplete sex acts are not capable of leading to pregnancy. With emale-female and emale-emale masturbation, a device that is effectively a dildo is required to stiffen the emale organ.

They have three of each chromosome in their cells rather than two, and XXX, XXY, or XYY sex chromosomes for the three genders. If you do the math, taking one chromosome at random from each of these, you’ll find that 2/9 of the children produced this way are XXX females, 2/9 are XYY males, and 5/9 of them are XXY emales. As a result, the emales are present in great excess. They often remain unmarried (a Pasthru marriage being three people of different genders, of course) and take jobs as servants, dangerous jobs, or ones that require long periods of isolation.

Incidentally, I did this math only after having encountered in my dreams the fact that there were excess emales in Pasthru society. This was another case of learning something in my dreams before I had a chance to learn it in real life. Heck, I don’t think I even knew about how the X and Y chromosomes work in humans when I first learned there were extra emales. After I’d learned about human sex chromosomes and the math behind them, during my next Pasthru dream I somehow knew about the Pasthru sex chromosomes, and after that was when I did the math.

The emales who find better-paying jobs are far more likely to get married, as they are usually expected to be the primary breadwinners of their families. Male and female Pasthrus are expected to be breeders, needing 4.5 children per family on average just to keep the population stable. In families where the male has a real job, they will usually hire an emale servant whose responsibilities include taking care of the children. It’s pretty much unheard of for female Pasthrus to continue working after marriage, and even if they did, they would quit before they started having children.

The emales are also the most sexually liberated gender, as they are the only ones capable of engaging in sexual acts with any other person. It’s accepted for male and female Pasthrus to participate in what Pasthrus call masturbation, either because their third partner is not present or because they haven’t found a third partner yet. However, homosexuality is strictly forbidden among females and males in their society, again, because they are expected to make children. Does it actually happen anyway? I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.

Wednesday night I dreamed of fucking a Nancy who was an emale, which was one way she commonly entered Pasthru dreams, though there were times I was among a whole society of them. And Thursday, July 20, I was face-to-face in bed with this Nancy, our joined organs between us and aimed toward our faces.

I did my morning routine with Nancy following a step behind me, and I had breakfast on the table for em when e arrived in typical emale attire. E was wearing an A-line dress, but one made for a completely flat-chested person.

“So, Nancy, I have to ask: How much of what’s been going on with me in the last few weeks do you remember?”

“All of it. I’ve been living my daily life the week since you last brought me here. I don’t recall when it was I became an emale, but it didn’t really matter there.”

“Because you live alone, apart from the occasional visitors.”

“Right. You came with Aries and we talked for a bit, and Victoria came alone another time, but only stayed briefly.”

“But nobody else. Do you ever see anybody else there?”

“I know I used to. I went to a school full of other kids. With you! You were in my school, Jody.”

“Of course. We did go to school together, in my dreams. Because of that you also know all the other kids I went to grade school with, because I naturally filled the dreams with them.”

“Most of the other kids got fuzzier in later years, when it was mostly you and Victoria and Aries and Mona, and often we were with the other Sea Men or Pasthrus or the Portal People, rather than your schoolmates.”

“And now I have drifted away from all those other kids, quite literally being isolated in the middle of nowhere, and the other kids are completely gone from my dreams. For over a year I have only dreamt of the people who, until this month, lived only in my dreams. And given how you have memory of the times between my dreams now, I think that you are more real than I used to think.”

“But you always wondered about it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. There were times I learned things in dreams in a way that just didn’t make sense. I couldn’t believe I had subconsciously picked up all that info and just realized it in the dreams. It was hard for me to believe that I was encountering other people, for real, in my dreams, and learning things from them that I had not somehow learned in real life. But now it’s clear that that is exactly what happened, and is still happening. I had Victoria here with me the other day, and you understand that I am Victoria. When she’s here, if I do not will her body to get up out of bed, she will simply lie there all day.”

“Yes. I’ve never actually seen you two together, but I have understood for many years now that Victoria is your name for yourself when you’re female.”

“It was new to me, too, to be together with her. But despite what I just said, it feels like she has some will of her own. For instance, I can direct her to get dressed, and she chooses all her own clothes and puts them on without me having to lead her through every little step. Some of the things I did as Victoria surprised me.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you probably don’t remember Victoria ever dating any men.”

“I don’t remember her dating anyone but me, actually, but it’s probably just because I wasn’t there.”

“Probably. It turns out that she’s not lesbian, though. She’s dominant, sexually. The first time I had her here, when I looked at myself through her eyes while we had sex, it seemed like she didn’t really want me as a sexual partner. I thought it was that she didn’t like men, in the same way that as Jody I’m not gay. But that wasn’t it. That was me, driving her body the way I’d use this body. I don’t go for men, so Victoria didn’t in the dreams.”

“So what happened when you turned the reins over to Victoria?”

“I found out she’s perfectly happy dating me as long as she’s in control. I had a blast as Victoria, doing things Victoria would want to do. And we had great sex at the end of it, but with Victoria in control and Jody just passively lying there and enjoying it.”

Nancy laughed. “And how about the girl skills? You’ve told me you already know everything from being Victoria, but when you had to be Victoria in the real world for a whole day, how did that go?”

“Smooth as silk. When I was driving Victoria’s body the hard way, I knew how to do all the things, though I had to think about it. When I let Victoria do the things, it was just like you would do them, things you’ve done all your life. Victoria put on pantyhose, lipstick, eye shadow, and mascara, perfectly, and hardly thinking about it. All while Jody was showering, drying off, and getting dressed at the same time. I’ve done all of those things as Victoria in dreams before, but I had never done any of them in real life until the last time she was here. The only thing I didn’t do was put in a tampon, and that was just because it’s not her time. I’m not sure when her time is, but she’s only been here twice. I’ll figure it out.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“Crap, I’m late for work. Nancy, can you clean up?”

“No problem.”

In the evening, Nancy described more of the surreal experience she’s had recently outside of my dreams.

“I know, in the past, I lived a real life, but I don’t remember any specific bits of it except when you were there as Jody or Victoria. Since things changed recently, I remember more of it, but those memories are weird. I remember going to the store to buy food. But I don’t remember any other people. No other customers in the store, no cashiers. Did I use one of those self-checkouts? I don’t remember. Where did the money come from? Am I going to work at some kind of job? If so, I can’t remember any of that, either. Maybe there was really nobody there and I just walked out of the store without paying.”

“Mona remembers more about her world. There are sea dragons and a magical covenant that imposes specific limits on how she can use magic.”

“Oh, I remember a lot about the world. My world is your world, or at least a very near copy of it. There are no dragons, but there are giraffes and hippopotamuses and venus flytraps and lots of other pretty weird stuff, even if I have never seen any of those things in person. I remember going to the store, and coming home from the store. I drive a car, though I cannot remember ever having to do any maintenance on it besides stopping for gas once in a while. There were other cars on the road, but I can’t remember anything about their drivers, nor was I ever stuck in traffic or even stopped waiting for a car to go by so I could make a left turn.”

“Weird. But time in dreams is like that; boring bits get glossed over or skipped entirely.”

“So you’re saying I work a boring job?”

“Probably. What’s different is that the dreams are continuous now, even when I’m not dreaming them. I don’t know why. Before, you only remembered things that happened during specific times I was dreaming about you.”

“That seems like what’s happening, yes.”

Nancy and I had sex, or what Pasthrus might have called masturbation, in the evening. And I had an idea what to ask Mona for, and I wanted to not summon her for it, so Nancy and I didn’t go to sleep fucking.