Page 8 of Victorious

“So you’re still sleepwalking?”

Paul shook his head. “No, the meds keep me from getting up, moving around, but I tried to tell her, I need something stronger, so I don’t dream.”

“Are you afraid of having nightmares?”

“No. Yes. It’s not—it’s not that. The problem is…” Paul’s eyes flicked toward the door. Gabriel could see him resisting the urge to rise and check, to make sure it was locked. His attention flitted over several other surfaces before he finally locked eyes with the therapist, leaned forward in his seat, and whispered, “My dreams are real.”

Gabriel inclined his head. “Dreams can be incredibly vivid, enough that sometimes they—”

“No,” Paul was shaking his head now, growing agitated. “I mean, the things I dream about,” he said, spreading his hands, “they … become real.”

Gabriel kept his expression carefully flat. He’d treated a variety of psychoses over the years and knew that the mind was more than capable of making fictions seem very real. He studied his patient, the bruises beneath his eyes. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“I can’t. I told you I can’t.”

“Because it’s not safe.”

Paul’s hands tensed on his knees. “You think I’m crazy.”

Gabriel’s mouth twitched. “I assure you, if therapists were forced to draw a hard line in the sand between sanity and madness, very few people would qualify as sane.”

“Delusional, then.”

“Do you think you’re delusional?”

Paul gave him a pained look. “I would, if it weren’t happening to me.”

“And what happens, exactly, when you dream?” asked Gabriel. “Can you describe it to me?”

The patient blew out a breath. Looked down at his fingers. “It’s like, I’ll dream about an earthquake, right? World rattling, things falling down, I’m running around trying to find shelter. And when I wake up, there’s a crack in the wall, and all my shit’s on the floor.”

“Do you ever have pleasant dreams?”

Paul shifted. “No. Sometimes they start out nice enough, but they always seem to turn. Like last week, I dreamed I was in the ocean. And it was good at first, I was just floating, but then I started to drown.”

Gabriel tapped his pencil thoughtfully against the page.

It made a kind of sense. A dreamy logic. After all, sleep had led Paul out that upper-story window. Sleep had nearly killed him. Part of his mind was clearly certain it still would.

“I couldn’t stay up, and I was swallowing water, and I was convinced I was going to die.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, but when I woke up, everything was wet. And I don’t mean just me, or the sheets. I mean everything. The furniture. The desk. The fucking floor. I stood up, and the carpet squelched under my feet. Thank god my laptop was in the other room, or it would have been trashed.”

Gabriel frowned behind his glasses. “And no one else noticed?”

“I live alone.”

“Why not record yourself?” he asked. “To see what’s happening.”

Paul’s head bobbed. “I thought about it. I really did. But I can’t. It’s too risky. All that shit goes to the cloud. They can see it.”

Ah, they. The shadowy figure at the heart of most patients’ paranoia. The amorphous danger lurking on the other side of action.

“That’s why you never hear about people like me,” insisted Paul. “They make ’em disappear. They scrub the evidence, but there are threads about it, if you know where to look. If you see the posts before they take them down.”

Gabriel thought of Occam’s razor.