After an exhausting day, I’m excited to get a whole night to myself. No one can see you when you’re dreaming, and you can’t interact with other dream personas, which makes it the highlight of my day. As I fall into my bed, I can feel my eyes closing. I think it only takes a minute or two before I fall asleep, but it’s hard to tell.

As I enter REM sleep, I feel my dream self separate from my body. It’s as strange a sensation as usual, but not unpleasant. I sit up, arching my back and stretching even though it doesn’t actually do anything. Glancing at the clock, I see that it’s about midnight. Excellent. I’m guaranteed a few hours of quiet work. As always, the first thing I do is leave my house and go for a walk. There’s no physical point to it, since I’m leaving my body behind, but it’s so refreshing to walk in the night, so I’ll go when I’m disconnected from my body and safe from everything I meet.

I can see windows lit up and people moving around inside their houses. Dreamwalking, as we call it, still lets you see waking people and their physical bodies, but not other dreamwalkers. It was invented so that people could do anything they wanted while feeling assured that no one was watching. Of course, they also had to make sure that you couldn’t hurt other people while you were dreamwalking, so that held a lot of complications. Obviously, people wanted access to their physical belongings, but that would have been problematic. If someone had picked up a knife and stabbed someone while dreamwalking, they could easily avoid the repercussions.

Fortunately, we have amazing scientific knowledge now. It would have been easy to make it so that a dreamwalker could pick up physical things, but like I said, that was dangerous. So someone came up with a way to make the dream personas resonate at the same frequency as the ordinary objects we use, and so we can pick up something without actually lifting it. Sort of like a hologram? It’s like we’re picking up a copy of the object.

As I finish my walk, I hop in the car, intending to drive to the store. If I grab a pack of beads or a skein of yarn as a dreamwalker, I’ll have them in my dream house. I won’t be able to use them in real life or make any money off them, so it’s free. Only because people haven’t figured out how to charge for it, though.

Tonight I feel like painting. Canvases, then and brushes, and good paints. No one can judge my horrible artwork here. I’m creating just for myself. It really is a beautiful world we live in, where you can have time to do whatever you like, knowing that you’re doing it just for you and no one will be able to make you feel bad about it.