You weren’t a stranger to nightmares.

It was an unfortunate truth that had been your reality for quite a few years now, but had only gotten worse since tour kidnapping.

You thought it would be a temporary thing. That waking up from twisted nightmares only to find yourself second-guessing if you were actually awake or not was something you would get over after a few months.

But you weren’t over it. You bolted upright in your bed, the mental image of 404 wearing your own face flashing in your mind’s eye. The dreams always felt so real. And that was because it had felt real when 404 used his powers to fuck with your head. Everything had felt real until you had been able to find a mistake here and there. The temperature of glass, the view outside a window—it was always the tiniest of details. Things that were all too easy to miss.

Your chest was tight as you struggled to suck in a deep breath. You brought your knees up to your chest, squeezing your eyes shut and counting backwards in your head from fifty. You tried to picture the numbers in your mind, but they kept slipping away, being replaced with the smirking visage of 404 with his stupid fucking goggles.

You opened your eyes again. The room was the same as it had been a few seconds earlier. The lights were off, moonlight was spilling across the floor from your window, and you could see a small green light from your charging Nintendo in the corner.

How detailed could 404 make these dreams?

That was only brushing the surface of your anxiety though. Because if you were still trapped in a dream by 404, where was the line between dream and reality? Had you ever been rescued from Dream and 404 in the first place? Everything that had happened since your rescue—the Syndicate revealing themselves to you, the confrontation and Puffy telling Dream to leave you alone, Wilbur dying and Tommy bringing him back to life—was that real? Was anything real?