Free Dreams Don't Count by Xarth

Dreams Don't Count
     
    By Xarth
     
    Copyright 2014 by Xarth
     
    Smashwords Edition
     
     
    ****
     
     
    As soon as I found myself in the room, I knew I was
dreaming. It wasn't that the room itself was particularly strange,
other than the slightly ethereal quality it held. It could almost
have been a rather nice bedroom, or something along those lines,
based on the way it was furnished. Mostly it was the fact that I'd
been finding myself there quite a lot in the past few weeks that
tipped me off. As far as I could tell, I'd developed some sort of
recurring dream and I didn't have the slightest clue why.
     
    I turned around, knowing I'd find the same person who
always shared the room with me. There were plenty of people my
unconscious mind could have dreamed up, many of them people I would
have loved to hang out with, even if only for pretend. Instead, I
got my brother.
     
    Not that I didn't like Tyler, it wasn't that. Being
twins and all, we'd grown up closer than most brothers and sisters
I knew in our eighteen years together. The thing was, I could see
him practically any time I wanted. If I was going to dream about a
guy over and over, it could at least have been a cute guy I could
play out sexy scenarios with or something. Relatively speaking,
Tyler wasn't nearly as much fun.
     
    "Why is it always you?" I wondered out loud.
     
    "I could ask you the same thing," he replied.
     
    It could so easily have actually been my brother in
front of me; he looked and sounded exactly the same as in reality.
No doubt we'd spent enough time together that my brain could form a
nearly indistinguishable facsimile.
     
    "This is my dream isn't it?" I said. "Why can't I
change you into someone else?"
     
    No matter how hard I tried, I'd never succeeded in
altering this dream in any significant way.
     
    "How do you know this isn't my dream?" my fake
brother countered.
     
    "If it is then at least change me into someone else,"
I muttered. "Or do something. This is getting a little boring. What
is this, like eight times I've had this dream now? And all we ever
do is argue."
     
    "You're always the starting the arguments. I'm pretty
sure I'm just being punished somehow."
     
    I shot him a dirty look. "Yeah, that's pretty much a
dumb enough thing for you to say. Dream you is a dead ringer for
real you, you know that?"
     
    Tyler just grinned. "Ditto," he said.
     
    I sighed and walked around in a long, slow circle. It
was a funny thing about the room; there seemed to be plenty of
windows as well as a door, but even though they never appeared to
move, I could never reach them no matter how far I walked. Dream
geography at its finest.
     
    "We should really come up with something more fun to
do while we're here," Tyler suggested. "Seeing as how it's been
happening a lot lately."
     
    "Like what? A game of cards? A board game of some
kind? We always used to play Monopoly, maybe we could get a game of
that going. Have you seen it around here at all, because I sure
haven't."
     
    "You don't need to be so sarcastic, I'm just trying
to help."
     
    "Of course you are. I think more to the point, it's
silly to be so sarcastic toward a person who, as near as I can
tell, is all a figment of my imagination."
     
    I walked over to Tyler and tapped him lightly on the
forehead as I finished speaking. He felt real too, as real as
anything in the dream world.
     
    "Again, pretty sure it's the other way around," he
said. "But that's not the point. I'm serious, we should do
something while we're here. We could at least talk about something
more than just how annoying this is."
     
    "Fine. How 'bout... you tell me a secret I don't know
about you. That way you can prove this is your dream and not mine.
Two birds, one stone."
     
    There was a bed off to the side of the room, which
I'd always considered a little too meta for my tastes, but it
offered a nicely visual way of displaying my irritation. I flopped
down onto it and closed my eyes in an ineffective