The World in Our Dreams

Beatrice is a first year college student arriving from a sheltered life. Home schooled, she never developed the ability to make friends or deal with social encounters. Fear and anxiety rule her life, but in her desperation she found an escape. Combining lucid dreaming with a memorization technique called a mind palace, Beatrice has created a world for herself to retreat to to escape the real world. Day after day , every chance she gets, she is in her dream world, creating and playing and exploring like the child she still is inside. It is an impossible creation, with rooms bigger than the entire palace yet still inside the grounds, with different moons, different skies, and different times of day all depending where you are. She has companions to play with, small variations of animals from her childhood, and they love each other dearly. It is not until something appears in her palace that she did not create. A room, a door, a dark stairway leading down. And then something finds her, something that she can't see, something she can't comprehend. It is in her mind palace, but it knows things it shouldn't. It makes her doubt if where she really is, is her mind, or somewhere else.