The nightmares are starting to break through the Overherd barriers sooner than expected.

But perhaps I should have been expecting this. In a way, I’m approaching the last leg of the dungeon. It’s been bad, and while I’ve gotten a bit of breathing room, I suspect it’s just going to get worse, beyond my own meager expectations.

I did lose hold of the Overcow in the night, which of course leads down the path of nightmares any time, but even after I got her back in my arms, the nightmare persisted.

Well, at least I woke up before my father exploded. The dream is probably best described as an Elseworlds tale, or an AU story, where I graduated and went back home to live with my parents.

We were living in a much nicer place, thanks to my income, almost decadent. But my father’s patterns of abuse remained, as they always have… It was an appeasement stage, where I did everything possible to keep the volcano from exploding, even though I knew it was inevitable. Things hadn’t yet reached the point where I would have to beat my own head against the wall to stop my father hurting either me or my mother (who I still protected with my life, even if the favor wasn’t returned by her), but the situation was getting there….

The cruelest touch is that I was trying to support my tea habit, even though I knew having hobbies that weren’t directly pertinent to my job upset my father, and he had just found out.

Then I woke up.

And hugged the Overcow very hard. I did go back to sleep, where the story picked up where it left off: a powderkeg situation, and I had foolishly just lit a match. My father’s anger can burn slowly, but the results are always the same: in a few hours, he would explode.

With my mother no longer working, and too tired to leave the house for long, I had no choice except to stay, if I wanted to protect her.

So I did. Even knowing what was coming.

Then I woke up with the alarm.

I’m sure someone will take me to task for not being strong enough to make different choices in my dream—or even just for not realizing it was a dream, and definitely for not remembering my current life.

My bartender would tell those people to go fuck themselves. Well. Not in those terms. He says that it’s extremely rare to be able to have lucid dreams, and told me not to fret about it. Good thing, because I’ve been trying to lucid dream ever since the Years of Zorn and Tharn started, past their end, and all this time without success.

I just don’t remember this life in those dreams. Oh, maybe small details are incorporated, like the tea habit, which just makes it worse.

My nightmares… there but for the fickleness of the gods go I.