#the dream beyond

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF movie Mike and Michael compare nightmares,,

[goryhorroor]

“1950s horror movies contrast radically with their 1940s predecessors. understandably – they were reflecting a whole new world. audiences wanted stories that connected directly to their lives, to the ever-expanding technology in their homes and workplaces. they also wanted horror movies that played to their fears – stoked by politicians – of the shadows that lay beyond their immediate, personal experience of the shiny american dream (applies to some of these movies).”

[assassin1513]

✨💙💜Infinity Travel💜💙✨

[blueskittlesart]

in the nicest and most non-confrontational way possible. i feel like some of you think that anything that isn't directly openly spelled out for you within a story is "missed potential" or "unexplored." like. sometimes there are implied narratives. sometimes the point is that you as the reader are supposed to think and draw your own conclusions and participate in the story. the writers not directly spelling every little detail out for you doesn't mean that the story is poorly written or missed its own plot details somehow. PLEASE.

[jjkyaoi]

new shut up i’m talking episode and hearing tommy talk about how this whole situation has basically stripped all the joy of content creation from him and makes him want to quit more is like. actually gutting. all of these people tommy found in this space—not just dream specifically, but the adults he relied on that lifted up his dream when he was so young were the same people who took all the love of it from him . and that makes me sick. and so so so angry. he was literally just 16

[soyalexnajera]

I'M GLAD WE DIDN'T HAD COMMERCIAL BREAKS BUT IMAGINE IF WE DID

[gcballet]

Red Dwarf as tweets/textposts pt.7

<- | RD | ->

[jaskieriswitchersexual]

With Hob having lived for approximately six and a half centuries, he's done a lot more sleeping than most living creatures (except maybe cats) and with that, he's probably met a significant number of the dreams and nightmares in The Dreaming at some point.

Hob is the quintessential dreamer, the dreams adore him, but his life has also not been easy and he's well-acquainted with the nightmares as well.

What I'm saying is, when Dream finally brings Hob to the Dreaming to introduce him to the family give him a tour of the realm, the dreams and nightmares come out to meet Hob like he's their old friend. Hob is strangely touched and also having the time of his life, while Dream is pouting that his creations have stolen Hob's attention away.

*edit* if you'd like to make a fic of this idea, please go ahead, just send me a link when you're done because I'd love to see it!

[landwriter]

Hi! I hope you feel better soon!

This is a great prompt by @academicblorbo about Hob Gadling being the landlord of the Dead Boys. It has a wonderful fill already by @omgcinnamoncakes but I’d love to see what you come up with for it!

Alternative prompt from me if that doesn’t work for your brain: remember the date between Jenny and Maxine? How about one between Jenny and Esther? Poor Jenny is going to really question her taste in beautiful blonde women 😭

Thank you! I saw ‘landlord’ and ‘decades’ and blacked out. I love Hob having them as tenants. Maybe even before the modern day meeting in Sandman.

The Sandman/Dead Boy Detectives, 2.4k, G Dream/Hob, pre-slash, alternating/outsider POV, found family, a reunion and revelations etc.

---

Hob did not, strictly speaking, have tenants. It was more of a minor haunting. Pun intended.

The small room above the pub and below his flat wasn’t worth charging anyone rent for; when he first bought the building he had put a handsome oak desk in there and some bookshelves before wondering who he was possibly keeping up appearances for. Who was he going to take back upstairs that would stop and say, Wait, can I see your office? So he’d left it as more or less an abandoned room.

When he realized a pair of boys were using it as their clubhouse, he didn’t do anything at first. He saw them quietly coming and going a couple times, disappearing around the corner of the first landing. Brazen things. He meant to call after them, but the shout had died in his throat. He’d been young once. He still remembered the need to get away from it all. It was only when he went to check if they’d been making a mess of the room that he discovered it was still locked.

He’d crouched down and inspected the latch and found no marks at all. Huh, he’d said, and jiggled it again, and been a little more interested in whatever clever way they were getting into it after they disappeared up his stairs. Then he didn’t see them for weeks, and assumed they had gotten bored and stopped.

Until they came back. In the middle of an argument, striding through the pub like they owned it. Hob straightened up as they passed him.

“I cannot believe you broke the mirror.”

“I was in a rush! It’s not my fault you forgot you needed Arcana Incantatum after we arrived at the church. And found the demon.”

“I hardly forgot, I only made the mistake of assuming you would know to pack it by now.”

Hob raised his eyebrows. The boys disappeared into the back hallway. He followed them as they went upstairs, too preoccupied with their drama to notice Hob. They turned onto the landing, still carrying on. Even as they walked through the door. The locked, closed door.

Hob blinked. Then he drew his keys from his pocket and opened the door. The boys were still inside. One of them was pulling a mirror out of a backpack that was several times too small for it. They didn’t even look up, and Hob wondered how he couldn’t possibly have put it together earlier. He cleared his throat.

“Hello, boys.” That caught their attention. Hob grinned. “Seems we’re neighbours.”

---

Edwin abhorred getting involved with the living. He and Charles got along perfectly well on their own. They were a duo. An intrepid pair. Best mates, like Charles often stressed whenever he was about to ask something particularly ridiculous of Edwin. They were solid together. As solid as two ghost boys could be. The living, though, were messy and unpredictable.

Perhaps the most salient fact at present: Charles invariably became attached to them.

“He’s sad, mate. I can see it in his eyes.”

“You said those exact words in ‘94 about a dog. At least ask Hob himself.”

Before you decide to adopt him too.

Hob Gadling, irritatingly, was unobjectionable on every ground Edwin could think of. He had made no imposition upon them. When he found them, he only asked them their business, and then told them he was usually downstairs, or upstairs, if they needed anything they couldn’t procure themselves. He had an interest in rare and old books, as it happened. In explaining this, he had also hinted at being far older than his looks would suggest, which vexed Edwin twice over. He knew his curiosity would not be slaked until he talked to Hob, but then he would be the one getting involved with the living, and Charles would hardly let him forget it.

“Do you think he’s really immortal? Mate’s far too calm. Last week I saw him stop a fight downstairs by stepping right between these huge blokes. He just said something and smiled and they backed right off.” Charles lit up. “Do you reckon he’d teach me how to do that? Conflict de-escalation, innit? I could show him some moves with the cricket bat, I bet. Oh, do you think he’s a cricket fan?”

It was obviously a hopeless case, and since the Dead Boy Detectives never took on hopeless cases, there was only one course of action that remained. Edwin had long since disabused himself of the notion he needed to breathe. He had no beating heart, yet when he was startled, he would find himself clutching his chest. Now, he exhaled slowly through his nose in an entirely superfluous sigh of resignation. “Well, Charles, shall we go talk to him?”

---

When the millennium came around, Hob found himself celebrating it with his accidental tenants. There was something gloriously satisfying about being able to make a toast to the next one and have it taken seriously. He’d asked them if they had something better to do - spectral trouble to get into et cetera - and they both looked at him with almost identical put-upon and incredulous expressions.

Hob had a terrible suspicion they thought they were taking care of him as much as he thought he was taking care of them.

Edwin, with his insatiable curiosity and, deep underneath it, something Hob thought he recognized from himself: a sharp animal ferocity and a refusal to go until he’s good and done, natural laws be damned. Charles, still brightly, painfully alive for a ghost - who should be alive still, by all rights, but nothing of this life was fair - who joked to cover up hurt in a way Hob knew too, and glowed any time Hob turned so much as a kind word to him.

He wondered what they saw when they looked at him.

The year ticked over, and technology kept working. Charles grinned innocently and said he could probably possess the telly and break it that way if Hob wanted?

Hob’s heart twinged. He knew they weren’t his, not to keep, but it seemed that teenagers didn’t change at all over the centuries, even if the boys were only sort of teenagers in the way Hob was only sort of in his thirties. It didn’t change that they’d been punted from the mortal coil before having a chance to grow up, and figure out the kind of men they were, and make their own choices and fuck up and try to be better than their fathers, and everything everyone deserved. Hob had made more than his share of mistakes. They hadn’t been given the chance to make nearly any at all.

So they made toasts to the new millennium, to the detective agency, to themselves, all stuck out of time in different ways and refusing to move on for different reasons, and Hob allowed himself to think of Robyn and privately pretend that they were his all the same.

---

A week later, Hob was reminded of the other universal traits of teenagers when he mentioned his stranger and both boys began to grill him with terrifying alacrity. Before turning to his dating life, like ravening bloody wolves. When Edwin had asked, in a specifically nineteenth century manner that Hob remembered all too well, if Hob had always been unmarried, he’d nearly put his head in his hands.

“It can be hard for me to associate with the living too, you know. For obvious reasons.”

Charles had turned to Edwin and hissed “See? I told you.”

Right in front of him. Nobody had taught them manners.

“Manners, Charles,” replied Edwin loftily. “We will, of course, respect your privacy. A man is entitled to his secrets.”

“You’ll go upstairs and rifle through my personal things, is what you’ll do,” said Hob.

Charles coughed to hide his laugh. Edwin flushed and looked away. Hob snorted, and told them about Eleanor and Robyn. Properly. It was a strange relief. He’d told the story wrong for plausibility’s sake so many times he had been worried he’d forget the truth of it one day.

They had listened, and been remarkably quiet until Charles piped up and offered to set him up with a ‘really fit’ ghost. Hob had roundly shut that down. Woefully, not all explanations were satisfying enough. Charles cornered him again the next morning while he was cleaning the bar.

“No, mate, I still don’t get it.” Hob was about to say he no more wanted to be with someone who couldn’t feel pleasure from his touch than someone who would grow old and be taken from him while he stayed the same, when Charles went on, bafflingly, to ask, “Why don’t you meet your mysterious friend more often than once a century?”

Hob sighed. “Adults are often busy, Charles.” Nevermind that he had begun to wonder the same since the eighteenth century. He’d always just assumed time passed differently for his stranger.

Charles just laughed and perched himself on the bar top. “Ooh, low blow. We’re busy too, you know. Plenty of cases to solve.”

“Really,” said Hob. “You’re busy. Right now.”

Charles waggled his eyebrows.

“Charles, I am not a case,” said Hob, sternly as possible. “I’m not even a ghost. He’s not a ghost. No ghosts.”

“We could investigate. Maybe ghosts are involved. What even is he? Why every hundred years? Is it some sort of Persephone situation?”

Hob bit his lip against shouting I don’t know! I don’t know anything about him! Instead, he tried to smile, and felt it come out as a wince instead. “He’s very private.”

Charles scowled. “Yeah, obviously. You don’t even know his name. He can’t be that good of a friend if he’s too busy to see you more than once a century.”

Hob couldn’t see the expression on his own face, but he saw Charles’ shocked reaction well enough. It was so long ago for him, and still Hob knew at once what Charles saw now: that first time you manage to visibly hurt a grown-up’s feelings, people who seemed too old and too stern to actually feel pain, when you’d been going around kicking at them like a new foal, just to stretch your legs.

“Sorry,” said Charles, instant regret chasing his surprise. He was a good kid.

“It’s alright,” said Hob. He meant it. He looked down at the shining bartop. His hands were restless with the urge to light a cigarette. He gave in. It wasn’t like Charles would be dying of lung cancer any time soon if he decided to follow Hob’s example. “I don’t think he would say he’s very good at being a friend either. Truth is, I’d love to see him more often. But we had an awful fight the last time we met. If he forgives me, I’ll have to ask.”

“Mates always make up,” said Charles earnestly. He was such a good kid.

“I suppose they do.” Charles still looked sorry, and Hob clapped him on the shoulder. “Hey. Thanks for looking out for me, Charles.”

Charles beamed at him. “Always. We’ve got your back, me and Edwin.”

---

Charles couldn’t bloody believe it. Hob’s friend was here. There was nobody else it could be. He and Edwin were watching from a nearby table, pretending to be absorbed in their own conversation. Neither man noticed them. They were too busy looking at each other.

He couldn’t imagine spending more than a century apart from Edwin. The way Hob had talked about him and his stranger over the years, it sometimes seemed like they were best mates too, no matter how little they saw each other. He was dead sure that’s what had Hob looking so gutted when he thought nobody was looking. He had known they would make up, though. Maybe now Hob would be happier.

“Charles, we really ought not eavesdrop,” hissed Edwin. Right as he scooted his chair closer, the cheeky hypocrite. Hob and his friend were talking too quietly to properly hear, their heads bent together. Lots to catch up on, Charles reckoned. A hundred years. He couldn’t stop thinking about the number. It seemed impossible. Funny, he couldn’t imagine that long away from Edwin, but he could imagine spending that long being best mates. There was nobody he’d rather hide from Death with.

Hob’s face was doing something strange as his long-lost friend talked. Then Hob moved and grasped him by the shoulders, so tight that his knuckles stood out in relief. The man said something in low tones and Hob shook his head, and then pulled him in for a hug. The man stiffened and then relaxed, and his arms came up around Hob’s.

Their cheeks both looked wet.

Charles swallowed and it felt suddenly a little like he was choking. He should look away, only he couldn’t.

“They must be great friends,” said Edwin softly.

“Yeah,” he managed to croak. We won’t ever need to have a reunion like this because I’m never going to lose you, mate. I won’t let them take you. It was stuck behind the phantom lump in his phantom throat. His hand, without him telling it to, reached out and grabbed hold of Edwin’s. Edwin squeezed it hard, and Charles knew he didn’t have to make his voice work after all.

Then the man pushed Hob away, but only far enough to grab his face and pull him back again, thumbing over Hob’s cheeks, and beside him, Edwin honest-to-god gasped, and then Charles momentarily forgot how thoughts worked too.

---

It happens thus: in the New Inn, just next door to the White Horse, some 639 years after they first met, Hob Gadling and Dream of the Endless share their first kiss. Neither, if they had bothered to think about it, would have intended to have an audience, but it’s a well-known fact that some kisses cannot wait, and theirs was chief among them, being that it had so much to say, and was so very long overdue.

I missed you, it said, and I came back, it said, and Please don’t go away from me again, and I could not.

And atop them, like blankets, were laid invisible the daydreams of those who saw them, including two long-dead boys, whose dreams were woven from the fresh and unaccounted-for possibilities of Hob kissing his mysterious stranger. Another man, thought Edwin. His best friend, thought Charles. Dream was the only one who could have heeded this, but he did not, because Hob Gadling was holding him tight and daydreaming loudly of this kiss and more, of this today and tonight and tomorrow, ever greedy and ever easily pleased, and Dream could hear nothing at all over their clamouring and comingled joy; the bright gold daydream between the scant space of their bodies that sounded so much like at last.

[eluminium]

Impulse: talking about how cool it was to reach 1 mil subs Someone in chat: Skizz is gonna overtake you soon

Impulse, no hesitation, with his entire impussy:

G O O D.

I can't wait. I can't wait! Honestly I would LOVE- I would ABSOLUTELY love to see Skizz pass me in everything. Subs, views, everything. Dude deserves it. I've been dreaming about that since I started. Him coming along and making his way up and overtaking me and me riding- I'll ride his coattails for a while, you know!

[lil-vibes]

Day 30: Discintegrate

Previous/Next

(prompt list here!)

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Jonny Sims had designed the new Bed Bath & Beyond logo. it was a low quality png of a worm on a light pink background. Everyone was going crazy over it. I emailed him and asked how he came up with the design, and he sent me a png of a cinnamon stick and blocked me.

[webonchin]

Had a little baby fever so better idea to give my favorite pair a baby, but ,me being me and taking advantage of the interesting things, I decided that the baby would be a little (literal) nightmare, yes

Bonus

Baby's name is Dusk, I use any pronouns to refer to them.

[assassin1513]

🤎⚜️🤎Force Places🤎⚜️🤎

[fukashiin]

ACEYUU WOKE ME FROM THE DEAD

book 7 spoilers <3 very long rant im sorry!!

it was never meant to be this way. when he was such an ass to us in the prologue, when he laid those pesky remarks upon us and immediately assuming that we got into NRC as a janitor because we weren't good enough without any prior knowledge of how we were brought here against our will and having to adapt to such an unfamiliar environment where everything - trends, names, history, and even the currency - were different. he didn't know about the throbbing headache we had while the headmage was explaining the school's curriculum and suddenly bringing up the word "magic" into the conversation like it was foreign language.

he thinks he's above us just because we're a clueless student who couldnt cast any spells and took up the miserable job just for the sake of money and to live. he had this one-way "not my problem!!" mindset about us that he dipped the moment after because he never would have suspected that we would grow to be something more important, something more irreplaceable in his life.

he never meant to test the waters, and he's drowning by mistake.

his concern for you gets more obvious as each book advances (or was it always obvious??). you're just an otherworlder oblivious to the dangers that lurk in twisted wonderland, so it's only casual for him to fret about when you've been taken into scarabia with minimal escape routes, to be the first one to notice that you were missing among the entourage of people that have been kidnapped, to be the only one to point out that you weren't in the best condition AND suggesting to bring you back home in case the party was all too much. he knows how vulnerable you are, and he jumps into action as quick as possible because that's basically his brand. nothing deeper!!! (unknown dangers lurk around you on the daily, but you lurk in his mind so much more than he lets on. you're probably more used to the dangers of magic than he's used to the thought of you occupying his mind 24/7. isnt that ironic)

and he didn't consider the complications of how dangerous it could be for the headmage to send us back to our original world, possibly damaging the very fabrics of time and space and ceasing to exist while transporting - he just instantly goes to the part where the news was positive and that we could travel between Twisted Wonderland and earth in one piece, blocking out his surroundings just to see your smile, as that was possibly the happiest you could have ever been in front of him.

imagine each time he hangs out with someone new, or if someone has gained a romantic interest in him once you've left, he tries to find a part of "you" in them in his peripheral vision. whether they have an ounce of bravery that you had, whether they're as understanding as you are to know that he isn't just a human built of jokes and pranks, whether they won't doubt him like the rest did - as you were the only one who truly believed in his capability to truly lead the rest out of danger.

he could beg for other people to believe in him, to see that his skills could draw out much more if he really wanted to, but he didn't have to do that with you. in a flashing moment of possible failure, he turned to you in a heartbeat, uncharacteristically, desperately calling out for you to save him because he had no idea what was happening. he almost started to lose himself and quickly realises that the power he was wielding so suddenly wasn't some lousy spell, that it could possibly cause someone's life, and you were there to steady him when he needed it the most. a rarity of a scene he entrusted his entire body to you with. you believed in him. you ARE the betterment of him.

you held his hand like a vow, to protect each other and strengthen through every obstacle and turmoil that drives you one step closer to becoming a better version of yourself. your hand, tightly coiled around his, radiated the warmth and comfort he needed in his times of darkness and inner conflict.

it should've been you. you're perfect.

and that's why his dream still has you in it. it doesn't have to be one way or the other, you can simply go back and forth to his world and your own in just a snap! he could never dream of you leaving his sight and grasp, hindering him from ever telling you how much you actually meant. he has all the time in the world.

and that's what he wants, but his heart says otherwise, and that's fine. he just wants you to be safe and see him for who he is. you inspired him to take pride in his name, as an ace can do anything!!

[essektheylyss]

I do keep coming back to the thought that there is no reason to have stopped to see Astrid before going to Aeor if the point wasn't to try to recruit her for chaperone duties. It doesn't exactly seem like she's with the Vanguard or she wouldn't be hiding in a smut shop in Zadash.

Please, Astrid, come to Aeor with us. You can take potshots at your ex's new boyfriend the whole time. And he can't even say shit about it, because he's the one who invited you.