Dreamfire by Kit Alloway

“Where’s my trimidion?”
    She went to a wicker basket that held an assortment of odds and ends, and returned with a small pyramid made of bars like golden toothpicks in one hand, and a little round base with another, longer gold toothpick coming out of it in the other. After setting these on the trunk next to Will, she pulled the diagram of the three universes out of the piles of notes they were generating.
    She started to speak and then paused, and the pause turned into a stilted question. “Are you religious?”
    Since Josh didn’t like to get personal, the question surprised Will. He did his best to answer it honestly. “I was raised Catholic, but I haven’t been to church since I was like eight.”
    â€œBut you probably believe in souls, right?”
    He shrugged. “I guess I do believe people are more than just flesh and blood.”
    â€œAll right. So when people fall asleep in the World, some part of them travels from the World to the Dream. You can think of it as a soul or a spirit or consciousness or whatever you want, just realize that it’s people leaving the World and entering the Dream.”
    She pointed to the arrow on the diagram that showed this. Will felt himself frown without meaning to. He hadn’t realized he’d still been thinking of dreams as something that took place inside people’s heads; that was what all those psychology books he’d read told him, after all. That was what science told him.
    â€œSo at any given time, there are about half a billion people on the planet dreaming,” Josh said. “The trimidion is basically a scale with three sides instead of two. Each corner represents one of the universes. They measure emotional turmoil, and we need to keep them roughly in balance. Now, the World is much more stable than the Dream. It destabilizes over decades, not hours like the Dream. Death always remains in perfect balance.”
    â€œSo wouldn’t the Dream throw everything completely out of whack, since it’s full of nightmares?”
    â€œAbsolutely. Nobody’s been able to measure how many dreams are actually nightmares, but some psychologists think it might be as many as three-quarters. Dream theorists think it’s much lower, closer to one-quarter. Regardless, that’s a lot of emotional turmoil to mess with the balance.”
    Her whole job, Will reflected, as Josh continued talking, is about keeping emotions from spilling over. That’s got to mess her up.
    It explained a lot.
    â€œIs that why you only try to resolve nightmares? Because they’re the only ones that mess up the balance?”
    â€œUm, yeah. Basically. Happy dreams can have the opposite effect and stabilize the Dream. Happy dreams do our job for us. But there’s a lot of controversy over what sorts of dreams we should interfere with, if we should just try to end out-and-out nightmares or if we should get involved in any old unhappy dream. You should talk to Winsor if you’re interested in that. She likes to resolve humiliation dreams. You know—you show up for class late, without your homework or your pants?”
    Will nodded. That told him a lot about Winsor.
    â€œBut the long and the short of it is that we just don’t have the manpower to deal with all the nightmares in the world, let alone go after embarrassment dreams and forgotten-homework dreams and running-late dreams.”
    â€œWhy not recruit more people?”
    â€œWe can, but at some point we’re going to have trouble maintaining secrecy.”
    This was something Will had been curious about. “Yeah, why the secrecy? Why not just come out and tell the World what you’re doing? I mean, you’re helping people. I know it would be crazy for a while, but in the long run everybody would probably be better off.”
    Josh thought for a minute. She ran her hand through her short hair, which was something Will had noticed she did when