Dream Theory - Commentary - Ch. 17-18 (Patreon)

Welcome back to another commentary for another two chapters!  As always, I’m surprised that two weeks have passed already.  Does it feel like it’s been really fast to you, too?  Or is it only me that feels like time is flying by?  The first week of September is already over!  And the next time we’re here, September will be almost over.

I digress - already.  

There’s actually only four chapters left of Dream Theory, which means there’s only two commentaries left (after this one).  How crazy is that?  

Once this story is over, I’ll post a new chapter of Red Carpet Romance, then we’ll start The Winter Challenge.  It’s close enough to winter for that, right?  (It’s been so hot here recently, so it’s probably not going to feel very ‘wintery’ for me.)  

Alright, with those updates out of the way, let’s hop to it!

Chapter 17 and 18 are two of my favorites, mostly because so much happens yet we still don’t know what’s really going on.  Lyla’s back in the story, which is a good and a bad thing.  Mostly a bad thing, but also good because we didn’t forget about her.  Now that she’s back and reveals quite a bit about her goals and motivations, I can point out some of the little details leading up to these chapters.

Because I’m slightly evil, I really liked that we had no idea Yang woke up in a dream in the beginning of Chapter 17.  You might have a few questions about how Lyla pulled it off, and I might have answered some of them (obviously, writing a story like this will always result in some things that people don’t agree with, but I did my best!).

One of those questions probably is...how did Lyla create Weiss’ house?  The answer is implied way back in Chapter 7 with Blake’s comment:

Everyone seemed to have [a prefab] these days, not realizing or caring that the process of creating a prefab surrendered vital details about their livelihoods for storage at Dreamscape’s main headquarters.

So, basically, Weiss had a prefab made, which allowed Lyla to know what the inside of her home looked like.  She then recreated it well enough that Yang didn’t notice a difference.  Not that Yang was in the best mindset to spot tiny differences in Weiss’ house when she’s freaking out about where Blake went.

There’s also the question of how Lyla created Weiss and Ruby in this dream.  The answer is...because she’s met them before!  

This was something I almost forgot to drop hints about, which would’ve been kind of a big plothole.  How could Lyla impersonate them if she’s never met them before?  It would be difficult, but not impossible (as Blake showed when she impersonated that guy’s wife in a dream).  Lyla’s solution was much simpler than doing all of that reconnaissance in order to pass herself off - she met Weiss probably through Weiss’ work with Taven’s son, and she accidentally bumped into Ruby.

We learn the first part in Chapter 11, when Weiss tells Blake this:

“I’ve met the woman who replaced you.  Dr. Webb.”

I didn’t use Lyla’s first name so as not to draw suspicion!  I figured that if I used Lyla’s name too much, people would start to wonder...and you don’t want people to start wondering too early.

As for Ruby, Lyla mentioned meeting her back in Chapter 3:

“I believe I just met your sister in the lobby.”

“Ruby?”

“That was her.”  Lyla nodded at the name and broke into a smile.  “She has a wonderful energy about her.”

Voila!  Since Lyla has met both Weiss and Ruby, she can impersonate them in a dream.  

As for Mrs. Sawyer, Lyla left the police station at the same time Mrs. Sawyer waited in the lobby.  She should know Mrs. Sawyer through work, as there was probably some sort of memorial for Greyson that they all attended.

So Lyla had all the pieces to create this environment, and then we learn that Yang has been compromised this entire time.  That gives new meaning to this passage from Chapter 13, right?

She had dreams, not nightmares, and they were as mundane as could be.  In one of them, she went around Weiss’ house locking windows.  From room-to-room she walked, latching one window after another.  James scolded her once or twice, but eventually he buzzed off and let her make her rounds.

This also explains her random bouts of exhaustion, as Lyla still had some fragment of control over Yang’s mind - probably checking to make sure the connection was still there.  At night, Lyla was probably snooping on any dreams.  And, as we learn in Chapter 18, she was especially snooping when Blake fixed Daydreamer (by breaking it).

It was the classic ‘let the fugitive go so that she shows us what we need to fix’ move!  And it almost worked, but Blake got ‘the bad feeling.’  That’s why she pushed Yang out of the dream early, which upset Yang but may have saved them in the end.  So it was good that Blake trusted her intuition, even though it kind of hurt her relationship with Yang in the process.

But let’s back up for a second.  

Lyla put Yang in a dream and made it look like Blake left - her attempt to break Yang’s heart all over again, I suppose.  What ended up happening, which you may have noticed, was that Yang just realized how much she still loved Blake.  Regardless of what happened, being faced with Blake’s absence only convinced her that that’s not what she wants.  She wants them to be together, which means she wants to forgive Blake so they can move on.

Which is a good thing!  After going to sleep wondering what their future held, now she’s more certain than ever that she wants to be together.

That might be a little difficult to do when Blake has switched from her ‘run from the problems’ mode to her ‘self sacrificing’ mode.  Neither is good, Blake!  Neither is good.  How about we find your ‘communicates really well and accepts help from others’ mode?  (She hasn’t learned that one yet, unfortunately.)

In this story, she’s basically the opposite of Yang.  She doesn’t trust anyone or turn to anyone for help, but that’s the first thing that Yang does.  Even though she’s been warned that there is a mole in the department, she still turns to Casey for help and hopes for the best.  I agree with her thought at the end of the chapter - if they didn’t trust each other, then...what?

Speaking of trust...apparently Yang also trusts Weiss to cut open her arm.  Well, she didn’t have much say in it, but she still didn’t protest!  

In the original iteration of this chapter, she was actually going to cut her arm open herself - because how boss would that be?  

Ultimately, I decided that giving Yang a knife when she’s nearly falling asleep might not be the best idea. That made Ruby the most logical second choice, right?

Maybe!  But I thought it would be funny for her to be squeamish while Weiss is super calm and collected.  Ruby isn’t panicking, of course.  She’s just...not wanting to cut her sister’s arm open.  I’m sure she would’ve done it if she had to!  Fortunately, Weiss stepped up to the plate and got that thing out of Yang’s arm!  I don’t even want to think about how badly that must’ve itched while it was healing...

Moving on to Chapter 18, and back to Blake’s POV.  Here, we get to see more of her skills in a dream.  We also get to see two heavyweight dream theorists go at each other.

As you might’ve noticed, Lyla does whatever she can to play with Blake’s emotions.  The more emotional Blake gets, the less control she has over the dream, and the more vulnerable she becomes.  This is why Lyla implies that Yang started dating someone while Blake was away.  When that doesn’t work, she points out that Yang has no reason to trust Blake anymore, which is much more effective because it plays upon Blake’s current fears.

What I found really interesting about Blake and Lyla’s fight is that while it seems, at moments, very physical, it’s actually an incredibly mental thing.  They only use physically attacking tactics to draw an instinctual reaction from the other in an attempt to shake their control over their emotions and the environment.  

It makes me tired just thinking about how much effort it must take to hold a dream together and also fend off someone trying to scare me with alligators and stuff.  Clearly, I’m not cut out for that type of job.  (Although if it was actually a job, I would absolutely try to do it!)

Towards the beginning of their conversation/fight, there was an allusion to the ‘sun and moon’ chapter of Living Fiction - this time, as Lyla brings the sun out for when she’s talking and the moon for whenever Blake speaks.  Lyla’s pretty cheeky, isn’t she?  Or ‘arrogant’ might be a better word for it.  She’s good, and she knows it.  Unfortunately, she used her skill in some decidedly not-good ways.  Also, she doesn’t seem repentant about it, which is the worst part - the unredeemable part, if you will.  

As Blake has loosely suggested throughout the story, it is possible to die within a dream.  She also brings up in this chapter that if she loses her focus and starts to react instinctively, she could succumb to Lyla’s attacks.  Basically, she could believe that she died, and then she might actually die.

In Chapter 3, we learned that Greyson Sawyer died in his sleep, and doctors thought it was a heart attack.  Well, we now know that it probably wasn’t a heart attack, but rather Lyla just being straight up evil.

It’s hard for me to write evil characters because I just want everyone to be happy.  I don’t want people to die!  The fact the some side characters in this story died seems like more than enough.  I guess if I want to turn the angst up another notch, however, then someone important needs to die...

But not someone too important.  And no one I really like.  Which is...everyone, basically.

Ok, we’ll revisit this later.  First, let’s get into Lyla’s ‘reason’ for being evil - the ‘injustice’ she’s experienced due to having a bad leg.  What I found interesting about the idea of controlling dreams is that it provided a nontraditional avenue for someone like Lyla to take control of something that was out of her control.  She can erase her bum leg whenever she’s in a dream, but more than that - she can do basically anything she wants.  

Of course, as villains are want to do, she took it too far.  She sees it as a way to equalize the playing field.  But, in order to do that, everyone needs to dream all the time.  That’s the only way she maintains her advantage over the people who’ve ‘wronged’ her.

What’s pretty fascinating is that - one, Lyla thinks she’s doing a good thing.  But two, she genuinely likes Yang.  Yang’s prosthetic arm makes her seem (or look) like an ally to Lyla - someone to be commisserated with rather than considered an enemy.

Now I’m imagining an alternate story where Lyla makes a play for Yang after Blake’s ‘death.’  That would’ve been interesting...and Blake tries to keep Yang away from Lyla from afar while also growing increasingly jealous (and concerned) as they get closer.  

I guess I don’t see Lyla doing something like that though because she doesn’t really strike me as the romance type.  She has a much bigger goal in mind, which means she probably wouldn’t ‘have time’ to pursue something like romance.  This alternate story would have to be where she wants Blake’s life, or where she’s personally seeking revenge on Blake for some reason.  That really isn’t the case here since she has higher ambitions.  

Now I’m thinking about a story where someone tries to take over Blake’s life... I think there was an old movie I saw that was like that...Swim Fan?  I don’t think it was a good movie, but this crazy girl tries to become the main character’s girlfriend by kinda...erasing his current girlfriend.  Another interesting thought to pursue later!  (I like this one better than the character death one…)

One thing I wanted to point out is the core difference in ideology between Blake and Lyla.  We can say they’re both of equal talent, but their motivations are so different.  Lyla wants to force equality upon the world.  Blake has a much different reason, which she told us back in Chapter 8:

She wanted everyone to experience their dreams, and she wanted that experience to motivate the dreamer to chase those dreams in real life. 

Personally, I like Blake’s line of thought much better.  She wants to encourage people to make efforts to bring their real lives as close to dreams as possible.  I think that’s a pretty noble goal!  Unfortunately, the people with noble goals in a story tend to be blindsided when someone comes up with decidedly unnoble goals with the same technology.

But if characters made smart decisions all the time, we’d have really short stories!  Or really boring stories.

Which brings us to a decision that probably didn’t seem bad at the time but ended up cluing Lyla in to Blake’s continued existence - Yang’s decision to lie about not using the Dreamscape anymore.  We all thought it was Detective Saffold, right?  Because Yang gave her the holomask with the big break for their case, then suddenly the kidnappers showed up.  (Lyla suggests that she’s been working with someone else though, so we don't know yet!)

Remember that Blake worried she was the one who messed up somehow?  She thought she pressed her research too far and someone discovered her snooping.  Rest assured, Blake!  That part wasn’t your fault.  

Poor Blake...she’s had a rough go of it in this story…

But, even after everything Lyla did to her, she still doesn’t have it in her to kill someone.  Did you notice what happened when she got the upperhand for a split second?

The second Blake heard a sound of distress, however, she loosened the bird’s claws - only to feel the object torn from her mind.

Her goodness is instinctual.  She knows that she needs to keep Lyla from hurting anyone else, but what she ends up mostly doing is playing defense while Lyla attacks.  That’s pretty much all Lyla does though - attack, attack, attack.

Of course, our good guys prevail in the end!  (It would be too depressing otherwise.)  So, with Lyla in a dream within a dream, and Yang having found her in reality...what happens next?

That’s what we’ll figure out next week.  I can count our remaining chapters on one hand, which is both sad and exciting.  The next story is much lighter though, which will be a nice change of pace.  It’s also nowhere near as story-dense as this one is, so probably a quicker, easier read.  Hopefully still enjoyable though!

Also, I may have started (casually) the White Rose prequel to this story.  It focuses on how they become a couple, so it’s also not as background story dense.  But I loved this version of their characters so much, I really wanted to see more - and see how they became such a great couple.  So...maybe we’ll see that sometime.  Probably not soon, but hopefully sometime!

Thank you for the continued support, as always!  We’ll be back here in a flash after two more weeks, so I’ll see you very soon!

Until next time,

Miko