Dream World by T.G. Haynes

like she was back in the dream chamber, but then hadn’t her sub-conscious played a similar trick on her earlier that very evening? Kate’s left hand closed around the necklace. It felt real enough to touch, but then most things felt so real in her dreams it was beginning to get hard for her to differentiate between what was fantasy and what was reality.
    As Sylvia sighed and sat up, Kate stuffed the necklace into her pocket, keeping it hidden from her friend. Sylvia removed the pads from her temples.
    Kate had to ask Sylvia, just to be sure. ‘We are awake now, aren’t we?’
    Sylvia couldn’t resist playing devil’s advocate. ‘I don’t know, are we? You tell me.’
    One of the doors opened and the churlish nurse who had tended to them when they first entered the dream chamber stepped through and began to prepare the room for the next visitors. That was it, Kate decided. She was definitely awake. There was no way that her sub-conscious would have bothered to conjure up Brenda.
    As she and Sylvia left the dream centre they discussed their respective fantasies, Kate anxious to try and work out what the darker elements of hers meant. To her disappointment, Sylvia wasn’t much help. She was more interested in focussing upon the more ribald aspects of their dreams.

Good Cop, Bad Cop
    On returning home, Kate found that she couldn’t get the complex dream scenario that she had experienced out of her head. It plagued her to such an extent she ended up going on-line in an attempt to try and figure out what her dream might have meant. Alas, she was unable to find anything pertinent, although one of the sites she viewed suggested that she harboured domination fantasies, but was scared to play them out to their conclusion. She assumed that this was why she had conjured up the door through which Dexter had escaped. Although this seemed a reasonable enough explanation for her dream, it still didn’t explain the presence of the necklace and why it should exist in both fantasy and reality. The only possible explanation she could think of was that maybe Richard had instructed Brenda to present it to her as a gift, that Brenda had placed the item on her pillow as she slept and that she had awoken very briefly at some point, seen the object, and incorporated it into her dream. Whilst this seemed slightly implausible, Kate couldn’t think of any obvious alternative.
    As she settled down to sleep that night, she placed the necklace on her bedside cabinet. It was the last thing she remembered looking at before her weary eyelids closed and sleep consumed her.
    Whether it was due to her trips to the centre or not, Kate couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was her dreams, in recent nights, had become much more vivid for some reason. She hadn’t been asleep long that night when she found herself in the middle of a fantasy scenario that she dreamt about so often she half wondered if it was trying to tell her that she should change career.
    For some reason, ever since her late teens, Kate had often dreamt about being a police officer. More often than not the dream would begin with her donning the uniform. Pleasingly, her mind usually selected a different one. Sometimes she would be a traditional English police officer; on other occasions she would be a member of the gendarme. The German polizei uniform was a particular favourite, as were the uniforms which the Russian police wore. Her favourite uniform, though, was that of an American traffic cop (possibly because she watched more than her fair share of American cop shows on TV) and, much to her delight, that was the uniform her sub-conscious chose for her to slip into that night. The only disappointing part about the scenario was that the locker room in which she got changed was empty, which was a shame given that she was naked and she felt horny as hell.
    Opening the door to her locker, Kate took out her sensible black bra and panties and put