Re: [Dream Training]
The things that walked out weren't nightmares in the usual sense. They felt like glitches. Like when bodies were put together wrong in video games, before righting themselves when the programming cleared up. They weren't monstrous in the usual sense, and Hannah's mind parsed them in a way that made them seem strange, but not in the usual way, either. She wasn't afraid of them, and she thought they were just part of the training, the teaching, the lesson to be learned in Paris. She didn't know why they could change the dream, because she didn't realize they were, in fact, her, and she could change the dream, even though she shouldn't be able to, maybe. She still wasn't sure if she should be able to, actually.
The return to the lab wasn't jarring, and Hannah didn't know the space well enough to squint and notice difference. "Are we awake?" she asked, but she turned her head this way, that way, and there was no Arthur. Arthur wouldn't leave. She'd only known him a tiny-little, but she knew he wouldn't go to the bathroom, take a smoke break, leave to talk to someone on his iPhone. He wasn't that person, and so they weren't awake, and so this was still the dream. "We're still dreaming," she said, not even giving Eames time to respond himself.
The people were still there, despite the setting. The scientist, the dancer, the marionette. They were a little different now: One arm righted, one eye back in its socket, one string tight and taut against the wooden beam overhead. They still changed the lab as they moved, but they were doing things, rote things, over there. They weren't actually attempting to near. "Can only the architect change the dream?" she asked, going back to her previous question as if there hadn't been relocation, as if there weren't things in the corners.