Dreaming: Billy & Eames
It hardly needed to be said that Eames knew he was dreaming. The elasticity of the dream was foreign. The shape of the mind underneath it was foreign too. He began in the middle, without rational explanation as to how they'd begun there and Eames had only the flickering awareness of form to decant himself from himself into something that reflected the endless mirrors of another person's mind. He began on the outside of a vast set of doors, his skin coated in salt and the dream prompted gently, a general sense of dread Eames refused to feel.
It was beginning to become draining. Somewhere, deep asleep beneath the narrow eaves of the house in the woods, Eames's mind turned over the knowledge that he was dreaming someone else's dream once more and fretted vaguely, without shape or conscious mind to turn it into some form of direction. He understood the psychology that drove dreaming. It was a turgid bore, so many volumes on the science of why the unconscious mind dredged up what it did, but he understood the fortress for what it was.
Somewhere deep under whoever's mind it was. The doors groaned, and Eames, dressed in the dream's prompt of nondescript gray linen, pants and shirt, stood in the mouth of an entrance to a place beautiful, desolate and with the wavering certainty of walls and pathways that made this imagination rather than memory. Which was a pity. An architect might have lusted after it.
"Hello," Eames drawled. He'd not the slightest intention of staying beneath the radar. Dreams that tried to instil a sense of inevitability weren't worth lingering for and being deep under made him feel queasy without the ability to feel his way out. He'd need to begin sleeping with the totem in his pocket, which meant wearing clothes. Eames loathed clothes in bed.