William was standing in front of a solid wooden door, familiar even though he'd only seen it once before. From the other side of the door he heard piano music, intricate and haunting, floating through the wall and around the cracks in the door frame. He kept staring at the doorknob, but he didn't reach out, didn't turn it. He didn't want to go in.
He didn't really comprehend that he was dreaming until he became aware of Joe, and even then it took a minute for his brain to process that Joe wasn't just in his dream, he was in William's dream. He said, "Oh," or thought he did, but even with the heightened awareness it was hard to control the dream, hard to look away from the doorknob.
It made sense now, that he was dreaming this. This was the day they'd met, barely an hour before William had first asked about Dreamwalking. "I think this is a memory," he tried to explain to Joe, although it wasn't, not exactly, because he still wasn't opening the door.