Darling,

Arthur gets progressively better at dreaming over the course of the next week. He picks it up quickly, gets right on track with constructing his own cities, using snippets and details from places he’s been to, places he’s seen or read of in books, but never entire buildings or cities from memory. It’s too risky to do that, Dom says when Arthur tries to do this during his third time under. It’s too easy to mess things up; it’s too easy for the subject to realize that it’s a dream. It’s too easy for the dreamer to lose his grip on reality.

“The dreamer constructs the dream,” Dom tells them as they walk up the stairs to the rooftop of an office building Arthur built. “He or she controls the physics of the dream, how it looks, how big the dream space is – is it simply a building or room or is it an entire city?”
They step out onto the roof and look down. Similar such office buildings stand around them, creating an intricate pattern with the streets below.

“The subject populates the dream with his or her subconscious,” Dom says, and of course Arthur knows all this; he’s thoroughly entrenched in everything that is dream theory, but it’s one thing to read it on paper and it’s quite another to see it all in action. “All my secrets are here, and if you talk to my projections, you might be able to discover some of them.” Dom gives Arthur a sideways glance and says, “Of course, the things I don’t want anyone to know are safely locked away, and you need to be particularly adept at navigating dreams to find those.”

They stand in silence for a moment and listen to the rumble of traffic from below. A light breeze flits through the air.

“Go on,” Dom prompts. “Try something. Change the landscape. Let’s see how long it takes my subconscious to catch on.”

It really only ends up taking a few minutes of pulling this and pushing that and knocking some buildings down until the projections are on them, as Dom Cobb has perhaps the most highly trained subconscious in the nation. Dom shouts at Arthur to use this opportunity to practice defending himself, but Arthur barely even has time to react before a nearby projection puts a bullet through his skull.

The next few times they go under, Arthur is learning two things at once, simultaneously figuring out how to construct a realistic and believable dream space and learning how to handle a firearm and protect himself in a dream. All of the researchers need to know how to do this, Dom says, whether they plan on actually using this knowledge or not. It’s protocol, and so Arthur doesn’t question it.

“It doesn’t have to look one hundred percent real,” Dom tells Arthur every time they go under. “As long as it’s close enough, the subject won’t find anything strange about it. After all, it’s only after we wake up that we realize anything was odd.”

And Arthur knows this, he really does, it’s just his perfectionism coming into play; he doesn’t like it when things are inaccurate, doesn’t like it when things look off. He keeps at it, though, because he refuses to be bad at anything. Constructing a dream should be easy, he thinks, it’s like molding silly putty. It should be easy; there’s no reason he can’t get this.

It isn’t long before Arthur is handling the weapons he dreams up like a pro, and he’s taken to keeping a gun with him at all times in dreams, just in case. It’s impossible to predict what will happen in a dream, and Arthur feels much more secure knowing he has something to defend himself with. He’s particularly fond of wielding a Glock 17, and he’s an excellent shot.

It’s very quickly become known that Arthur is one of the most promising young researchers this program has recruited. His colleagues joke about having to watch their backs, because surely, he’ll put them all out of business. Arthur always takes these jokes with a smile and a shake of the head, asserting that there’s no way he could do any of this on his own. They all get along quite well, even though Arthur is substantially younger than all of them.

Mal takes her maternity leave a few months later and maybe it’s just Arthur’s mind skewing things, but the lab feels a lot quieter, a lot more subdued. No one else seems to notice though, with the exception of maybe Dom, but even Dom seems to just shrug it off. He takes as many days off as he can to stay at home and take care of Mal anyways.

Arthur starts going under more, playing guinea pig for the researchers, and he doesn’t mind because there’s something about these shared dreams that’s infinitely fascinating to him. The one thing he helps them test the most is the method of waking someone up from a shared dream through the use of something called a kick.

A kick is the sensation of free falling, of hitting a surface, or some sort of similar sharp jolt that startles the dreamer awake. It’s a simple enough technique but it’s been recently discovered that it’s possible to take the dreamer in the first layer and put him or her under again, thereby putting the dreamer in a dream within a dream. The kick them becomes harder to administer, as the two kicks for the two dream levels need to be synchronized, and this is what they’re currently working on.

Often times, the kicks won’t be performed properly, and Arthur won’t wake up until the timer runs out and forces him out of the dream. It’s probably the most uncomfortable way to wake up from two dreams down, and Arthur sometimes goes home with a headache pounding at his temples after a day of work.

“There has to be a way,” Arthur says one day after being wrenched awake by the machines he’s hooked up to. “There has to be a way to let the dreamers know that the kick is coming, some kind of signal that is able to pass through to the different dream layers.”

The researcher who has been going under with Arthur to set up the kick in the first dream layer, a woman in her early thirties with dark brown eyes that look so much older than she is, rubs her eyes. Her name is Alexis, and she’s been going under with Arthur the most now that Dom is taking nearly every other day off to spend time with Mal.

“Well, we already know movement transfers through dream layers,” she says, “But that could make the dreams too unstable. It’s too risky.”

Arthur massages his aching temples and squeezes his eyes shut, willing himself to think coherently through this migraine.

“What about sound?” he suggests. He looks up at Alexis. “Does sound carry?”

Alexis shrugs. “We’ve never tried it before,” she says. “But I guess it’s worth a shot. What kind of sound were you thinking?”

Arthur blinks heavily, twice, and tries to clear his head again. “A song?” he offers, “Some kind of clear, distinctive signal. I don’t know.”

Alexis ponders that for a moment, and Arthur is handed a cup of water, which he takes gratefully. It doesn’t do much to alleviate the headache, but the cool water still feels good going down his throat. He’s not allowed to take anything for his head until after they’re done here, as the extra drugs in his system would throw the effects of the Somnacin off.

“You know,” Alexis muses, “That might actually work.” She looks at Arthur, “Let’s try it.”

He nods and finishes off his water, easing back into his chair for another round. The technicians debate for a minute or two over what song would be best to use, but Arthur doesn’t even hear them. He tunes them out till their voices are nothing but white noise. It’s easier on his head this way.

They go under again, and Arthur’s headache subsides temporarily, as pain and injuries diminish in intensity the farther down the dreamer goes. Alexis puts Arthur under a second time and he wakes up in a grassy field with nothing but swaying flowers and grass and rolling hills as far as the eye can see. He wonders why his subconscious has taken him here, of all places, but he has nothing better to do, so he lies down in the soft, soft grass and stares up at the impossibly blue sky, waiting for the musical cue that will signal the kick.

Time drags on and Arthur wonders if the kick is ever coming, but then he remembers that time moves slower down here than it does one level up, and that in turn is slower than reality. He lays there for a long time and almost forgets he’s in a dream, and then he hears it, faint strains of a woman’s voice singing, an orchestra swelling to the chorus along with her.

“Non, rien de rien... non, je ne regrette rien…”

He recognizes the song immediately.

He feels a sudden familiar pull right behind his naval. His eyes open and he catches a glimpse of the ceiling of the hotel room of the first dream layer, and then his eyes are opening again and he’s back in the lab. His chair is tipped over and his head is buzzing, but his fellow researchers are smiling down at him with victory in their eyes.

Arthur knows without them even having to say that they succeeded and he allows himself a brief moment of triumph before going off in search of the aspirin he knows they have stashed away somewhere.

“It worked,” Alexis cheers from beside him as he downs a glass of water and a couple small white pills in hopes of diminishing the throbbing in his head. “Wait till Mal and Dom hear about this. They’ll be ecstatic.”

And they are, even more so because it was kind of Arthur’s idea to begin with. They look every bit the proud parents they’re soon to be, and Arthur can’t help smiling fondly at the two of them as they beam at him later that day.