Chapter Text
Phil woke slowly, his brain still fogged by sleep, still half in the dream with the shadow.
He used to call his recurring dream friend “the shadow boy,” but that had been long ago, back when it had all started, back when he’d been only a boy himself. Now he just thought of his dream friend as “the shadow.” And this was the first shadow dream he’d had in a few months, so he found himself reluctant to wake, wanting to cling to those last lingering moments of the dream that were quickly fading away. The shadow dreams were always his favorites.
He pulled the duvet up to his chin and snuggled into it, thinking back on what he could remember of the dream. The shadow had seemed sad, Phil thought, and he wondered what that meant about his own psyche. Why would his subconscious make his shadow friend sad tonight, when Phil himself had gone to bed fairly happy? Why had he dreamt about the shadow at all, instead of dreaming about the cute girl who’d been flirting with him at Louise’s party last night?
Strangely, it wasn’t the girl’s face he imagined as he closed his eyes and pressed his head into the pillow, wrapping the duvet more tightly around himself against the morning chill. Instead, he imagined the familiar presence of his dream friend, and he wished he could comfort the shadow. He hoped that in the dream he had, at least a little bit.
By the time he shuffled toward the kitchen in search of a bowl of cereal, he’d left imaginary childhood friends behind in the quiet corners of his mind and the warm folds of the bedclothes. Dan looked up from the sofa, laptop on his lap, dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you go to bed at all?” Phil asked with a worried, knowing sigh.
Dan shrugged. “I slept a couple hours, I think.”
Phil sat on the arm of the sofa in his pajamas and rested a hand on Dan’s shoulder, making him look up. “We don’t have anything we really have to do today, so maybe you can catch a nap or something.”
Dan nodded absently, turning back to his laptop screen, and Phil went in search of breakfast, trying not to worry about his brooding flatmate. He wondered if maybe some Miyazaki might cheer Dan up a bit. They hadn’t watched Totoro in a while. The thought of Totoro’s magical forest made him think of the shadow again, just a hint of a whisper of a thought, but then it flickered away under the bright lights of the kitchen, and the real world intruded again, and his shadow was gone.
Phil couldn’t remember when the shadow boy first appeared in his dreams. It sort of seemed like he’d always been there, but the first time Phil remembered telling his mum about it was when he was in Year 3, so he must have been about 7 then.
The boy wasn’t a real shadow, of course—that’s just what Phil called him, because he didn’t have a real name. He didn’t always look the same, either, but Phil could always recognize him anyway. Sometimes he looked just like Phil, like looking in a mirror and seeing his own school uniform and his own pale face grinning back at him with the same freckles and everything. Other times, the shadow boy looked like a squirrel running through a forest, and Phil chased him until the shadow boy ran up a tree and laughed at him as Phil jumped and jumped but couldn’t reach him up there until he decided to grow claws and climb up the trunk and the shadow boy squirrel would change into a butterfly and fly away, laughing at him even more.
Sometimes, he was just a speck of light, swirling around Phil’s head or leading him off to show him beautiful things, like the time Phil followed him to an entire field of cornflowers, and he lay flat on the ground and gazed up at the sky, and the shadow boy had transformed from the speck of light into a bright orange fox and had curled up by Phil’s side among the blue flowers and had lay there with him for ages, watching him with warm brown eyes and letting Phil stroke his soft fur.
Phil didn’t always look like himself in the dreams, either—he could look however he wanted. Sometimes he made himself into a bird covered in a whole rainbow of feathers, or even a boy covered in a rainbow of feathers! He could do anything he wanted, but he just usually preferred to look like himself, because then he wouldn’t get lost. He would always be able to find himself again.
The shadow boy didn’t seem to be afraid of getting lost. When Phil asked him why, the shadow boy said it was because he knew Phil would always find him.
The shadow boy didn’t call him “Phil” in the dreams, though, just like Phil didn’t know the shadow boy’s name. They didn’t need names in the dreams, because they just knew each other, knew each other’s souls or hearts or something. They knew each other better than words or names can express, in that way you just sometimes know things in dreams. Phil was just “me,” and the shadow boy was just “you,” and they were just “us” … and it didn’t have to be more complicated than that. No matter what they looked like, no matter what they were called, it was still them, and nobody knew Phil as well as the shadow boy did.
Sometimes he wished the shadow boy was real. He even pretended sometimes, talking to his own shadow on the playground, pretending that it was the boy from his dreams, but he was old enough to know it was all just his own imagination. He understood about dreams, that they weren’t real. And he understood also, even in Year 3, that nobody would ever know him as well as the shadow boy did. He’d never feel that connected to anyone else. Not in the real world. Only in his dreams.
And that’s why the shadow dreams were always his favorites.