Zhao Ruyuan, Aaron Parish and Sage Winchester

For as long as dreams have existed, so has the Dream Game.

Nobody knows for sure how it came to be or how its players are chosen, but two types of people are most frequently found playing it: dreamers with powerful desires they wish to see fulfilled, and aimless wanderers who have lost all faith in wishes. Those of the two extremes may find that when they lie down to sleep, they will find themselves dreaming of something important to them: a person, or perhaps a meaningful place. And when they wake, they find themselves holding an object of particular significance in their hands, brought from their dreams into reality.

The next time they sleep, they will dream of a sea of dandelions: the first stop for all new players of the game.

Within the realm of dreams, the players find themselves in different worlds — anything from the realistic to the fantastical, spanning any time period from ancient history to the far future. They will find themselves bearing a new identity, whether it be a king or a slave. Though they are not told their goal in so many words, it will be in their hearts: to find the dreamer, and grant their desire. Simple, yet often difficult.

For every player, the only thing that remains the same across all dreams is the object from their prologue of a dream, the one that followed them into reality. It will grant them powers they can use only within the dreamworld, something to protect themselves in the often-treacherous worlds they find themselves in. Over time, the players came to call these objects ‘totems’, and they dubbed the game the ‘Dream Game’.

Those who play the game can only tell their fellow players about it. Any attempt to tell those outside it will be mystically erased or redirected; players simply cannot speak to non-players of their experiences, as if blocked by some inexplicable force. Isolated from those outside the game, players turn to the dream realm for companionship, coming together in groups and teams. Most of these groups have a simple goal: to live for as long as possible.

Death in the Dream Game, unlike in any other dream, will result in a player dying in real life. Bonded by this common fear, players seek companions for power in numbers, hoping to surmount the odds and conquer the game. As they continue playing, however, all of them slowly realise the truth.

No matter how many games a player goes through, there is no end in sight. The Dream Game will become harder and harder, the worlds and characters more and more twisted, but it never ends. For many, they find that becoming a player means they have signed their death warrant. Eventually, they will come across a game they simply cannot defeat — and they will never wake up from it.

For as long as dreams have existed, so has the Dream Game. Nobody knows for sure how it came to be or how its players are chosen, but all who play it know that there is no escape.

Rue is grieving. With the loss of his grandmother fresh on his mind and the newly-gained guardianship of his little sister on his shoulders, every day is more tiring than the last. Alone and afloat in a mass of responsibilities with nobody to turn to, he no longer knows where he’s going or what he wants to do next.

Aaron is stagnated. He’s brought his company to great heights, yet he’s at a loss as to what else he can do to bring it even higher. Constantly occupied by meetings and business negotiations, he finds himself frustrated and missing the days when he could immerse himself in what led him to start his company in the first place: coding. It’s not like he regrets his life, but if he was given a chance to change it, he knows perfectly well that he’d leap at the chance.

Sage is lost. His world has narrowed to a single foggy field of dandelions, and he hears hundreds of disembodied voices in the mist every day, some familiar and others foreign. He’s pieced together what happened: he’s not awake. He’s caught in a dream, or more accurately, trapped in the space between them. His body, back in the real world, is comatose. He has no idea what he needs to do to wake up, but with his only choices being staying still or conquering the games that this strange world sets up in other people’s dreams… he thinks that, perhaps, he’ll find a way to wake himself up if he goes on playing these games.

It’s Rue’s first game. The only thing he can rely on is the origami crane his late grandmother gave him in his dream the night before, which followed him into reality; though he doesn’t understand why, he know it possesses an unexplainable power. By wishing upon it, he can give it a purpose and function, to turn it into anything from a weapon to a messenger to a guide through the unknown. For his very first wish, he asks it to show him the way to people he can trust — and lets it lead him from there.

It’s Aaron’s third game. He’s been wearing the watch he buried with his father for more than a month, and though time stops for a minute in the dream when he presses his watch button for a time-out, reality has been flowing on on as usual. He’s determined that he can’t do this alone. He’s been holding out on joining a group before feeling out his limits, but now, he thinks he’s ready to find himself a team. He has an offer from his very first game, the name and number of a not-quite-stranger he shared one dream with. He discards the notion of joining, however, when he meets two people that catch his interest: a bright-eyed young novice with nothing to his name but an origami crane, and a seasoned veteran with a sad smile that speaks of secrets he can’t tell.

It’s Sage’s twenty-eighth game. Unlike everyone else, he has no physical totem that grants him powers: only the four butterflies tattooed over his stomach. Turning into a butterfly has its advantages, but it doesn’t let him escape from his thoughts. He’s spent the past three months in a haze, entering dream after dream and coming up fruitless, and sometimes barely escaping with his life. With one such narrow scrape behind him, he chooses an easier game instead, hoping to catch his breath — and instead finds it taken away by two people he never expected to bond with.

Rue falls for Aaron first. Aaron’s self-assured charisma, backed by firm morals and dashed with a streak of sharp sarcasm that keeps him from being boring, draws Rue’s interest instantly. He couldn’t ask for a better partner-in-crime, and with the games’ life-or-death nature, theirs is a bond forged in fire. But then there’s Sage: sweet yet cynical, with a gentle nature but a ruthless hand, and far more resilience that his fragile butterfly wings would imply. At first, the way Aaron’s gaze is drawn to Sage makes Rue despair that he’ll ever be able to compete… at least, until he realises that he’s not exactly sure who he’s worried about losing to.

Aaron falls for Sage first. For all that Sage tries to hide his loneliness, it’s evident that he craves company — and yet shies away from it at the same time, as if he fears committing to any kind of connection. Aaron isn’t perturbed; he’s willing to wait for Sage to open up to him, even if it takes time. But then there’s Rue: a partner more reliable than Aaron had anticipated, always ready with a quick retort and up to any task that the games throw at them, sometimes to reckless extremes. Aaron wants to hold on to Sage, who seems liable to disappear at any moment… but when he comes a step too close to losing Rue, that’s when it dawns on him that there’s someone else he can’t bear to let go of, who’s been by his side all this while.

Sage falls for Rue first. Like a ray of sunshine piercing the fog, Rue’s bright smile and quick wit soon become the highlights of Sage’s interminable days. For all that Sage doesn’t want to become the butterfly drawn into a flame, he finds himself looking forward to every time he hears that familiar voice in the fog. But then there’s Aaron: patient and persistent, clear about his intentions but never crossing the line, giving him an entirely different kind of comfort. When he sees Aaron and Rue growing closer, his first instinct is to back off despite the ensuing turmoil — only for them to draw him back in together, an agreement made without him ever realising it.

On the shores of an unknown world, with fish swimming through the sky, they come to an understanding: the three of them, together, are what they want to be.

With their resolves renewed and their bond connecting them, they turn their attention towards a new goal: bringing Sage back to reality. Aaron and Rue aren’t content to only have him in their dreams, and with people he loves waiting for his return, Sage is more determined than ever to wake up.

The question of Sage’s missing totem has always weighed on them, and a visit to his bedside in reality gives them the answer they need. Rather than only the butterflies tattooed on his stomach, he has a physical totem just as they do: a blue iris in eternal bloom, invisible to all but other players. The fact that Sage lacks this totem on his person in the game can only mean that it was destroyed or lost — the first of which should have killed him, and the latter of which should be impossible.

The wish that Rue makes on his crane, in search of Sage’s lost totem, brings them to the most fiendish dreamscape they’ve ever had to conquer. The dreamer is out in the open, but his twisted desire for destruction has turned his dreamscape into a treacherous nightmare — and by his word, only one person can leave it alive, as he encourages players to hunt each other down.

He recognises Sage. He rejoices to see Sage ‘back from the dead’ — his almost champion, he calls Sage. The one whose totem he personally crushed. Between his mockery and the memories that Sage regains from being within this dreamscape, they soon piece together that this was Sage’s final game before he fell into his coma.

But Sage isn’t alone now, and they swear it won’t be theirs.

When they bring down the dreamer who’d destroyed Sage’s totem, all they feel is relief. It’s the most difficult dream they’ve had to conquer yet, but they come away from that hellscape both with the assurance that they’ve healed a festering wound, and with valuable knowledge — from both Sage’s reclaimed memories and the long-lived dreamer — about the game and Sage’s intentions within.

Sage had played the game before any of them had, and done so without being compelled to. A lucid dreamer who happened upon his own dreamscape and totem, he’d learned how to harness its power and cross into other dreamscapes through the interim space — and swiftly realised that many of those dreamscapes were twisted and dangerous, turned into nightmares by pent-up regrets and pains. He just as quickly discovered the existence of players, but not having been formally drafted into the game, he was unable to communicate with them about the game at all. Still, being alone didn’t deter him; he set out to mend as many dreamscapes as he could, crossing from one to another freely in search of those within his power to fix.

Sage doesn’t have a totem that allows him to wander into other dreamscapes anymore, but the prize they gain upon conquering the destroyer’s dream seems to have been tailor-made for that consideration. With the choice to select their next game in their hands, they know exactly where they need to go next: the final piece of that puzzle lies within Sage’s dreamscape.

Sage’s dreamscape is a game that was waiting just for them. It’s both the easiest and hardest game they’ve ever played, one that simply asks all of them to lay themselves bare to each other — but when they emerge victorious, two prizes await. The first is Sage’s and Sage’s only: a reformed totem, his path back to the reality. But the second is for all of them, a power unlike any they’ve ever seen: the power to use their abilities, just once, outside of a dreamscape.

Sage’s long-awaited awakening is celebrated with relief and joy, all his loved ones by his side. Though his body in reality is still frail and weak from the coma and recovery is a slow process, now that he’s no longer alone, it’s not nearly as harrowing as they feared.

But their journey isn’t over yet.

The fact that Sage didn’t die when his totem was destroyed traces back, as far as they can surmise, to the butterfly power that Sage was granted when he lost his totem. It can only be described as a gift: something that saved his life, and granted him a power which he could use to keep himself safe through the games he played. And only one such entity could have given him such a gift.

Nobody knows for sure how the Dream Game came to be, but after so many games, they know that the games aren’t without purpose. They’ve all come to realise this as they played, every time they feel that sense of rightness whenever they win a game, having achieved the dreamer’s wishes and brought them peace. They’ve watched dreamscapes untwist before their eyes, becoming something beautiful from tattered ruins; they’ve brought together star-crossed lovers and smoothed over past regrets, and with every happy ending, something settles into place.

Though their lives are at risk in the Dream Game, the game itself is not malevolent by nature. And though its purpose may be greater than the knowledge they have, they’re determined to uncover the truth. With the power of Rue’s crane, they could easily use the prize given to them to leave the game forever, a privilege never before granted to any other player. But escaping is no longer their intention. They know that the Dream Game’s truth lies beyond the fog of the dandelion field, and with this power in hand, they finally have the ability to pierce it.