Leareth is not tracking things very well right now, but he can sort of sense that she has a sense of her current best practices for what to do, and it's...reassuring. 

Falling asleep is probably a bad idea but he's out of mental resources for trying not to do things that are probably a bad idea. 

- and, predictably, he is eventually back in Parabola and very very loudly projecting a formless nightmare about being repeatedly set on fire. 

Lucy gets a tap on her pocket-mirror. 

She really has to do something about this. 

She takes her honey and appears in Parabola. 

Leareth is doing his best to impersonate a puddle on the ground. Puddles do not have preferences or goals or beliefs about reality at ALL. 

She elucidates him. 

He does not, immediately, find the wherewithal to move. 

...Oh, right, this again. 

:Sorry: 

This is a much higher density of the REALLY bad nightmares than usual - he's been down to only projecting content once a week or so, in the last couple of months - but he's been stressed and that makes it worse. 

"Do you need laudanum."

He needs Maitimo to be there but he can't have that ever again. 

:What is that?: 

"It's a drug that makes you not dream. It's kind of addictive, though." 

:Oh. I - would want to avoid that long term. I suppose it could be a short term patch since this is very inconvenient for you:

"I'll figure out a way to prevent it in the long-term. Laudanum addiction does wear off. Faster with life-light."

:All right. In the short term I - would really like to be able to sleep here. Though if I am going to be drugged I want to be in the safest possible place and probably that is the Bazaar? ...Sorry. Unless that is too inconvenient. I will manage: 

"No, that's extremely reasonable." 

:...Do you need me to do anything right now: 

"No."

Then Leareth will just lie on the Parabola forest floor. 

The lucid-dream part of Parabola is nice, he thinks vaguely, as long as he can manage to stay lucid.

He wishes, distantly, that Lucy would sing again, but expressing preferences is very hard and he doesn't. 

Once she's assured he doesn't have anything else to say, she does start singing. 

It helps. A lot. It's much easier to keep his mind in the here-and-now, and not drift toward a thousand different memories that he has no particular desire to revisit. 

If given the chance, with about thirty minutes of peace and quiet he'll fall back into a non-dream sleep. 

Lucy does not leave Parabola immediately. 

She finds the Fingerking who has been so useful to her, and the two of them talk. 

Leareth's circadian rhythm doesn't currently feel that this is nighttime, so he wakes up a few minutes later. This inside of his head feels a lot less raw than before; it's definitely helping with restful sleep, at least, that while he's still having nightmares at all, he isn't spending that long trapped in them before Lucy interrupts. 

He sits on the side of the cot, yawning, and waits for Lucy. 

Lucy appears out of thin air a couple of minutes later. 

Leareth, who does not currently handle being startled very well, flinches so hard that he nearly falls off the cot before managing to parse that it's just Lucy. 

:- I was not aware you could travel there physically, with your body: he says faintly. 

"Yes, Prisoner's Honey does that," she says, picking up the jar illustratively. 

The jar of honey is definitely magic in a way clearly connected to the magic of the dream-realm. It looks sort of like a Gate, in a way, except for how it's completely different. 

:Why is it...called that...?: It is not one of Leareth's more pleasant associations. 

She blinks and looks at the jar in her hand. 

"I...do not know."