Over the four months since that first client meeting, David had never had such a good time in his life. Oddly, it wasn't because he got to work with a gorgeous women (or two) on an almost daily basis as the newly assigned lead manager on the project. While that interaction and work was a wonderful addition to his daily life, the majority of this good feeling came from finally feeling rested.

David's little trick with his dreams had helped him get a new lease on life. He finally felt like a 26 year old in the prime of his life instead of old man. That wasn't all. His skill with dreams seems to have expanded. About a month after using the 'magic word' method to escape his nightmares, David realized that he could now sort of edit his dreams. He could add things to the dream or take stuff out.

However, he was limited to how much he could revise the nightmares. David had realized the more effort he put into changing a dream then the greater his headache when he woke up. He had found that out the hard way.

David had dreamed of being trapped in a room that was continuously shrinking. This was a repeater that he had always dreaded. He had also just realized that he could change a dream slightly. Getting crushed alive was one of the worst ways to die and just a fraction of the pain realized into real life was horrible. David had sat down in the center of the shrinking room, closed his eyes and imagined into existence some supports that kept the room from shrinking. If he would have left it alone after stabilizing the situation, everything would have been fine.

Since he was now sitting in a room having nothing to do, David had started imagining into existence all sort of stuff. A hot tub, a couch, a trampoline. Whatever he could think would be fun. Then, he had woken up to a headache that felt like something was trying to break out his skull from the inside. It was so bad that he got sick and had to call in to work to miss two days. Missing work wasn't something he normally did. Karine Carmine had even called to check on him the second day.

After that incident, he had tried a few things and found a good middle ground between the nightmares and the headaches caused from changing them. He would just change to different dreams that requires a physical resolution using his magic word. The ghost, building collapses, meteor stiles, and other odd dreams... those dreams were hard to fix by changing a few things, so he had no choice but to swap the dream out.

For nightmares that had physical threats, David found that one way to 'fix' a nightmare was to 'summon' protection in the form of weapons into the nightmare. That method had been quite enjoyable.

He couldn't help but reflect on the dog beast dream that had started the whole process a few months ago. Last time he had the dream, David had imagined a hand cannon type of pistol and shot the creature in the head when it was trying to attack him. After the beast was exterminated, David was actually able to wonder the neighborhood for a while. Eventually, he managed to get inside his grandma's house to have a nice dinner with the entire family like nothing crazy had happened outside. The nightmare had been converted into an odd mix of battle and happy memories. It was awesome.

This method didn't always work though. He had a reoccurring nightmare of getting in a car accident and flying off the road in the car into a river. No weapon or contraption would save him from that one. In that case, the dream got to be more of a puzzle solving problem. Instead of panicking and drowning to death, David could now retain some calm over the situation. The last time he had the dream, he managed to get out of the car and start swimming to the surface before he had to tap out with his magic word. He had a feeling that the next time he had that dream then he could just get out of the situation like it wasn't a major issue.

Besides the lack of tiredness, his skill at manipulating his dreams had a few other odd benefits for David. He started to notice that he could handle real life situations different then he would have in the past. Events that would have startled him before now seemed to be much easier to cope. Like his real life ability to handle traumatic occurrences was increased because he had learned to patiently navigate his nightmares while asleep.

Last week was the craziest. David and the Carmine sisters were making an early morning site visit to the zoo. They were walking through the zoo when all of a sudden the situation went downhill. A jaguar had escaped an exhibit. The staff had not noticed the escaped animal until a keeper found a group of dead llamas in another exhibit. From what David heard after, the jaguar had went on the predator's equivalent of a drunk human's joy ride and slaughtered as many other animals as it could throughout the zoo. Imagine working at the zoo and then a voice comes over the radio to let you know that a jaguar murdered a bunch of other animals, is unaccounted for and freely roaming the zoo. It could be hunting you right now and you wouldn't even know. The usually calm zoo staff was scrambling around like a bunch of lunatics.

Instead of panicking like the staff, David had went on high alert. He had immediately flipped the ink pen around in his hand. In a second, he had went from an architect taking project notes to a killer ready to stab something to death with his ink pen. He actually felt kind of goofy afterward, but he had developed a weird reflex to responding to frightening situations.

Although the group had seen the jaguar run by in the distance as keepers chased after it with tranquilizer guns, they never were really threatened. David's change hadn't gone unnoticed either. The ever present bodyguard, Charles, had looked at David oddly for a while after the brief scare. David had also noted a few things from the experience also. The two women had seemed completely unconcerned. Like no threat of danger could get to them.

Other than the increased ability to deal with stress, he had become a lot more productive at work. The design of a project of this scale doesn't happen over night. They were current planning the start of construction in around four more months.

During the design process so far, a lot had happened over that time. David realized that Karine Carmine was one of the main driving forces behind the project. The cold and detached woman seemed to only show emotion when developing details for the project with David. At this point, they were working on design elements on almost a daily basis. Sometimes her sister, Sonia, would be present and sometimes she wouldn't be around. David has felt that it wouldn't be inappropriate to say that him and Karine had become friends due to working together on the zoo exhibit.

Today, they were attempting to sort through the difficulties of odor in the exhibit. Karine and David were sitting with a plan in front of them in the office conference room. Charles was seated outside the room as usual.

The topic of the day: How were they going to make the exhibit smell like the night? Well, Karine and David had decided how they wanted the smell. They were aiming for an earthy, dew sort of smell. How to achieve that effect was the problem.

After thinking for a while, David finally had an idea.

"Karine, how about making all the exhibits with some sort of bioactive soil substrate, then just venting the exhibits into the walking areas? The smells from the soil, greenery, and animals would drift out into the pedestrian areas and give them the full odor of the night," David proposed.

"Wow, David. I think that would work well. However, we may still need to vent some exhibits to the outside. Remember, we decide to include some skunks in one of the exhibits," Karine replied.

"Ha ha," David smiled and laughed, "I completely forgot about that. We wouldn't want to have the whole exhibit smelling badly."

Karine was sitting across from David smiling right back. Their eyes met for a second and Karine shied her eyes away.

Looking down at her notepad, she asked, "Hey David, what are your plans for this weekend?"

David stopped breathing at the question. As typical, David couldn't help but have a little crush on this beautiful woman. And she had just asked him what he was doing this weekend.

"N-nothing," David stuttered.

"We are having a business get together at our house on Saturday night. Would you like to come over?", Karine asked.

David didn't know what to say at first, but he quickly recovered.

"Yes, I would very much like to go", David replies while making perfect eye contact with Karine.

"Okay," Karine responded with a blush, "I'll text you the details this afternoon."