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A few weeks after the dream’s end, when he’d ended it, Danny holds his hand out over the sink and pours out salt on it. Nothing happens.Salt on a burn, right? It’s just basic, ingrained first-aid knowledge for a clumsy kid who keeps getting himself hurt. Salt desiccates, dries out the fluid from the bursting damaged cells; which reduces swelling, thus reducing the pain of a minor burn. Additionally, salt kills any bacteria that might have been on the skin.Salting is one of the first preservative methods discovered by early humans; probably after fire, but not by a whole lot? So there’s just a lot of real-world science and history behind the whole idea of salt as a purifying agent, like throwing salt on something to cleanse it of evil influence. It’s actually something that makes sense, all paranormal sorta-science aside.It’s not that Danny doesn’t believe in ghosts, at this point. If a floating glowing person-thing shows up and starts bending reality at the edges until the rules he’s been learning all his life warp into a new unknown form, then that pretty handily disproves the hypothesis that ghosts don’t exist.Or he could wake up and everything would be just like it was before the Manson Portal and all that stuff with Spectra and the GIW and Valerie and … and all of that. That’s happened a few times already, though, and the ghost dreams vastly outnumber the non-ghost dreams so…? He doesn’t really know where to go with this, really. He can’t really keep track of which dreams do or do not contain ghost-related strangeness as part of real life, not when he can’t reliably tell when it’s not a dream.Dreams are weird and jumpy and make no sense, but being awake can be like that too. Dreams happen completely inside a person’s head, but all thoughts happen in the brain. …how do ghosts think, then? Where does Sam’s brain go when she’s Phantasm? And dreams feel like they’re really happening as long as he’s in one, but not after. How do you tell? What part of a dream is real?He could ask Jazz, and she would tell him all about how dreaming is the process by which human brains work through problems that a human consciousness can’t solve with conscious thought. A brain sorting through the day’s memories, saving the important ones and discarding the rest to make room for tomorrow’s thoughts. Only, sleeping brains have different definitions of important.Maybe he should have listened more closely when she answered him? But he’s pretty sure that time was in a dream, since it was right before the kitchen changed colors. Or was that because Dad repainted it? He isn’t sure. What’s the difference between taupe and cornsilk, actually?Tucker would absolutely make a comparison to how computers work, strip out what he wanted from all the other stuff and say that dreaming is defragmenting for the meat-brain.The basic design of a computer is based off organic brain function, in a way, ones and zeroes and microscopic switches. Connections and systems of connections, and meaning making itself out of all those fragile interconnections.Come to think of it, Mom would give an explanation that’s rooted more in measurable biological functions, something about dopamine and acetylcholine levels and how brain activity changes during sleep. REM sleep looks nothing like a waking state on an ECG, so there’s that.But Danny can’t live in a hospital room with an ECG machine and electrodes in his hair forever, so that’s no help either.So Danny tries to do like he remembers doing before the dream. He takes one threadline of thought and follows it as far as he can, and lets all the other parts of his mind drift backwards through all those saved memories. It doesn’t always matter what the main visible thread is, as long as it’s there. It can be a complicated research question, a multi-step math problem, a star-map that only matches the physical sky. The stars don’t change, even when he does. He’s literally another person compared to days ago, months ago, years ago. He’s grown, he’s gotten his butt kicked, he’s helped his superpowered best friend kick ghost butt and been saved by his non-superpowered best friend. And that’s, that’s really not the right wording! It makes it sound like Tucker’s somehow less just because he doesn’t have ghost powers. And, yeah, the powers are awesome-But, ghost powers were never why they were friends. Sam was always the mad girl from the weird mad scientist family, too weird to be popular but too mean to let people pick on her. Tucker was the even-more-gothy guy who knew everything about the latest technology, always scared the school bullies off Danny.And Danny is… well, he’s the nerdy space kid. He’s trying to exercise more and taking AP Physics in preparation for qualifying for NASA’s astronaut training program, he can’t throw a punch to save his life, and some of his earliest memories are the ones in which he’s daydreaming about star formation and interstellar communications networks.Way back when, his mom and dad had glued location-accurate glow-in-the-dark stars on his bedroom ceiling. He’d sat on the bed and double-checked their work just to make completely sure they matched the positions of the major constellations visible at ground level in Amity Park, as of exactly midnight on his birthday that year.Memories aren’t accurate. Neural pathways fade or get overwritten, like overused CDs, like star charts that have been gone over so many times he knows he knows where everything is- and, and then he actually checks his memory against the reference, and they completely disagree. More often than not, the charts are corroborated by the sky and his observing it.And that’s, that’s normal. Human brains have limits to how many threads of thought can run parallel to one another at any given time, a limit to how many discrete things can be held in short-term real-time memory – one or two, six or seven at most. That’s what computers are for, to do problems human brains aren’t as good at and free up brainspace for thinking about things that aren’t algebra problems. That’s what writing things down is for, so people don’t have to remember things in their own brains all the time. Brains can only hold so much.What happens to thoughts, when the brain they lived in dies? Common threads, hesitant beginnings of connecting thoughts, drift forward while his consciousness is busy doing real-world stuff.Danny putters around the kitchen, putting together a late-night snack. He passes on the fudge and the honey-glazed ham; Dad swears by them, but Dad hasn’t ever gotten sick from overeating that Danny can remember. Danny is small and nervous and used to stress-puke when he was little. He needs something lighter.Milk and cookies, maybe? Or milk and cereal, but then what will he have for breakfast? Toast?He frowns. No, not toast.Maybe a sandwich? Bread, some cheese, the lean deli turkey Mom keeps pushing at Dad because his doctor says he has to lose weight. Mustard and mayo, some lettuce from that big bag of salad, and half a tomato. Salt and pepper.Danny hesitates over the salt shaker. It’s not the shape – half a football, sitting on its side like a an anatomical cross-section or a ground-level view of the sky. White ceramic with brown-painted stitching, to go with the pepper shaker in ordinary white-on-brown.There was something about the salt. Salt in general, and this exact salt in particular. Salt and the sink. Danny picking at little metal spout with his fingernails, levering it up out of the cardboard top of the big box that table salt comes in at the grocery store.Had he burned his hand again? Was he trying to make toast? Why? He didn’t even like toast, he always burned it, and the texture was unpleasantly dry and gritty at best.He looks up and the ceiling is dark, beyond the exact pattern of worn-out paper stars his parents had glued up there when he was seven. Dull paper stars that never needed a sky to burn. He holds his hand out over the sink and pours out salt on it. Nothing happens.Salt, without a burn.