A/N: I know, I know... what am I doing? I'm already juggling so many writing projects, and here I am posting on another. But, over the course of this last week, I was inspired by not one, but TWO new Aladdin fic ideas. I've decided to go ahead and post some writing for the less structured of the two. This is meant to be a free-form anthology, nightmares experienced by the characters in the aftermath of their experiences. I won't make promises on how consistently I will post on this, but it wouldn't leave me alone... so here it is.

Sweat soaked sheets. A skin-deep chill seeping into bone. The panicked escape from a dangerous world, wrong in every way, into the empty darkness of the night. Then, the sweet relief of knowing that this place, the physical world, is correct, and the recently visited tortures and visions are merely concoctions of the anxious psyche.

No matter how many days, months, years passed, the nightmares remained. Unpredictable, coming as they please, without warning. No truth, however powerful, not even the steady knowledge of having survived the experience, could soothe the mind of its worries. Aladdin had escaped the strife of the streets. Jasmine had secured her kingdom and rule. Jafar had been banished. Genie had been freed.

But, in the ethereal, fluidity of dreaming, reality existed unchecked. The in-between, where realities collided, where possibility was a deck of cards to be dealt, and the mind played the dangerous game of What if? Repressed and forgotten fears were given power to run amok. Trauma, when left unhealed, turned into a dangerous poison for the mind, leaving no medicine with which to cure the pernicious infection that begged the question... what may have been? The only means through which the mind can heal, is to self-soothe, processing, and running through all the ways in which victory could have so easily turned to defeat.

When the mind seeks consolation, these are when the horrid visions come. And, when the body was weak, when the mind was overtaxed, when the soul became weary with dread, known truths became flexible. In the deepest, darkest hours of the night, with the body at rest, the mind could expound truth into grim alternatives.

Nothing was true. Nothing was sacred. Nothing promised, nothing gained.

Arabian nights, like a Arabian dreams, this mystical land of magic and sand, is more than it seems. Arabian nights, like a Arabian moons, a fool off his guard, could fall and fall hard, out there on the dunes.