That night John had a dream that would alter his life in a way he never thought possible, which sounds a bit extreme, but looking back on it, it seems to be a stunningly accurate description. Though it wasn't actually the dream, but more the twelve minutes after it that really changed things.

After spending the rest of the afternoon with Clara, John had gotten home and promptly fell asleep, and he had the same sort of vivid dreams that he had the night he got sick. This time, he was wearing a brown pinstriped suit, his hair was shorter than it was supposed to be, and he was hanging onto something for dear life. He looked to his left and saw a blonde woman in a similar situation, only she couldn't hang on. She lost her grip and he was screaming and all he knew was that nothing had hurt quite like that in his entire life.

Then the dream changed and he was still wearing the same suit and his hair was still the same weird length, but this time he was surrounded by people he loved, including the blonde woman who he now remembered was called Rose. They were all working together to pilot some sort of alien technology and they all seemed incredibly happy. There was cheering and hugging but then each of his friends started leaving one by one and every time he watched them go his heart broke more and more until only he was left.

The dream changed one more time and his hair was back to its original length and he was in a graveyard with three other people when one of them suddenly disappeared. The next thing he knew the redheaded woman was crying and he was crying and everything got extremely emotional before she disappeared too.

John woke up feeling exceedingly horrible. It was as if his subconscious was punishing him for feeling so great the day before, which he did not appreciate. He looked at the clock on his nightstand. It read 7:33, so John figured he might as well get up.

He brooded over a bowl of cereal on his kitchen counter and tried to figure out why he had such awful dreams. He remembered the last time he had dreams like that, the day he went slightly crazy. When he woke up the first thing he did was grab the silver fob watch on the table in front of his couch.

If John had any idea what would happen once he picked up that watch, he never would have touched it. If he had any idea what it would turn him into, he would throw it in the trash and try to forget it ever existed, but unfortunately John did not have the ability to see into the future.

He set his empty cereal bowl in the sink and moved to sit on his couch. It was a casual motion that really didn't do justice to the dramatic event that was about to happen.

John held the silver device in his hands, flipped it over once, and opened it.

"Clara, I need to talk to you. Immediately," he said into the phone.

"John? It's not even eight yet, are you alright?" Clara's voice was groggy with sleep.

The Doctor sighed and figured he would address the name issue later. "No, I'm not alright. I need to talk to you as soon as possible. Can you come to my flat?" He asked.

Clara sounded concerned when she said, "Yeah, of course, I'll be there in twenty."

Clara got ready as fast as she could and took the tube to the station closest to John's flat. She grew increasingly more nervous with each step she took, and she kept her hands in her pockets to stop them from shaking. John sounded terrified on the phone. It hadn't even been a full day since he told her about his memory problem and already something was wrong.

John buzzed her up to his flat immediately and when he opened the door she knew something was definitely off. He still looked the same, with his tweed jacket and bowtie, but his mannerisms were different. He seemed unsure of himself and his hands were much more animated than they used to be.

"Please, sit down," he said.

Clara moved awkwardly to the couch and did as she was told. She watched John pace back and forth in front of her for a few seconds before she spoke.

"You seem different. Why do you seem different?" She asked.

John stopped in his tracks and turned to look at her. He sighed. "Okay, Clara I'm about to tell you something and it's going to be extremely difficult to comprehend and it's going to sound absolutely mental but you have to trust me, okay?" He said.

"Okay," she said.

Ten minutes of nonstop talking happened in which Clara learned that John's name was not, in fact, John, but rather the Doctor, before she got a hold of the situation. She put her hand up to stop his rambling.

"Hang on," she said, struggling to wrap her brain around the new information. "You're telling me you're a time traveler who locked himself in a watch, and masqueraded as a toy salesman named John Smith?"

The Doctor nodded, seemingly pleased that she had gathered that much information.

"Do you think I'm an idiot?" She asked.

"Ah, I thought you might come to that conclusion," the Doctor said. "Follow me."

Before Clara had time to react, the Doctor led her out of his apartment, down the street, and into a sketchy looking alley.

"Um, should I be worried?"

"Why?"

"You're leading me into an alley."

"Well I had to keep it somewhere I wouldn't just stumble upon it."

"Keep what somewhere?"

"My TARDIS!" The Doctor exclaimed, as if Clara was supposed to know what that word meant.

"Your what?!" Clara's volume matched the Doctor's.

The Doctor stopped in his tracks and held his arms wide as if he were showing off a masterpiece at a museum opening. "Tada!" He smiled.

Clara looked up and realized they were standing in front of a blue police box.

"This?" She said, confused.

"Yes, this," the Doctor said. "Come have a look."

He opened the door and Clara walked inside. It took her longer than she would like to admit to find her words again, but when she did, she didn't comment on the impossibility of a box that was bigger on the inside. Instead she just said in a defeated voice, "Oh my stars, you're not lying."

The Doctor hopped down from a set of stairs and his huge smile started to fade.

"Lying? No, of course not," he said.

Suddenly the huge box seemed suffocating and Clara turned around and walked back out into the alley. She found it incredibly hard to breath and her brain seemed to weigh about eight pounds more than usual. She figured it was due to the insane amount of knowledge this man just dropped on her in the last fifteen minutes.

Out of all the things she just learned, including the existence of other worlds and the possibility of time travel and the fact that a police box can also be a time machine, the only thing she could think of was how she seemed to have lost her best friend, and this new man has come to take his place.

Clara wrapped her arms around herself and tried to focus on her breathing. In, out, in, out. She was so focused that she didn't notice when the Doctor walked out of the police box behind her and close the door.

After a few seconds she turned around to look at him and said, "You're really not John, are you? You're not just playing a trick on me."

"Er, no. No, I'm not," he said.

She wondered how any of this was possible. How was it possible that someone she loved could be an alien who trapped his conscience in a watch? How was it possible that this stranger looked exactly like her best friend? And how was it possible that all of these impossible things were happening to her of all people?

"Clara, are you alright?" He asked.

"No, I don't think so," she answered honestly.

"I know it's kind of a lot of information to take in—"

"So that's it then? You opened that stupid watch and it's all over?" Clara said. Her eyes were dangerously teary.

The new man had trouble keeping eye contact. He was silent.

"The man who loved me, you're not him anymore?" Clara pushed her hair behind her ear just to give her hands something to do. Her throat was starting to hurt.

The man, the Doctor, stood in front of her without a word for a long time. She looked him in the face, even though it hurt, and he looked at her shoelaces, even though he owed her so much more. Just when Clara thought she was going to explode from all the emotions raging through her body, he spoke.

"No. I'm not," he said. He looked up after that. Clara shut her eyes and in doing so, let a tear fall. She quickly scrubbed the cuff of her jumper across her cheek. "Not yet," the Doctor continued. Clara's eyebrows scrunched together for a bit.

"Not yet, what's that supposed to mean?" She asked. They were both looking at each other, now, and something passed between them. Maybe it was a bit of electricity, maybe it was a silent word, or maybe it was something as simple as an idea.

"It means," he started, "that I don't want this to be the end, after all I never really have liked endings." He looked at her for a while without saying anything. Then, "I want you to stay." Clara stared at him in disbelief.

"And you think that's fair to me?" She said, "You think I can just skip around with someone who walks, talks, and looks exactly like the man I fell in love with, and treat him like a stranger? How could you possibly ask me to do that?"

"But Clara, that's just it! I'm not a stranger! All those things that he was, everything he said, everything he liked and everything he hated, everything he stood for, that all had to come from somewhere," he was urgent and passionate and Clara was afraid she might do something stupid, like believe him. "It came from me, Clara. It all did. Do you remember when he told you he couldn't remember who he was?"

Clara nodded slowly.

"Well I'm it. I am what he couldn't remember. Hello," he said and waved awkwardly.

They were still staring at each other, neither one daring to look away.

"Then why do you seem so… Different?" She asked.

"Because I am different. But I promise, Clara, I promise that John Smith is still in here somewhere, at least part of him, the part of him that loved you. And if you stay, I think I can find it. I want to find it Clara. I just need a chance. Please, just give me a chance," he said.

"I think I need to lie down," Clara whispered into the silence.

The Doctor nodded and opened the TARDIS door before he realized that she probably meant to lie down in his second story flat.

"Why did you do it? Change yourself, I mean," Clara asked after a while. She was sitting on John's couch while the Doctor was sitting in a chair on the other side of the table. The Doctor looked at the table between them for a long time before answering.

"Clara the first thing you have to know about me is that I didn't intentionally hurt anybody. I'm an observer. But I have a history like you wouldn't believe, and it follows me everywhere I go, and people get hurt. Because of me. Because of the things I've done," the Doctor explained. Clara wasn't having any of it.

"Just get to the point," she said. She realized it sounded rude, but her nerves were too frayed to care too much. The Doctor looked up at her for the first time and sighed.

"I lost people, Clara," he said.

"So have I, that's no excuse," she replied.

"Yeah well it wasn't your fault was it?" He snapped. Clara's face went slack.

"I'm sorry," he said, he looked down at the table again. The air between them filled with suffocating silence.

"I lost people, so many people, all because I invited them to join me in running away from the monsters under my bed. And I realized that while trying to escape, I turned into the very thing I was running away from. I've made too many mistakes, Clara," the Doctor couldn't find a place to rest his eyes. He had never said any of this to anyone before, and finally hearing it out loud suddenly made it very real. "So I did the only thing I know how to do: I ran. I made up a life for myself and locked the rest of me away in a watch in the hope that I would never feel so empty, that I would never hurt that much ever again."

Clara couldn't look away from him. His upset face was the same as John's. The corners of his mouth drooped down and his forehead wrinkled with the weight of everything he was admitting. Clara couldn't help but sympathize.

"Mistakes are normal you know, nobody's flawless," she said softly. The Doctor laughed darkly.

"You're not the first to tell me that, Ms. Oswald," he said, "but answer me this, if I make the same mistake over and over and over again," there was so much emotion in his voice, so much hurt, that Clara could hardly bear to listen, "am I normal, or am I a madman?"

The two of them talked for the next few hours, and it only got slightly easier for Clara to look the Doctor in the face. The more they talked the more she realized that John was never coming back, and that hurt. It hurt a lot.

But Clara was strong and determined, and it's not every day that you come across a time travelling alien, so she listened patiently to all his stories, the happy ones and the sad ones. By the end, after she learned about Amy and Rory, she realized that the Doctor was even lonelier than John Smith ever was, and that maybe he needed someone too.

It was nearing three in the afternoon when the Doctor finally finished, and he seemed to be coming out of a daze as he told the last part of his story. By that time, Clara was so enraptured with everything this new man was, and all the things he's seen and done, that she realized she didn't want the story to end.

After a bit of silence where Clara didn't know what to say, the Doctor asked her one question.

"Would you like to see?"

And there were two main factors that led to Clara's answer: 1) She didn't want this to be the last time she saw John's face, and 2) She had 101 Places to See.

"Yes," she said.

Thanks for sticking around 'til the end. Let me know what you thought if you have a few seconds to spare.