Aeslin nods and vanishes into the bedroom.  If Mira's watching, she'll see a mass of blankets fly out from a closet shelf and shake themselves out in the middle of the air before Aeslin unrolls them.

"Dream magic was my first specialty back when I was a really little girl," she says.  "Found an old book on it written by a Fay... still don't know who; they didn't give their real name.  Though I'd love to meet them.  Anyway, nobody else had studied it really, but I practiced until I was walking into other people's dreams every night.  I few mistakes of course -" (there's a brief frown) "- and then got into other magic, but there's so much potential in dream magic nobody's looked into!"

"I wouldm't be surprised; dreams can have some very interesting things in them.  ...Shall we?"

She gets herself settled in for the oncoming sleep, assuming that she can just yet.

"Sure."

She reaches into her dresser drawer and holds up a pen.

"You want the normal fast sleep spell with just my wand, or the extra-safe version that involves drawing circles on your forehead, but makes clear that I'm not going to do anything other than just put you to sleep?  Or, well, would make clear if you knew how to interpret it...  I guess I could develop circles for the memory-altering and semi-hypnotic versions too, if I wanted."

"I lose nothing I haven't already risked by trusting that you're just going to cast the sleep spell."

Aeslin stares at the closed curtains of her window for a moment, and then flicks her wand in a circle, and then a figure-eight, and then jabs it straight in the direction of Mira's head.

Tiredness breaks over Mira, in a huge wave.

If she tries, she might be able to keep her eyes open long enough to see Aeslin repeating several more figure-eights and another jab... but after that, she's going to be asleep.

Aeslin herself slips into her nightgown and then takes out her experiment journal.

After some notes about the building she'd started investigating, she adds,

Experiments interrupted by Mira, with cogent questions.  Look into hiring lab assistant?

 Also, consider how to check how many Muggle-sprung never realize about magic.

Also, investigate natural unconscious magical circles as reaction to mind-affecting magic?  Might help explain spell failure rate. 

... And then she casts the dreamwalking-trigger spell on herself, turns off the light, and lies awake for a few minutes before she decides her mind is racing all too much and casts the sleep spell on herself.

She's looking for someone.  They're - that way this way that way - through the door of a 'bank' that looks like the Matrix, out of the airship's dumbwaiter that is the other half of the door, turn a corner into a house that has more corners than it should, corners that turn into eachother (glass and grey and red, well put together - "outside", it's raining, but there isn't an outside -)

Oh, hello.  That's a person, there, amongst the crowd of no import.  Could it possibly be?  Has she found something she's been looking for, after so long?  Why does she feel like she's thinking more than she usually does, when the dream's not busy repeating itself?

She's floating in the sea of cloudlike mist that's at the core of her dreamrealms.  But she's lucid tonight.

She concentrates, and an image of her wand appears in her hand.  She waves it - not in any spell, just as a gesture; it's not a real material wand anyway - and the mist clears a bit, enough for her to see a metal gate off in one direction.

Smiling, she walks through the mist (faint images of trees and library shelves and a waterfall in the distance), and gestures for the gate to open.

It doesn't open, but it fades somewhat.  She walks through.

The gate vanishes behind her (as she expected), and she's suddenly in a crowd, wearing different clothes.  Everything feels different now, less homely, more alien... as expected; she's in Mira's dream now!

And there's Mira herself, or at least an image of her!

Aeslin gestures, and her wand is again in her hand, and she's wearing the same skirt-and-T-shirt she was when they met this evening.  "Hello, Mira!" she says aloud.

Lucidity washes over her like the shock of walking outside into the cold, as she hears Aeslin's voice.

Her dreams sometimes include communication, but they never seem to include sounds.  Not sounds that feel real.

"Hello, Aeslin," she tries to reply.  (Part of her isn't sure she'll manage to actually speak, instead of vaguely impress communicative intent upon the dreamscape.  She's not quite all there, to be speaking with - there's only half an impression of her body, really, for all that that definitely means she stands out from the crowd.)  "...So, uh, what happens now?"

The 'crowd' - really, more of a sparsely scattered set of humanlike objects that aren't at all interactive - seems to fall away from the, 'open-concept floorplan' of the 'house', without actually falling at all, as Mira somewhat-fumblingly makes her way to a side feature - something that's not actually a bar, on account of not having anything to eat nor drink, let alone alcohol, but is perhaps best described as either that or an island.  (The seating arrangements there are definitely bar stools, facing 'outside' towards the glass walls and the rain.)

...Hopefully she doesn't accidentally frustrum-cull Aeslin's manifestation.  That would be rude.

Aeslin doesn't fall away; the magic holding her image in the dream is steadier than that.  Mira could probably dismiss her if she wanted to, but hardly by accident.

"Hello!" she answers, waving her hand.  She gestures around the room as she catches up with Mira.  "A real place?  Or something from your imagination?"

(Aeslin points at the "bar," and an empty plate appears in front of them.)

"I've never imagined this place before in my life, but definitely more the latter than the --"

Ker-plate?  But why ker-plate?

"What's the plate for?"

"It's a bar?  A plate's something that should go there - want to fill it yourself?  Or got other ideas now that you can consciously decide what should go here?"

"...It's not really...

"Like sure this is 'a bar' but it's not, a bar...  It doesn't.  Hm.  Serve the purpose?  Of a bar.  If I was going to appearify food it would be from an actual restaurant-shaped environment feature or something.  This is a house.  It's not even a kitchen.

"But...  Why do this anyway?  Is it just...  Because we can, sort of thing?  I don't know what I should be expecting of this magic other than the evident lucidity."

"Then what is it?  A workbench?  Decoration of wonder?

"And yeah, that's most of the fun part!"

"Could also go digging into each other's subconscious and monkeying around with our heads - hmm, it'd actually be an interesting experiment to see if you could do anything to me that'd stay around after I woke up since you didn't get the trigger-spell cast on you... but that's not as fun, right?"

"...Oh it could be quite fun indeed, for certain kinds of people - but I don't think either of us trust eachother quite that far yet, and I doubt you're one of the people who would have inherent interest in such things.  Even if I'd give myself reasonably good odds of succeeding at doing something to your subconscious mind if I tried."

That voice... sounded different.

"...Though, speaking of workbenches, I have a sudden burning curiosity as to the question of whether you could make something in here and reify it out there later."

And now it's back to ~normal again!

"Yeah, I don't care to now that I know it can be done."

(And that's a good thing for the world, her friend once said.)

"Uh, make something?  Like what -" She's suddenly holding a piece of paper with what looks like a spell diagram drawn on it.

"Like make any thing, not limited to but including whatever it is you have there, and - evert it out of the dream into reality?"

"I've technically done that, but only through my real-world wand.  So I can conjure illusions in the real world, but not create arbitrary things - I need to know how to do it by magic."

"Mmmm.  What makes a magic spell work?"  She has some thoughts.

"The short version is, your will, the earth-force, and something to bring them in contact.  Which abstracts a lot, but it tells you something about what it's abstracting.  You can only do something you can imagine - in broad terms, of course; you absolutely don't need to know every detail and you can certainly abstract it to 'do this list of things'.

"And you can only do something the earth-force knows how to do and is willing to do where you are; that's a whole broad category I don't totally know myself but includes everything about land-memory down to 'enslavement spells categorically don't work in the United States.'

"And you need something to bring them into contact, like a wand.  I can only be dreamwalking now because of the trigger spell I cast on myself before I went to sleep.  Your circle in your mind... could've been through my wand, or could've been some of the poorly-understood things that look like exceptions.  My own favored theory on them is that sometimes people eat bits of magical trees, but I can't prove that."

"Carbon's carbon wherever it is, and there's not not microscopic tree bits in food.  Wouldn't be surprised."

But her focus is quite elsewhere, because she may well have λ-things to make λ-real.  The question is, what?

"I have some wild ideas," she says, staring at the freshly manifested floating λ that radiates a somewhat purplish shadow.  "Do you think not knowing what nominally can't be done might help me do them?  Or will things just...  Fizzle?  Or explode.  Exploding would be worse than fizzling."

"Here in the dream?  No worries.  You almost certainly won't mess up your own head by accident, or mine.  In the real world?  It usually won't help, but no particular risk of accidental explosions."