A night like any other…

Princess Luna patrolled the dream realm, doing her nightly duty, like she had done thousands of times before. After all this time, there was nothing she hadn’t seen before. She knew everything worth knowing about her realm. How to identify who was dreaming every point of light in view. What was the primary emotion fueling each dream. She could identify at a glance, the twinkling of happiness, the glow of fear, and the shine of lust. There was even one off to her left flickering with irritation, and another near the bottom of her vision outright strobing with anger. Those were probably a griffon and a dragon, respectively. She’d seen it all, more times than she could count. There was nothing new under the sun, and the dream realm was no more innovative.1

However, while there was nothing new, there were rarities. And that one star, off to her right and a little ways up, was both shining and glowing. Sexually charged nightmares weren’t unheard of, but they were among the rarest of dreams, right up there with the pure gleam of overwhelming joy. Luna could go moons without seeing one. But when one did appear, it took precedence over almost anything else. It was also one of the few times she stepped in to help adult ponies. They could mostly handle their own nightmares, so Luna usually stuck with helping foals. Unless nightmares became recurring, or were sexual in nature.

In light of that, Luna hurried up to the star representing the nightmare and touched her hoof to it, easing her way in.

Looking around, Luna found two pale pink ponies making love, strangely enough. If the pair’s belly-to-belly position didn’t convince her it wasn’t rape, the passionate lip-lock definitely did. Even stranger, the green-maned stallion was the dreamer, not the blonde mare underneath him.

Princess Luna spent a moment trying to figure out why this apparently consensual and passionate coupling inspired such fear, but before she could figure it out, the stallion’s rhythm faltered, and his head jerked up.

“What’s going on?” Salmon Run muttered, looking around disjointedly. As though he’d just woken up, funnily enough. “How did I—oh, Celestia!” he yelped, interrupting himself when he caught sight of the pony beneath him. His wings, already flared with arousal, started flapping frantically, shooting him away from his partner.

“Oh, geez! I’m so sorry, Sis. I didn’t mean to…I mean, I shouldn’t’ve…”

“Ah, so that explains it.” Luna thought, as the stallion with the close-cropped mane and tail continued babbling apologies for several seconds more. Equestria had few sexual taboos, but incest was one of them. Sexual or romantic relationships between first or second cousins were illegal, and even with third cousins it was frowned upon. Barely tolerated, even by the more open-minded ponies. Fourth cousins was about as close as the average pony was comfortable with, and only if it was strictly casual sex.

“Sis?” Salmon asked suddenly, finally noticing that the blonde pegasus had gone still, mid-throe. Like a wind up doll whose mechanism had wound down. “Lily, are you okay? Gilded Lily? What’s wrong?”

“Be at peace, Citizen.” Princess Luna said, making herself known to the dreaming pegasus. “There’s nothing wrong with your sister.” The princess ignored Salmon Run’s shocked outburst at her sudden appearance and the sudden collapse of his front half that was his amateurish genuflecting. She was all too familiar with such reactions. “That is merely a dream construct, and now that your concentration has wandered from it, it has gone dormant, like a bear hibernating in winter.” In fact, the only reason it hadn’t faded away entirely was because Luna was making sure it didn’t. It would prevent him from pretending it had never been there, so she could force the necessary conversation.

“Oh. Uh, thank you for the uh, reassurance, I guess.” Salmon said, his chin still touching the rocky ground, and his eyes flicking over to the frozen image of his sister repeatedly.

Luna waited for the stallion to continue, but he just stayed bowed in place, shivering for a moment more. Finally, she ran out of patience, but just as she opened her mouth to start, Salmon found his voice again.

“I’m so sorry, Princess!” he blurted out. “I would never do something like this with my sister in reality. Please don’t—”

“Peace.” Luna insisted firmly, raising her hoof placatingly. “As We said, this is a dream, and few ponies have any conscious control over the contents of such. We, of all ponies, understand exactly what that means.” For his comfort, she didn’t point out that her understanding of dreams meant she realized this was a dream of a true desire, and not just random mixing of waking sensations. There would be time enough to get into that once the stallion was more at ease. “Now, rise, so that we may speak comfortably.”

“Uhh…”

“Rise, before you give yourself a cramp.” Luna insisted. “In the privacy of the dream, I seldom insist on much formality. Besides, when one is dreaming this lucidly, there is often some degree of synchronicity with the waking world, so if you don’t straighten your spine, you will wake up with your back so cramped that you won’t be able to move. My own back is starting to feel some sympathetic twinges.” she added, semi-seriously, in an attempt to relax him with humor.

“But, um, my, uh…” Salmon stuttered awkwardly, looking backwards, his eyes dipping briefly.

Catching on, Princess Luna rolled her eyes. “We have seen dozens of erotic dreams and thousands more pony genitalia in the waking world. And that in just the last few years. I could not even begin to guess at how many I saw before the Nightmare.”

“Right. Yeah.” Salmon agreed awkwardly. “Still, it’s a little awkward. I’m just an ordinary pony, and you’re a princess.”

Princess Luna had encountered this mindset many times. Mostly in the dream, since in the waking world she mostly dealt with ponies who were used to her and/or her sister, so knew that they cared about another’s exposure as little as the average pony, who seldom had more than their tail to cover their genitals with. And short-tailed ponies, like Salmon, didn’t even have that much coverage. The problem with visiting ponies in their dreams was that in many cases, these visits might well be the only time the dreamers ever met royalty in person. Which meant they had no idea that their princesses couldn’t care less. Canterlot’s well-known propensity for wearing clothing didn’t help matters, either.2

Rolling her eyes again, Luna did what she often did in this situation. She turned around, presenting herself to the—to be blunt—cowering stallion. Then she lifted her tail and flexed the muscles of her hindquarters, making herself wink. That trick almost never failed to make others more comfortable with her. It did have one problem, though.

“Now you have seen mine, and I have seen yours. So there is no need for further modesty.” she said, dropping the Royal We, in an effort to be more informal. Turning back around, she was not at all surprised to see the stallion gob-smacked. His only movement had been to raise his head far enough for his jaw to gape open. It almost always took a little while for a pony to get over the shock of being winked at—something typically considered to be just about the crudest proposition a mare could make—by royalty.

A moment or two later, he showed no signs of coming out of his stupor, so Luna decided to move on to the next step in her plan.

“Very well. I shall return later, once you’ve recovered. I shall try to make it back tonight, but I may not manage it until tomorrow. Until then, I want you to remember what my sister hath told her student. There is no wrong way to dream. She did not mean it in this context, but that makes it no less applicable. Also remember that not all dreams are truthful, and either way, you cannot be punished for anything that happens in the dream.”

With that, Princess Luna spread her wings and flew beyond the dream’s boundary. A second or two later, she looked in on it and saw that Salmon Run had gone back to loving his sister, and was currently nuzzling her teats…

Author's Note

1. The closest Luna got to something genuinely new were the dreams of other sapients. She rarely dealt with the dreams of non-ponies, and almost never gave non-equines so much as a second glance. Not out of racism, but because their thought processes tended to be so alien they were just plain uncomfortable for her. When their sensory inputs weren’t inflicting all manner of mind-screwy synesthesias, that is.

2. Though, in truth, the near-ubiquitous nature of shirts, jackets, and the like meant that it was actually more titillating for most Canterlot stallions to expose their forequarters, than for either gender to expose their back half.