Fanfic / In Your Wildest Dreams

Jaune liked to think he knew his friends well, and his teammates better than anyone, but when his newly unlocked Semblance keeps inserting him into the dreams of those sleeping around him he'll have a chance to see the people he thinks he knows in a new light - whether he wants to or not. Can he keep his accidental invasions of privacy secret or will the nightmares force his hand?

— FanFiction.Net summary

In Your Wildest Dreams is a What If? fanfic by Coeur Al'Aran where Jaune has a Semblance that allows him to be a Dream Walker. The fic follows Jaune as he explores his friend's dreams, while trying to navigate and learn about the true power of his newly found Semblance.

In Your Wildest Dreams contains examples of the following...

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • Zig-Zagged for Weiss and her siblings. In canon, Weiss merely states that she had watched family acquaintances disappear and never come back due to the White Fang kidnapping or killing them, and this affected her deeply. Here, Jaune enters a dream of the White Fang directly attacking Weiss' family in Chapter 30. The dream is ultimately revelaed to be Blake's, and was caused by a traumatic anecdote that Weiss told her during an argument. In the dream, the SDC building was attacked with her uncle and several boardroom members killed. In real life, Weiss and her family were able to hide in a secure bunker while the White Fang were routed away. Blake's nightmare had her attack the Schnee children due to her own guilt about being a former White Fang member.
  • Played painfully straight for Professor Port. In canon, his bombastic, drawn-out speeches about slaying the Creatures of Grimm had no deeper meaning beyond him being a great Huntsman. When Jaune enters his subconscious in Chapter 37, he discovers that among other things, Port has had to Mercy Kill a child in the aftermath of a Grimm attack (something he suggests was not an isolated incident), and that he watched two of his students die to the Grimm.
• Adaptational Backstory Change:
  • Coeur Al'Aran usually incorporates updates to RWBY canon's worldbuilding such as character backstories as they come into his later fics' mythos (it's even exemplified in this fic by Cinder and Neo's backstories in this fic being mostly canon-adherent) — but in the case of Roman Torchwick, Coeur in this fic made an exception, as he keeps his pre-RWBY: Roman Holiday backstory for Roman (as a fallen ex-huntsman from Beacon instead of a Mistralian ascended pickpocketer who was still on the streets when he was 18) intact.
  • Ozma, Salem and Remnant's backstory has several alterations in Chapters 43-44 compared to the canon version.
    • In this story, the God of Light grants wishes to many supplicants, regardless of their selfishness and selflessness, and causing great disruption to mortal society, which is not something that happened in canon.
    • When Salem goes to the God of Darkness when the God of Light refuses to resurrect Ozma, Ozpin's account of the event to Jaune is that the elder deity's instruction to Salem to not seek her lover's resurrection was ambiguously worded, and she therefore failed to realize it was an order. In the canon, the God of Light blunty tells Salem to "Let him rest," in other words, cease her attempts to have Ozma restored to life.
    • In "The Lost Fable," the God of Darkness, feared and shunned by humans, resurrects Ozma because he desires a worshiper. Salem also very carefully omits the fact that she went to the God of Light, indicative of the fact that, yes, she did understand the God of Light's "Let him rest" was a command to her and that she was disobeying that command. Here, Salem tells the God of Darkness that she did approach his brother to bring Ozma back but makes it sound like the God of Light couldn't bring him back. The God of Darkness thus revives Ozma to one-up his sibling.
    • As per Coeur's other fics, the Brother Gods only succeeded in wiping out a majority of the first human race rather than every single one before they left, and the survivors are the current human race's ancestors; and rather than the second human race already having a moderate civilization before Ozma and Salem set themselves up as rulers, Ozma and Salem were entirely responsible for dragging humanity back from the stone age.
    • Whereas canon indicates that the Relics only came to Remnant at the same time the God of Light resurrected Ozma, in this fic, the Brothers sent the Relics to Remnant sometime before that, and the main reason why the God of Light resurrected Ozma to gather the Relics was because none of the surviving humans on Remnant wanted to use the Relics to bring the Brothers back at all.
    • Whereas "The Lost Fable" states that Salem instantly recognized Ozma in his first reincarnation when he sought her out, Ozpin mentions in this version that he had to prove to her it was really him.
    • Unlike the canon version where Ozma and Salem's reunion, rule and falling out all occurred within Ozma's first reincarnation's lifetime, and they fell out because Salem had gained an insatiable appetite for destruction and was plotting mass genocide against the magic-less humans; in this version, Ozma and Salem were together for several centuries, and their falling out was a gradual affair which started with Salem growing frustrated at the static of their royal life after several lifetimes, and Ozma turning down her pleas that they spend one of his next lives free of their royal duties.
    • Lastly, whereas Salem showed no remorse in "The Lost Fable" for her and Ozma's daughters dying in their crossfire before she spitefully ended Ozma's life too; Ozpin recalls in this fic that she completely broke down as soon as she realized that they'd killed their own children, and it was the last straw which drove her to her present day evil on top of everything else she'd endured up to that point.
  • Hazel and Gretchen's backstory is also tweaked. Instead of being Gretchen's older twin, Hazel is roughly five years younger than her, and was in her hard-fought care after their parents died. The "training accident" which Gretchen died on is stated in this version to have actually been a cover story: in truth, she died on a secret mission for Ozpin which he sent her on alone. Instead of initially blaming and hunting down Salem for Gretchen's death before she turned his rage on Ozpin; Hazel blamed Ozpin from the get-go, because he knew Ozpin had broken training protocol to send Gretchen on that last mission without her teammates or backup, but he was unable to expose Ozpin via contacting the police due to Ozpin's power and connections, leading Salem's faction to reach out to Hazel.
• Adaptational Badass: While Jaune's Semblance does nothing for his combat ability (and thus for most of the day he's still useless in combat), once his Semblance gains the ability to affect the real world, he becomes godlike every night; it starts with being able to heal an ordinary sparring wound Nora gets in class, and eventually escalates to returning Ozpin to his physical and magical prime.
• Adaptational Context Change:
  • One of Qrow's nightmares implies that he was present at the fall of Kuroyuri but arrived too late to actually save anyone. In canon, there's no implied or confirmed connection between Qrow and Kuroyuri.
  • In canon, it's implied that Pyrrha's loneliness came about because her strength and fame isolated her from everyone else from the get-go. Here, the story is slightly different. She actually had a best friend named Ashley who was by her side in their first tournaments, but at some point before she arrived in Beacon, Pyrrha accidentally ended Ashley's career by slicing her leg while her Aura was down. To avoid damaging Pyrrha's reputation, her agent made Ashley sign a settlement that included a clause that she never contact Pyrrha again in any way, which Pyrrha only discovered long after it was too late to change it.
• Adaptational Friendship: Whereas Jaune and Amber the Fall Maiden in canon didn't know each-other at all on account of Amber's coma, Jaune's dream-walking Semblance in this fic leads him to repeatedly enter Amber's coma dreams and make them easier for her. Amber in the dreams becomes extremely close to Jaune as a result, and Jaune in turn is devastated when Amber finally passes. Getting justice for Amber's death is Jaune's main motivation for helping Ozpin's group find Amber's attackers.
• Adaptational Jerkass: A slight case with the God of Darkness. "The Lost Fable" made his reasons for granting Salem's request to resurrect Ozma out to be because he was hungry for a human worshipper in Salem (something he lacked). In this fic, Ozpin states that the God of Darkness's reasons for granting Salem's request were that he simply wanted to one-up the God of Light by doing something that he thought was beyond his brother's power.
  • The God of Light is hit with this as well. In the canon, he explicitly told Salem to let Ozma rest after his death. In this fic, he simply tells Salem he won't resurrect Ozma; she didn't realize that this meant he was ordering her to drop her quest to revive Ozma. Therefore, his subsequent anger at Salem and his undoing Ozma's resurrection by his brother seems more petty. Moreover, Ozpin's recounting to Jaune that the God of Light granted both selfless and selfish wishes for inscrutable reasons, causing chaos in the world, is absent from "The Lost Fable."
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Assuming the dream is an accurate representation of the actual person, Adam is far more uncertain about attacking Beacon than he was in the show. Here, he says that he hates the idea (Huntsmen protect everyone regardless if they're human or Faunus, after all) and the only reasons he agreed to the plan are that Cinder is way too powerful to deny and the students are all Huntsmen-in-Training, so they should all be fine. In the show, Adam not only led the charge to destroy Beacon but personally attacked students during it, including almost executing a defeated student before Blake arrived.
  • Cardin's father Alabaster was previously characterized in Relic of the Future as a racist braggart. In this fic, Alabaster is portrayed in Cardin's nightmare as a much more complex man. Jaune discovers that Alabaster is a war veteran with a public perception placing him closer to war criminal (a Faunus teacher in the nightmare accuses Alabaster of murdering his brother), and he is fully aware why the local Faunus absolutely despise him and his family. Alabaster was haunted by what he'd seen and done during the Faunus Wars, and he explicitly wanted Cardin to grow up to be a better man than himself. Alabaster enrolled Cardin in a school whose student body was mostly Faunus in hopes that it would make his son an accepting, tolerant person. Unfortunately, this backfired when the students bullied and ostracized Cardin for his father's reputation.
  • Whereas the canon version of Salem showed no immediate remorse when she killed her and Ozma's daughters in the crossfire of their falling out, and any remorse she had afterwards is at best only hinted at (and only centuries later); Ozpin states in this fic that Salem broke down as soon as she realized she'd killed them and that this was the final straw which drove her into madness and made her the genocidal monster that she is in the present.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Instead of Healing Hands, Jaune's Semblance is dreamwalking and dream weaving, although he can only activate it while asleep and thus far he can't control whose dream he enters. His semblance soon evolves to gain this quality as well, where wounds and injuries he heals (or causes) in a dream are echoed in the waking world, to extent of even regrowing lost limbs.
• Adaptational Sympathy:
  • As per usual for Coeur Al'Aran's works, Salem is treated more sympathetically in her Start of Darkness than her canon self. Ozma's canon reasons for falling out with Salem — she'd gained an appetite for total warfare and was plotting a Final Solution of all magic-less humans — are retconned, and her and Ozma's falling out was a slow affair which took centuries to boil over and which Ozma is portrayed as sharing fault for. Finally, unlike her canon self, whose possible remorse for Offing the Offspring when they were caught in the crossfire of her lashing out at Ozma is at best only hinted at; in this fic, Salem explicitly broke down the moment she noticed what she'd done, and Ozpin believes that the trauma completely broke her and caused her present day self's evil.
  • In "The Lost Fable", the monarchs who allied with Salem's rebellion against the Brother Gods did so for ultimately self-centered reasons like attaining immortality for themselves and their immediate loved ones. In this version, Ozma states that was only one of the reasons — in truth, many of the wishes that the God of Light had granted worshippers based on his unpredictable Blue-and-Orange Morality, such as a child wishing to be queen and political rivals being wished dead or defeated, had de-stabilized and jeopardized entire kingdoms, and Salem's monarch allies wanted to put a stop to the God of Light's reckless wish-granting to ensure their own kingdoms weren't constantly one bad wish away from being wiped out.
  • Hazel's reasons for blaming Ozpin for Gretchen's death by Grimm and siding with Salem against him are fleshed out, and the siblings' relationship and backstory is changed, as Coeur Al'Aran has long been critical of Hazel's canon motivations as "non-sensical" in their execution. Instead of being Hazel's younger twin, Gretchen is Hazel's older sibling and parental substitute, who went above and beyond to maintain custody of him and avoid being separated from him by the adoption circuit after their parents died, despite the financial straits. The "training accident" which killed Gretchen in canon wasn't really a training accident at all, but a secret mission from Ozpin's inner circle which Ozpin covered up as a training accident, and she died alone without her student teammates or any back-up (which is against normal huntress-in-training protocol); Hazel was aware of this from the get-go, but found himself helpless to get the truth of why Ozpin had done this or to expose Ozpin, due to the latter's connections and high standing. In this version, it was this that Salem and her faction took advantage of to turn a grieving Hazel over to their side, rather than Salem driving him to nihilism.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Unlike the show, Weiss is shown to carry some resentment for Winter over her leaving her and Whitley to fend for themselves against Jacques and his rage, which ends up boiling over during an argument the two have over Jaune's false arrest.
• Alternate Universe Fic: Instead of the Healing Hands Semblance that Jaune unlocked in canon during the events of Volume 5, Jaune in this fic unlocks a Dream Walker Semblance during the events of Volume 1, impacting his relationships and interactions with several of his peers.
• Ambiguously Bi: Thanks to a rather unique dream scenario, Jaune ends up having to kiss Adam Taurus and can't help but note that he's an even better kisser than Yang. Later on, he can't help but agree that Oswald, or rather the de-aged Ozpin is hot when Yang points it out.
• Anchored Ship: Jaune entering Ren's dream in Chapter 10 clues him in that Ren is well aware that Nora is attracted to him. However, while he reciprocates her feelings, he doesn't feel confident in pursuing a relationship upgrade because he's afraid his subdued personality would ultimately bore her, and he doesn't want to trap her into forcing herself to make a romance work.
• An Arm and a Leg: In a dream, Jaune unwillingly gets to see in explicit detail how Ironwood lost at least one of his biological limbs. Way back when he was just a soldier, he was involved in a skirmish where the enemy was employing elemental Dust ammunition and was struck in the shoulder by an ice bullet. It would be one thing if it was just a chunk of ice embedded in his flesh, but ice Dust is a reactive substance that generates much larger quantities of ice through constantly emitting temperatures near absolute zero. Having that thing inside him for more than a few seconds instantly flash-froze and destroyed all surrounding tissue and was continuing to sap the heat from other parts of his body at not instant but still deadly speed after the bullet was removed. There was no choice but to roughly and without anesthetic amputate Ironwood's arm from the shoulder down to stop the super-frostbitten and dead limb from continuing to freeze him or poison him with necrosis.
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • When Winter confronts Jaune about his Semblance, she tries to make him tell her everything he saw in Weiss's dreams, only for Jaune to refuse to. When Winter tries to say that Weiss would want her to know, Jaune takes the wind out of her sails by pointing out that if that were true, Weiss would've told her already.
  • After Winter tries to tell Weiss that Jaune is dangerous without revealing why, and in the process questions Weiss's judgement of character, Winter defends herself by saying that she's only looking out for Weiss's wellbeing. Weiss, annoyed, shoots back that if Winter really cared, she wouldn't have unceremoniously ran off to the military and left her and Whitley alone to deal with their father, stunning them both into silence before Weiss runs away to hide in her dorm room.
• Bait-and-Switch: Chapter 38 opens with Pyrrha in a tournament, having severely injured and potentially killed her opponent. After the body is described as "bent and broken", calling Penny's first canon death to mind, it's revealed that it's actually Ruby, and then Jaune realizes that it's all a nightmare anyway.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: While watching Professor Port's dream in Chapter 37, Jaune wishes he could understand how his stories are supposed to relate to killing Grimm. He even notes that Ren once spent hours analyzing Port's stories in search of some kind of hidden meaning behind them. By the end of the dream, he learns that rather than secretly explaining how to kill Grimm, the stories are traumatic anecdotes about his failed missions. He's forbidden by the Council to properly prepare students for the horrifying reality of being a huntsman, because telling people that they're more likely to perform a Mercy Kill on a dying child than heroically save a village would hurt recruitment rates. So he tells grandiose versions of these stories with happy endings in hopes that, eventually, a student will be able to figure out the Hard Truth Aesops behind his boring stories before graduating. The following day, Jaune is finally able to decode another story about Port valiantly protecting a "puppy" from a Grimm horde; in reality, the "puppy" was a child and the last survivor of a village, but despite Port's best efforts to protect him, the child got scared, ran away, and was killed by the Grimm. When class ends and Jaune sees Professor Port sitting on his chair staring at the ceiling, he realizes that Ren was right that their teacher's stories had hidden meanings - and he wishes he never knew about them.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Due to Jaune's kindness towards Neopolitan's split personalities and treating them as separate individuals, she latches onto him like a protective older sister. When Mercury threatens to beat up Jaune after Emerald fears that he might be onto them, Neo very pointedly threatens to snap Mercury's mechanical legs. After Cinder discovers Jaune's Semblance, Neo has no qualms on murdering the woman once she makes not-so-subtle threats about what she'd do if Jaune entered her dreams again.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Velvet may seems like shy and harmless girl, but when Coco's ex cheated on her, Velvet broke her arm during sparring and made it look like an accident.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Ozpin states in Chapter 44 that during the time when the Brother Gods dwelled on Remnant, the criteria by which the God of Light decided whether to grant or deny a request that his visitors made of him was completely incomprehensible to humans — some times he granted wishes to end wars, famines or diseases, and other times he granted wishes to kill rivals, take away free will, gain riches and force love onto an unwilling person. Ozpin comments that to human beings, it was basically a coin toss whether the God of Light would grant or deny a request.
• Breather Episode:
  • Chapter 22 is set weeks after Amber's death and Jaune's Near-Death Experience trying to find her murderer, and while it has emotional fallout pertaining to that as well as Ruby's later nightmare it's considerably more relaxed and cathartic than preceding events.
  • Chapter 36 (which Coeur himself admits to being somewhat of a filler chapter) is another example. After witnessing Cardin's nightmare and waking up to Neo sitting on his bed, nothing too crazy ends up happening to Jaune. Yang, Weiss, Blake and Pyrrha do decide to pay Junior a visit that results in the four of them getting detention (and some Amusing Injuries in Pyrrha's case) but the whole thing is largely Played for Laughs.
• Broken Ace: Qrow is one of Ozpin's most trusted agents and an incredibly skilled Huntsman. He's also an alcoholic wreck of a person who can barely teach his classes, once left a ten-year-old Yang alone at a park until 2 AM, and carries a mountain of trauma from a horrible past as a bandit and the friends and family he lost along the way, whose deaths he blames himself for.
• Brutal Honesty: This is how Jaune decides to handle revealing the full extent of his Semblance to his team (and clarifying/clearing the air with Pyrrha who only got the basics). He leads with the bluntest description possible, spells out that yes, he has been in their dreams and seen what they dream about... and immediately heads off the issue of him seeing their secrets by countering that he saw basically nothing in any of their heads that was a secret to anybody because everybody can see them a mile away without needing to invade dreams. Ren and Nora do have a traumatic past, they do like each other but are too insecure to go for it, Pyrrha is resentful of her fame and she does like Jaune and the only reason he couldn't see it is because he was hung up on Weiss — none of this is news to anyone, and they don't get to be distrustful of him just because he knows a little more detail than everyone else. In turn, they get the opportunity to be forward with all the frustrations they've had with his and each other's behavior that they've been too tactful to bring up before. Brute-forcing through the awkwardness and uncertainty sure to come from the reveal gets the team through the drama intact a lot faster than wishy-washy avoidance would.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Oobleck is a quirky professor who talks too fast for the average person to understand and is quite possibly addicted to coffee. He's also a renowned history expert and therapist, an incredibly competent Huntsman, and most likely a former agent of the VSS with enough political connections to circumvent the General of the Atlas Military.
• Call-Back: When Yang and Blake express how Jaune surprised them (and everyone else) by punching Cardin when he used to just quietly take the bullying before, Nora says that she was not surprised and that she's always known Jaune was secretly a beast. Though it's not called out as such in the narration, this is an obvious consequence of when Jaune ended up fighting Grimm with Nora in her nightmare about her memories of the events of Kuroyuri the first time he started entering dreams.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Deconstructed in regards to Pyrrha's inability to confess her feelings for Jaune. Jaune suspects that Pyrrha might have a crush on him, but given what just happened with Weiss, he doesn't want to presume anything and potentially ruin their friendship if he's mistaken. So he just starts heavily hinting to her that he's interested in going out to the Beacon Dance with her instead, but Pyrrha's timidity causes her not to act on said hints. This convinces him he misread the situation and he should ask out someone else, to Pyrrha's consternation. Ren does confirm that Pyrrha has a crush on him when asked, but since he's already started a relationship with Yang by that point, he reasons it's not fair to him, Yang, or their teams to openly acknowledge Pyrrha's feelings until she finally does. The fact that he knew already finally comes out after Jaune is forced to reveal his Semblance to her, which drives a wedge between them.
• Career-Ending Injury: Pyrrha reveals that she once had a friend named Ashley who was by her side as she was climbing the tournament scene, but a fight between them ended that when Pyrrha accidentally sliced Ashley's knee. Though the accuracy of the nightmare is questionable, it has Ashley say that while doctors think she'll eventually walk like normal after physical therapy, they agree she'll never compete again.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Completely averted with Yang. She doesn't just not get jealous over the possibility of Jaune cheating on her, but she is the one who teases him about the possibility.
• Commonality Connection: Once his need to be a protective uncle gets shoved aside, Qrow forms a quick bond with Jaune over the fact that they're among the rare group of people with uncontrollable Semblances. He ends up being the closest thing Jaune has to an ally within Ozpin's inner circle, thanks to Ozpin himself tending to stay neutral, Glynda tending to not be involved unless it's needed, and Ironwood and Winter hating him from the get-go.
• Continuity Lock-Out: The new readers that are not familiar with Coeur's previous works might find confusing what Oobleck meant by "wasn't always just a teacher" and his shared backstory with Roman that may seem like come out of nowhere.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Conventional wisdom states that students won't respect a Combat Instructor unless they can prove better at combat than said students. New professor Oswald — that is, Ozpin after having been transformed into a long-past previous incarnation of himself thanks to Jaune — takes this to its logical conclusion in his first day as Combat Instructor, where the first thing he does it invite any student who wants to to all attack him at once. He then proceeds to prove he's not just the World's Best Warrior anymore, he's also the World's Strongest Man again. And by the time Jaune and the other first years get their time with him, he's been doing it all day to the entire student body (plus endurance running) and isn't even winded.
• Deadpan Snarker: After rediscovering his youth via being magically de-aged to his prime, Ozpin does his best to embrace modern generational slang instead of worrying about the long-term implications of his sudden youth. Glynda, for her part, doesn't appreciate his nonchalance.
  Glynda: Please stop. You sound awful.
  Ozpin: Big yikes if true.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • After Jaune accidentally enters Penny's dream, Ironwood tries to have him arrested for breaking part of Atlas's espionage act. However, when he cites the specific law, Oobleck notes that the law he cites specifically regards to leaking classified information regarding weaponry, and Ozpin never gave Ironwood any permission to have classified Atlas weaponry on Beacon's grounds. Oobleck thus concludes that either both Ironwood and Jaune broke the law or neither of them did.
  • When Jaune enters Oobleck's dreams for the first time, Oobleck becomes lucid and tries to summon an image of one of his deceased teammates. In his excitement, he forgets that, lucid or not, he is in the middle of a nightmare, so the summoned image is of his teammate's mutilated corpse blaming him for her death.
• Dies Different In Adaptation:
  • As expected, Amber isn't long for this world once the story starts, but rather than being murdered by Cinder during the Fall, she dies peacefully in her sleep several months early.
  • It's implied that Leonardo Lionheart commits suicide off-page after Cinder and her team are exposed as Salem's agents.
• Disappointed by the Motive: In Chapter 27, Neptune falls squarely into jerk territory when he asks Weiss out to the school dance, only to abandon and publicly humiliate her. When Jaune ends up in one of his nightmares and gets some more insight into his psyche, he discovers that Neptune is terrified of being made fun of for literally anything, such as not knowing how to dance (even though most men don't know how to dance either) or being inadequately sized down below (Neptune was naked for most of his dream and Jaune sees that he's actually about average). Compared to the geniume trauma his friends have endured, Neptune's fear of social embarassment are so meaningless and insignificant that an irate Jaune tears into him, calling Neptune pathetic for letting his performance anxiety and nonexistent problems ruin Weiss' night.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Jaune entering Ironwood's dream and accidentally repairing his missing arm prompts Ironwood to have armed soldiers arrest Jaune at his dorm, provoking a fight that ends with errant shots going into other students dorms (and which would have killed Sky Lark if he had still been sleeping). Ozpin is so furious that he kicks Ironwood and all of his forces out of Beacon on the spot, and to the end Ironwood is threatening to take Jaune to court over it.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Deconstructed. Jaune realizes after entering one of Weiss's nightmares that his attempts to woo have made her stressed and uncomfortable to even interact with him, not only because he won't take no for an answer, but him making every attempt a public spectacle makes her come across as a villain in front of others, as though she enjoys stomping on his heart. When he wakes up, he makes a point to publicly apologize so everyone can see him admit he was in the wrong.
• Dramatic Irony: Jaune is in a position of knowing hardly anything about his friends' histories, but the reader does through watching the show or reading Coeur's other fics. As such, he's occasionally left confused by the incomplete information their dreams present him, and is stuck speculating how much of the imagery might be literal versus metaphorical versus random nonsense, and occasionally getting it wrong. For example, he assumes Cinder's dream about killing Rhodes and her stepfamily is a metaphor for her feelings towards an abusive childhood, while the reader knows she is dreaming about an actual event from said childhood.
• Dream Walker: Jaune's Semblance in this story is that he unintentionally invades his teammates' and other peers' dreams. Jaune, being a generally good person, tries to use this to help them.
• Dream Weaver: Jaune's Semblance gives him a version of this, allowing him to alter the dreamer's mindscape at the cost of his aura. This eventually extends to being able to perform actions that can effect them (and himself) in real life, such as healing or receiving injuries.
• Erotic Dream:
  • In the first chapter, Jaune accidentally ends up in one of Blake's dreams, and it's clearly based off of one of her smut novels. He's pretty entertained until he realizes that he's actually in one of his friends' dreams, and it makes him swear to himself that he'll never take advantage of the opportunity.
  • In Chapter 11, Jaune ends up in Yang's dreams the night before the dance and sees the two of them about to go all the way just before she wakes up. However, when Ruby reveals that Yang is actually nervous about Jaune wanting more than friendship with their date, Jaune realizes that it was actually a nightmare about their relationship moving too fast, so he keeps the outing platonic and let's her set the pace for any further developments beyond that.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Assuming his dream matches how he actually feels, Adam is incredibly uncertain about attacking a Huntsman academy, recognizing that they're just students, but he genuinely believes there's no other option that wouldn't maximize innocent casualties. He even notes that the students in the Academy handle the kind of Grimm they're bringing for breakfast, so they should be okay at the end of the day. He also admits that while he's far from a saint, Cinder is far worse than he is and he tells "Blake" to never go anywhere near her.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • The first rule that Jaune makes when he realizes what his Semblance is is that he'll never use it to make sexual advances on anyone.
  • Even knowing that it means Amber's killer remains unidentified, Jaune can't bring himself to force her to relive Cinder's attack when she's already about to die anyway, instead granting her a peaceful final dream.
  • Though Ozpin and his team welcome Jaune's help when it doesn't put him in danger, they all draw the line at having it impact his studies to a debilitating degree.
  • Ozpin is willing to put up with a lot of Ironwood's military-first mentality, but when it eventually escalates to the point that his students are actually put in danger, he kicks Ironwood and Atlas off the campus and promises far worse troubles if any of his students were hurt.
• Fountain of Youth: Due to nature of his power, Jaune accidently reverts Ozpin back into his first body when he was an 20 year old.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: After experiencing Cardin's childhood through one of his nightmares, Jaune does concede that Cardin probably wouldn't have become a hateful bigot if he hadn't been tormented by his Faunus classmates. While his past makes Jaune sympathize with him to some extent, he still acknowledges that Cardin's past doesn't justify any of his bullying.
  "He still didn't know what to do about that since, good reasons or not, Cardin was still a racist bully. He was just a racist bully with a slightly more sympathetic story behind it."
• Freudian Slip: As a result of Jaune entering her dream and taking the role of her father in it the night before, Coco accidentally calls him "dad" in front of her team and teams RWBY and JNPR, twice, much to everyone else's amusement.
• Friendless Background: Ruby reveals that despite being more of a social butterfly, Yang struggled at making friends with her peers just as much as Ruby did because of her good looks; guys would assume that she was leading them on if she was nice, girls thought she was dressing provocatively to steal their boyfriends, and even her childhood friends started acting weird once puberty hit. This only made her Raven-induced fear of abandonment even worse.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • Averted with Yang. When Neo in her Mint guise suddenly shows up and starts being very physically affectionate with Jaune, she eggs on the bizarre antics of this random girl, to Jaune's mild irritation. Ruby explains that this is probably thanks to Neo's diminutive size making them look more like an older brother and younger sister interacting, which Yang finds cute and amusing as a fellow older sibling herself, additionally noting that Yang would probably make them behave similarly if Ruby was any shorter. Later, when it comes to his library chats and night time walks with Blake, she enjoys teasing them about how scandalous it seems, since while she doesn't actually think there's anything going on, she loves baiting reactions out of them (especially Blake).
  • Played straight with Pyrrha, who can't help but feel spikes of jealousy when Jaune is around not only Neo, but pretty much any of their other female friends for varying reasons (Weiss for being Jaune's crush, Blake for her midnight rendezvous him, etc.). This even includes Nora whenever she's being affectionate, which Pyrrha notes is especially nonsensical for her to feel since Nora's feelings for Ren are extremely obvious. However, the only one she remains consistently jealous towards is Yang; not only because Yang is Jaune's girlfriend, but because Jaune and Yang dating is a direct result of her failing to capitalize on asking Jaune out when she had the chance.
• Heroic RRoD: After he wakes up from Amber's dying dream, Jaune's given a room to himself so he can grieve in private. Instead of doing that, he proceeds to set dozens of alarms and conk back out, going through dozens of dreams in order to hunt for her killer by appearing as Amber and looking for a reaction. Doing this so many times drains his Aura... and then he keeps going even after it's empty, causing the power to start drawing from the vital foundation of his spirit instead. Eventually, it claws deep enough that it can't draw any more and his Semblance not only fails, but the stress to his soul, sends him into cardiac arrest and leaves him in a multi-day coma after being resuscitated.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Jaune's nightly visits into the dreams of others has given Jaune a glimpse at the inner thoughts and insecurities of the people around him. This deeply upsets as he knows how deeply personal they are and that his Semblance is essentially forcing him into an extreme invasion of privacy.
  • In turn, some of the actions Jaune finds himself taking thanks to this knowledge — such as complimenting Yang for being Ruby's Parental Substitute and punching out Cardin for tugging on Velvet's ears — have pleasantly surprised his friends since they're used to him being a dorky, awkward Extreme Doormat.
  • Oobleck isn't just a capable historian and therapist, he's also very well-versed in Atlesian law, to the point that he gets into a legal debate with Ironwood over Atlas's own laws regarding Jaune's potential criminality and comes out on top. He also reveals that he realized Penny Polendina wasn't a human the second she answered a question in his class and recognizes that she must be the weapon Ironwood is so worked up about.
  • Glynda is fluent in Remnant's equivalent of sign language.
  • Qrow's verbal spats with Winter aren't just because he enjoys riling her up, but because Qrow has a hunch that Winter wishes to question Jaune about Weiss' nightmares. As a result, he's running interference so Jaune doesn't have to deal with her overprotectiveness for as long as possible. His hunch is proven right when Winter immediately corners Jaune for that exact reason the moment Qrow is occupied arguing with someone else.
  • Professor Port's entire personality is revealed to be a facade for a deeply cynical man who struggles with the morality of his profession. He's well aware of how dangerous the situation is for the villages outside of the city's walls (a village can be wiped out to the man in about twenty minutes), but the Council refuses to let him teach the grim realities of the job for fear of how it would affect recruitment numbers. The cognitive dissonance between what he's being told to teach versus what his job is actually supposed to be is too much for him, so he makes up his fake stories that put his students to sleep because he has no idea what he's actually supposed to be doing and can only hope that the students figure out his messages before they go into duty and die.
• How Do I Shot Web?: As he's just discovering his power in the first place, Jaune is having to figure out how it works from scratch. An exacerbating factor that's revealed later is that Jaune, having faked his way into Beacon with no prior study, barely has any idea how Aura and Semblances work in general. This causes him to make mistakes that other students know better than to make, and Oobleck doesn't think to advise him against because he wrongly assumes Jaune has a baseline level of knowledge that he doesn't have in reality.
• Hypocrite: Ironwood arrests Jaune with intentions to extradite him to Atlas just for entering Penny's dream, something Ironwood knows he has no control over, and specifically says that Atlas's court system is fair to all in an attempt to essentially blackmail his teachers into going along with it. Oobleck then points out that Ironwood never told Ozpin he was bringing classified weaponry into Beacon, meaning he broke the law as well, and Ironwood simply responds that even if he broke the law there's no way any charge against him would stick.
• Ignorance Is Bliss: Nora doesn't have any memories about her parents and asks Jaune use his powers to find something about it in her dreams. Jaune accepts her request, only to find Nora's half-dead mother telling him to left it forgotten.
  "Some things are tucked away for a reason. Best left forgotten."
• I Never Told You My Name: After Pyrrha has a nightmare about the time she accidentally ended a friend's career on the tournament scene, Jaune accidentally says too much when he's trying to comfort her; he says Ashley's name, which he only learned in the dream because Pyrrha spent the whole conversation dancing around it. This ultimately forces him to reveal his semblance to her, and soon after, Nora and Ren.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: While it's partially due to his Heroic Self-Deprecation, Ren makes it clear to Jaune that if Nora were to end up in a relationship with a genuinely good person who he knows would treat her right — such as Jaune himself — he would sincerely put her happiness above his own feelings.
• It Is Not Your Time: When Jaune overuses his semblance to the point of cardiac arrest, he has a Dying Dream where he is mocked for his failure while sinking into a deep pool of mud. Just before he gives in and falls all the way through, Amber's spirit pulls him out, telling him that it isn't time for them to reunite yet.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Ironwood is prone to overreacting in potentially violent manners, and his attempt to arrest Jaune for healing his arm, an act that ends up putting innocent students in danger from errant gunfire, is proof of that. Nevertheless, Jaune does acknowledge that, taking the fact that it was all a giant uncontrollable accident out of the equation, what Jaune did to Ironwood could essentially be described as nonconsensual experimentation and he does apologize for that.
• Jerkass Realization: Weiss spells out to Jaune in her dream that his pursuit of her isn't cute and endearing, it's actively making her life worse. The bottom line is that she isn't interested and nagging her won't change that, but by putting her on the spot in public over and over, he forces her to be the bad guy rejecting him, with bystanders and even their other friends sympathizing with him and putting the blame on her for raining on his parade. Weiss has come to dread seeing him at all because interacting with him almost always ends up reflecting badly on her when she already struggles to make social connections. Jaune is mortified by how thoughtless he's been this whole time, and next time they're together he (publicly, to make it fair) apologizes for his behavior and promises she won't have to deal with that from him anymore, which begins repairing their relationship.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Professor Port's dream reveals that he hates a lot of the moral compromises he has to make in the Huntsman profession, especially regarding exposing the true horrors of the job before the students in training have to see it firsthand. Nevertheless, he continues doing the job with gusto and accepts the sacrifices, saying that as long as the world needs Huntsmen, then he would rather it be him doing it instead of a child.
• Lame Comeback: When he's first suffering from poor sleep due to his semblance, Jaune is less than capable of coming up with good responses.
  Ren: [Pyrrha's] right, Jaune. You're a wreck.
  Jaune: Your face is a wreck.
• Let Them Die Happy: Rather than force Amber to relive the battle that's about to finally kill her, Jaune instead forces the dream to a lush setting where he sits and comforts her as she dies, promising that they'll go on a date in Vale, telling her he loves her, and then kissing her just before she dies.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Cardin's father enrolled Cardin in a school where a majority of the students were Faunus in an attempt to prevent Cardin from becoming as bad as he did. It backfired when the other students bullied him because of his father's actions, turning him into the racist bully he is in Beacon.
• Man, I Feel Like a Woman: On multiple occasions, Jaune has assumed the body of a woman in a dream and immediately contemplated groping himself.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While in his own near-death nightmare, Jaune's mind torments him with images of Amber saying he played with her feelings with lies and failed to help her like she would have wanted. At the end, a different image of Amber appears with a totally different attitude, referencing that he's almost "following" her and reassuring him that he did right by her. It's ambiguous if that's just his subconscious chilling out as the stress on his soul is alleviated — or the actual spirit of Amber coming back to bail him out.
• Mercy Kill: Jaune learns through a dream that Professor Port once had to mercy kill a child following a Grimm attack; the child had lost both legs in the attack and was never going to survive regardless of any first aid he could provide, so he coaxed the child to sleep and killed him right there. It's made clear that Port is not only still traumatized by this, even if he maintains that it was ultimately better for the child, but that he's had to perform similar actions before.
• Monster Mash: Velvet's dream is determined to become a nightmare. Jaune is equally determined to not let it happen.
  • An Alien pokes its head over the opposite side of the couch as Jaune and little!Velvet watch a children's movie. Since it seems to be waiting for Velvet to notice, Jaune puts his hand so Velvet can't see it.
  • Creepy Doll: One of these appears on the doorstep holding a knife. Jaune, absolutely having none of that, punts the doll straight past the next house over.
  • Evil Phone: A threatening voice on the phone asks if Velvet's home alone. Jaune answers no, and that he's a Huntsman. The voice panics and claims it was a wrong number.
  • A guy with a white mask and a knife appears in the room. Jaune summons Crocea Mors and glares at him. The masked figure looks at his knife and quietly retreats.
  • Monster Clown: Put in a chokehold and shoved out the back door.
  • In addition to the above, Zombies, Giant Spiders, other assorted movie villains and monsters, and the apocalypse happen as dream!Velvet falls asleep safe and sound nestled against Jaune's side. He notes she really needs to cut back on the movies.
• My Greatest Failure:
  • Oobleck's nightmare reveals that he's still haunted by his role in the fall of Mountain Glenn and the deaths of his two teammates. When he becomes lucid during a nightmare of the event, he indicates that he wishes he had ignored the Council and not detonated the bomb that sealed the tunnels.
  • Glynda's nightmare has her reveal that she's still traumatized by a time she went alongside Ozpin to inform a student's parents that the student had died on campus. Even though there was nothing she could've done about it (the student didn't die because of any Huntsman-related activity, he died of a drug overdose) and she didn't have to do any of the talking, the nightmare has the parents state it should have been her instead, and when she's lucid she reveals she's terrified of having to ever do that for another dead student again.
  • Professor Port's dream reveals that he's still traumatized from a mission he was in charge of that led to the deaths of two of his students.
• My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: Oobleck heads off Ironwood's attempt to arrest Jaune with this, as detailed under Didn't Think This Through.
• Mythology Gag: When Ozpin tells Jaune that it's best that they keep the potential healing properties of his Semblance a secret because others may try to take advantage of it, Pyrrha says that if it got out he could end up being as famous as her. This was all a key premise of Coeur's previous fic Raise.
• Nervous Wreck: Velvet is a bundle of stress and insecurity. She doesn't have the same type of trauma or ongoing drama that some of Jaune's friends have, she just worries easily, about everything, even when she has little reason to. She's one of the characters who gets multiple dream sequences with Jaune, and both of them display her psyche showing her something upsetting but relatively petty and being really insistent that she should be having a nightmare no matter how many times Jaune tries to shut it down or how comically contrived it ends up.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Jaune and Qrow conduct an experiment to have Jaune enter his dream to identify Amber's killer, Ironwood and Ozpin wake him up early because he's burning his Aura too fast and, because they're alone in the Emerald Forest, he should be able to re-enter Qrow's dream again with no issue. Instead, he enters Adam's nightmare, scuttling the plan.
• Oblivious to Love: Discussed. When Jaune talks to Ren about Pyrrha having a crush on him, the latter says that while everyone else in their group would say that Jaune should have figured it out months ago, he understands how hard it can be to notice romantic feelings. Much later, when talking to Blake about the romantic drama plaguing Team JNPR, Jaune privately notes that the only reason why Pyrrha's crush seems so obvious to everyone else is because his teammate is good at masking her feelings when she thinks he's watching.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Ironwood arresting Jaune just for entering Penny's dream when he clearly learned no classified information in the process pisses Oobleck off so much that he threatens to ensure Ironwood is either arrested or loses his job. Glynda notes that normally she'd be betting on Ironwood, but Oobleck is personally invested in this one, and he tends to find a sneaky way to win once he's invested. That night, he reveals in his dream that he called in powerful friends, presumably the VSS, to make sure the Vale Council doesn't go along with any extradition if Ironwood bothers to follow through.
• Opposites Attract: Averted. Blake notes that Sun is basically her polar opposite in personality and how likely they are to clash rather than get along. After all, people usually bond with those they share interests with. Jaune and Yang do note that they look cute as a couple during the dance, but grant that it might not mean anything for the future.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Though Jaune refuses to tell Winter what he saw in any of Weiss's nightmares so as to not violate her privacy any more than he already had, he does tell her that she was never in any of them, which gives Winter some relief.
  • When Sky Lark is almost killed by an errant shot from Ironwood's second attempt to arrest Jaune, Ozpin gives all of Team CRDL the day off and lets them go to Vale if it would help.
• Point of Divergence:
  • The differing circumstances leading up to the Beacon Dance mean that Cinder outright blows up the CCT rather than just hack it. Ruby doesn't interfere at the CCT, because she's fully occupied at the dance and isn't allowed to sneak away.
  • Amber passes away several months early, meaning Cinder gets the Fall Maiden powers shortly after the dance rather than during the Fall of Beacon.
• Poor Communication Kills: Jaune and Pyrrha dating is torpedoed by this: the former begins to suspect the latter harbours feelings for him, but not wanting to make a fool of himself by asking outright (after his disastrous attempt to court Weiss), instead spends a full week giving repeated, obvious hints to her to ask him out for the dance. Pyrrha doesn't do anything in response to his obvious signals, so Jaune concludes he must be mistaken… until Ren confirms that he wasn't wrong; Pyrrha does have a crush on him and was/is heartbroken when he decides to ask out Yang instead. Neither of them understand why Pyrrha failed to make a move, but Ren assures Jaune that he shouldn't feel guilty since he can't be faulted for Pyrrha's unwillingness to act on her own feelings when he gave her many opportunities to do so.
• Power Incontinence: Jaune can apparently only enter others' dreams when he himself is asleep, and on account of being asleep, he has no conscious control of what he's doing and invades a dream randomly. Once he's in a dream though, he's lucid, so he can make deliberate choices how to use that power within it. His power activating while he's sleeping means that the usual bodily failsafe of a Semblance failing due to exhaustion or falling unconscious isn't in effect, meaning he can use it far past the point of safety, which causes him to overuse it to the point of cardiac arrest in Chapter 21.
• Power Perversion Potential: Subverted. While Jaune's first thought for potential applications are to manipulate Weiss into being attracted to him and have dream sex with the girls of Beacon, he's immediately so disgusted with himself for even thinking about it that he makes it Rule #1 of his dream jaunts that he will not take advantage of anyone in their own subconscious.
• Primal Scene: Velvet's dream ends up almost being this, apparently based on a real memory, and she's only spared reliving it because Jaune urges dream-her to let him check out the weird noises coming from her mom's bedroom. He cracks open the door to find said mother... along with an unrelated man and a camera operator.^note  According to Velvet, her "being in movies" is something she had to do to pay the bills since their divorce, and an author's note elaborates that having to take care of a young child alone meant that she wasn't getting most of the income she normally would as an active-duty Huntress. Jaune shuts the door before Velvet can see for herself.
• Protectorate:
  • Jaune finds himself feeling increasingly this way over the people he's seen the insecurities of in dreams, especially when he sees them placed in a situation that could potentially cause their awful memories to resurface. When he sees Cardin tormenting Velvet in the cafeteria, Jaune punches out the former in an enraged fugue before he can even process doing so.
  • Blake also notes that one commonality he and Yang share, and one of the reasons Yang became interested in him, is an especially protective streak around Ruby, whom he treats as much as a beloved little sister as Yang does.
• Psychic Surgery: Chapter 28 reveals that Jaune's Semblance can heal others. When he heals the wounded hand of Nora's dream self, the real Nora wakes up to discover that a wound she got during training (which, by Nora's estimation, should've taken her a week to recover from) had completely healed overnight. It gets to the point that Jaune regrows Ironwood's missing arm without having any idea it was missing to begin with.
• Reality Warper: When he's in a dream, Jaune has the powers of a god, being effectively invulnerable and capable of completely changing the landscape and story of a dream by expending his Aura. Once his Semblance evolves, he ends up able to change the real world as well; among other things, he burns half of Cinder's face off, repairs Ironwood's missing arm, and de-ages Ozpin back down to his 20s; on the other hand, injuries inflicted on him carry to real life as well.
• Red Right Hand: Jaune invokes this idea when he's chasing down Cinder in her dream. Because she's wearing a hood, he doesn't know her identity even though he knows she killed Amber, so he uses his power in the dream to burn half of her face to a crisp. When Cinder wakes up, the injury carries over to real life, and since he'll recognize what he did to her once her injuries are seen, she has little choice but to try to kill Jaune to silence him before he can identify her.
• Running Gag: Early on, Jaune keeps accidentally cluing Oobleck in to which student is having which dream no matter how many times they try to keep it impersonal.
• Sadist Teacher: Glynda is stern. Oobleck is enthusiatic. Port is boring. Ozpin, or Oswald as he's now known to cover up his inexplicable new appearance, is a slave driver who spends his first day clobbering entire classes at once and forcing them to do endurance running until they throw up. It seems ol' Oz is a bit too eager to lord his regained fitness and power over 'lazy whippersnappers'.
• Secret-Keeper: The only ones who initially know about Jaune's abilities are Oobleck and Ozpin's Inner Circle, plus a handful of people that those individuals trust, such as Ironwood with Winter. Team JNPR ends up being this from Chapter 40 onward, as he lets Ren and Nora know the details of his semblance after a fumbled conversation a few days prior forced him to tell Pyrrha.
• Secret Secret-Keeper:
  • In general, Jaune resolves to keep what deeply personal information he learns about those whose dreams he inadvertently invades to himself as much as possible, a sentiment echoed by Oobleck who also requests Jaune to minimize the details of the dreams in their already private sessions as he has no desire to learn about his students' personal secrets as well.
  • Oobleck reveals to Ironwood that he figured out Penny was a robot the first time she answered a question in one of his classes. He specifically reveals this when Ironwood tries to have Jaune arrested so as to call Ironwood out for bringing Penny onto campus without warning them.
• Shipper on Deck: Downplayed, with Ren assuming that Jaune would have started dating Ruby in a year or so if Pyrrha failed to ask him out by then, due to how close their friendship is and Ruby in particular not having any other male friends.
• Sins of Our Fathers: Cardin was hated during his childhood for his father's actions during the Faunus War.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • After Ironwood's second attempt to arrest Jaune goes pear-shaped thanks to his teammates' intervention, Ozpin furiously exiles James and his forces from Beacon until further notice, saying that it's time he go into Vale to search for the missing active terrorist instead of pick a fight with one of the lowest performing first years on campus.
  • Following Nora’s genetic code being rewritten so that she’s Jaune’s biological daughter, her biggest gripe with the whole affair is that she’s now no longer a natural redhead.
• Slashed Throat: Jaune finds out the hard way that his Semblance has evolved to the point where he gets injured for real if he's injured in a dream when he wakes up to find blood dripping down his throat after being decapitated by Cinder in Neo's dream.
• So Proud of You: After Ozpin effectively exiles Ironwood and Atlas from Beacon, Ozpin tells Team JNPR that he's proud of the way they handled themselves during the incident, specifically citing that they non-lethally fought through the hostile forces to reach him for help.
• Take That!:
  • One of Blake's books, featuring "sparkly vampire erotica", gets destroyed by Atlas during their second attempt to arrest Jaune. Yang considers it to be not that great of a loss and Ruby chimes in that even she thought the movie sucked.
  • When Jaune learns about Gods, relics and whole secret war between Ozpin and Salem ,he says that it sounds like "a bad TV show plot".
• The Tease: Yang is very appreciative of the changes in attitude Jaune undergoes as a result of his dream visits, with his newfound confidence and sensitivity making her attracted to him. This leads to her blatantly flirting with and teasing him by Chapter 7, which she doesn't deny when Blake and Weiss point it out. Jaune, naturally, assumes it's only teasing. He does catch on eventually and they start dating, though Yang is initially nervous about it.
• Tempting Fate: After Jaune ends up in Ironwood's dream, he tells the rest of his team that he's probably going to get arrested at breakfast since he's undoubtedly pissed off the Atlas military once again. Pyrrha insists that he's probably worrying over nothing, only for Team JNPR to leave the room and immediately be held at gunpoint.
  Nora: "I'm sure he's overreacting. Oh yeah, it sure looks like it, Pyrrha."
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Ozpin, after Jaune de-ages him back into one of his earlier incarnations, during his prime in young adulthood no less. One of the first things he does when alerting Jaune about this is to happily make the teenager have a panic attack. After establishing his new persona, the new combat teacher Oswald, he continues to behave like a sardonic prick who happily works every student to the brink of exhaustion, with the only silver lining for both staff and faculty being that Glynda's semblance is still powerful enough to keep him line. The only person who remotely likes the "new" teacher is Pyrrha, who relishes being so thoroughly outmatched for once.
• Villain Has a Point: Adam points out how Huntsmen mostly spend their time working as mercenaries for the rich, instead of fighting Grimm. Jaune himself admits that Adam has a point.
• Wham Episode:
  • At the end of Chapter 7, Jaune ends up in the dream of Amber, who is in the midst of a prolonged Dying Dream while on life support.
  • In Chapter 9, Jaune ends up in a dream where a young brown-haired girl is bullied by her pink-haired sister. Fans who have read RWBY: Roman Holiday will recognize the circumstances as that of Trivia Vanille, who would grow up to become Neopolitan, and by the end of the chapter, she's following him around and watching him from a distance.
  • Chapter 13: Jaune ends up in Cinder's nightmare, but unlike anyone else, Cinder immediately realizes that he's not supposed to be there and confronts him in reality, forcing him to admit his Semblance to her so she won't kill him.
  • Chapter 18: Jaune ends up in a bizarre dream where he can't find the dreamer but which turns out to take place inside Penny's software. The next morning, he's confronted by Atlas soldiers in the middle of breakfast who try to arrest him on charges of tampering with classified military technology.
  • Chapter 23: Jaune ends up in Cinder's dream while she's dreaming of killing Amber, and while he doesn't see her face, it confirms to him that her murderer is on campus. Before she wakes up, he tries blindly attacking her with a sword made of Aura, which ends up damaging Cinder's physical body when she wakes up and officially puts him on her list of threats.
  • Chapter 33: Jaune burns half of Cinder's body in her dream and the injuries carry to real life, prompting her to attempt to murder him in the middle of the night. Blake intervenes before she can kill him, forcing her and her team to go on the run with their identities exposed.
  • Chapter 43: After ending up in just about everyone's dream at one point or another, Jaune once again lands in one of Ozpin's dreams. It's of one of his past lives, showing a time when his relationship with Salem was beginning to degrade because of their different desires in life. Given how many secrets Jaune can accidentally stumble on, Ozpin decides to tell Jaune the truth of his past, beginning with the fact that he's thousands of years old.
  • Chapter 44: Ozpin, having been alerted and made lucid by Jaune, asks him a favor: pushing his dream in the direction of him realizing his mistake, repairing his relationship with Salem before it's too late, and getting to live happily ever after like he'd always imagined. Ozpin wakes up satisfied, only to find in the morning that he no longer sees the aging Professor Ozpin in the mirror, but instead the young face of the same early, long-dead reincarnation he had just been dreaming about.
  • Chapter 46: Ozpin, or Oswald as he's now called as a cover story, lays down the pecking order as Combat Instructor and stretches his newly-young legs by effortlessly thrashing huge groups of students all day with easy displays of incredible power. A video of this gets back to Salem, who immediately starts panicking because not only is Ozma somehow back in a form that he lived and died in thousands of years ago, but he somehow has all the magic power he had at that time but had since given up, demanding the Grimm Queen's full attention.
  • Chapter 47: Nora now has blond hair and related to Jaune as his daughter.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Jaune's semblance quickly evolves to have this effect. While in a dream of Amber's killer, Jaune conjures a weapon of pure Aura and hurls it towards the killer before they wake up. Cinder jolts awake with a real injury corresponding to the one in the dream, and she realizes that Jaune needs to be taken care of. This soon escalates to the point where Jaune can regrow someone's limbs, alter their age, and even rewrite their genetics to change their parentage. Naturally, Jaune is horrified by this, especially since these situations come into play when he still has no idea how to control whose dream he ends up in, much less how to avoid activating the reality warping aspect of his powers.

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