End of a long absence

The nightmare hit him once he returned "home" from Milliways, the night after he saw the Dark Man with Moiraine Sedai. It was probably brought on by a combination of seeing Nyarlathotep and actually finishing his Amp Well.

He'd had that dream before, or one like it. Usually, there wasn't that much blood directly on his hands. It generally involved an alternate ending to the Earth Strike Ultimatum, one where he wasn't even as patient with the baseline masses as he'd been in actual history.

And it wasn't usually Max dying on him like that. It'd usually been someone close to him — Annabelle Newfield, Jeremiah Scripture, Shelby Eisenfaust — and they usually died in his arms to make the point, but never before, to the best of his recollection, had it been Maxwell Anderson Mercer. (He didn't rule out the possibility that he'd simply suppressed all memory of previous dreams where it'd been Max, but since it couldn't be tested, he deemed it irrelevant.)

He'd been awakened by the smoke detector, to find himself in a burning bed. He'd squelched the flames with a thought, of course, but it was still a humiliation, losing control of his powers like that.

Some time thereafter, he happened to run into young Tom Riddle, who was looking for happy memories of Dream. He provided a happier memory than Nightmare can cause, for whatever it might be worth.

He's been avoiding the bar since that night. Seeing into the mana-spectrum does not give him the ability to manipulate it, and he suspected that ability would be a prerequisite of Nightmare's defeat.

But he's decided it's time to face his fear. Or face its relief. Whichever.