“And then she woke up, and it was all a dream.” My third grade writing teacher told me that it was lazy to end a story this way, that it kept the characters from having to deal with their actions in the waking world.

If only that were true.

I’ve always had vivid lucid dreams, dreams of flying, escaping evil scientists who wanted to experiment on me, ducking and running through apocalyptic, bombed out cities below grey purple skies, weaving and dodging bullets shot by men in scary uniforms, always running, always trying to get away. Even when I knew I was dreaming, it felt like I was there, trying to make my body move faster, my thoughts and actions translating to my limbs as though through mud. Each dream was a terror, and one would imagine I would have been relieved to wake up from them. And yet the dreams would cling to me throughout the day, dragging me down, bruising circles under my eyes, and making me feel as though I had one foot in each world, fading only when I would try to fully remember them.

I only ever told one person about the dreams, my therapist, who brushed them aside and suggested I cut down on watching tv before bed. They assured me that that’s all they were, dreams.

So one can imagine my surprise when I heard frantic knocking on my door one twilight evening, and opened it to find a ragged person who seemed to be in some sort of torn-up cosplay costume, with realistic-looking fairy wings, pointy ears, and a sort of patched-up steam punk outfit. Very little tends to phase me when it comes to people’s self-expression, so the real shock came when their wild eyes locked with mine. Their face was thinner, cheekbones jutting out with a peculiar sort of angularity, but there was no mistaking it. I gasped involuntarily and took a step back.

The person on my doorstep… was me.