Page 33 of In Somnis

Wake up.

I endured years of exhaustion from extreme sleep deprivation until I realized that this was the worst possible response.

I glance at Tessa again, at how her body sits perfectly still while her mind is clearly somewhere else. All I can hope for her is that she’s not trapped in her personal nightmare. That she’s not filled with terror.

Now that I have the language for my state—and hers—I can only hope to help her one day.

An unfinished nightmare isn’t something you can simply shake off. Your mind doesn’t let go of unprocessed fear. It circles back, again and again, trying to resolve what you refused to face. Nightmares recur not because the brain is cruel, but because it’s persistent and wants equilibrium and closure.

If you become lucid in a nightmare and choose to stay, you’re making a statement and telling your own mind that you’re willing to witness what it’s been trying to show you. Sometimes, that decision alone is enough to dismantle the fear that keeps the nightmare alive.

That’s the key difference that changed everything for me.

By the time I was in my final year of high school, I was riddled with problems that seemed to have no solution. I couldn’t eat properly, thanks to the eating disorder that turned every meal into a battlefield, and I couldn’t sleep like a normal person, thanks to the nightmares that turned every night into a war zone. Two of the most basic human things, and I was failing at both.

Then one night, I decided to fight rather than flee.

Darkness terrified me, so in my dreams I just turned on the lights.

Spiders bigger than me tried to hunt me down, so I made them shrink.

I rewrote the rules, and for the first time in years, the night stopped owning me.

Lucid dreaming became exposure therapy for me long before I knew what exposure therapy was, but that was the moment I understood its true potential. By the time I got into academia, it felt like a no-brainer that I’d end up specializing in this, the thing that actually helped me claw my way out of most of my trauma. I managed to help a lot of people with that approach, but most cases weren’t as severe as Tessa’s… or Ridge’s.

Ridge’s trauma runs deep, yet the guy is stubborn as hell. He’d never even heard of lucid dreaming before his mother nagged him into becoming my patient, but once he was in? Damn near effortless. I’ve never met anyone with his natural gift for it.

He has this curiosity that barrels past red flags as if they are polite suggestions. He got better—faster than anyone should—and one day, he stepped straight into my dreamscape like it was no big deal. Up until that exact moment, I’d written off dream sharing as pure fantasy. Wishful thinking. Made-up.

He proved me wrong, and it altered my life once more.

That guy doesn’t know the word boundaries, but it’s not only his fault they evaporated the second he showed up in my dreams. Our shared obsession turned into a real friendship—the first time I’d ever had someone to actually talk to about this stuff. Marcus thinks I’m nuts, but Ridge believed every word. Hell, he was right there in it with me.

After almost a year of working for Mrs. Vaughn and getting nowhere with Tessa, I confided in him. Another line I should’ve never crossed—patient privacy, ethics, all of it. I tried to justify asking for his help as “research,” and I never said her name outright, but Ridge isn’t dumb, and this town is tiny. Everyone knows about Tessa’s situation.

The woman in question blinks next to me, and I lean in closer, locking eyes with her. I’m positive those tiny micro-movements mean something. A code. A yes. A no. A plea. But proving it? That’s the part that keeps me up at night.

Besides the obvious.

I haven’t caught enough of them yet, haven’t replicated the pattern enough times to build the data set I need. One swallow, one flutter, one shift in gaze… it’s all so fragile, so easy to write off as random.

But I know what I see.

“Do that again, Tessa. Can you hear me? Come on, blink for me.”

I wait, but nothing happens. If anything, her micro-movements shut down even harder, and her breathing turns shallower. It reminds me too much of my own paralysis episodes, of that moment I manage to wiggle a toe or a pinky, thinking I’ve found the crack in the spell. Sometimes it works, and the whole thing shatters, but other times, it backfires. The effort makes everything lock up tighter, like the paralysis is fighting back. Maybe it’s the same thing here. I push, she pulls away, and I’m left staring at her still eyes, wondering if I made it worse.

Ridge and I read everything we could to help her case. I dove into the medical side, into locked-in syndrome, minimally conscious states, all the things doctors had already chased, but without the dream layer I added.

Ridge scoured the weird corners of the internet and kept hitting the same fringe chatter nobody takes seriously unless they’re already halfway down the rabbit hole. He found stories about a second layer to dreams, but there was no hard proof. There were only personal accounts and language that makes scientists snort—letting go, untethering, intention without a tether. Most folks who talk about it get written off as spiritual hobbyists dressing up dissociation as enlightenment.

I rolled my eyes at it too. Right up until the day I couldn’t anymore.

Right until the nights turned against me again, and no amount of trying or training could get me out of it.

Tessa is still unmoving, so I reach for the book resting on the side table that Mrs. Vaughn usually brings down with Tessa to the sunroom. The cover is worn, and the spine is cracked from use.

Alice in Wonderland.