Page 52 of In Somnis

Note to self—grab that peachy lipstick Lenny loves so much for Christmas. Hers is almost empty. Or maybe get a better shade.

I huff a laugh, crumbs scattering over the page. “Oh, now you tell me you don’t like my signature color?”

Damn, I still wear that one.

Somewhere around the middle, the tone shifts. The entries get longer, more focused. Instead of one-line jokes and doodles, there are paragraphs. She stops writing about school drama and starts writing about a guy. I remember her being unhappily in love, but she never told me any details about it, only that she had to get over the guy from back home.

It’s embarrassing how long we’ve been stuck in this almost-thing. Everyone at home knows it, so of course, my mom knows, too, and of course, she disapproves. She wants me with someone who fits better. Someone with the right last name, the right future, the right everything.

As if Wells isn’t as good a name as Vaughn.

Wells? She never told me his name. My breath snags, but I keep reading.

I don’t want to be pathetic, you know? I have every privilege a girl could ask for, and I told him that I’d give all of it up to be with him. And he just looked at me and said I shouldn’t. Said he didn’t want my life, didn’t want me to leave it either. Said he would choose someone else, and I should too.

How am I supposed to do that? How do you choose someone else when your whole stupid heart is already ruined?

I sit back a little, swallowing the lump forming in my throat.

I don’t understand how Nora, who has always been nothing but warm and kind to me, could stand between Tessa and her happiness like that. How that sweet woman could look at her daughter, see the beginnings of real love, and say no because the boy Tessa fell for didn’t belong to the “right” world.

But seeing Tessa’s handwriting tremble in this entry, the pain bleeding through every line, I understand how deeply it hurt her.

How alone she must have felt with it.

Knowing she carried all of this without ever telling me, it twists something inside me. I was right there, watching her try to go out with other guys. She told me how she kissed them, even slept with one, but it never felt right.

Now I know why.

Real life doesn’t help. I only forget him in my dreams. Sometimes it’s like I live there more than I live here.

I swallow hard around a lump of blueberry as the entries shift again, this time toward her dreams. She always had the weirdest ones, where she’d be cooking but the burners were beating hearts under the pans. Or a beach, where when the tide rolled back, there were hundreds of doors in different colors, but she never managed to open one. They’re all written down in this journal in detail. I thought she was exaggerating when she told me about them. Turns out she was underplaying it.

I think I became conscious within unconsciousness? I dreamed about the doors again. Rows of rows of them, and I thought, That’s weird, I must be dreaming? And the moment I realized it, I woke up.

What if we could cross the line from imagining?

Shit, imagine it.

I drag my thumb over the edge of the page, trying to do just that, but I don’t even know what that would look like.

I bought a book on lucid dreaming today.

There’s a little doodle of a book underneath, with a tiny Zzz pattern rising from it.

Apparently, you can actually learn to control what you do in your dreams, where you go and who you see. Everything. If I can steer them, maybe I can finally have one part of my life that doesn’t feel like it belongs to everyone else.

The next entry is from a few days later.

I think I almost did it. I was in the dining hall, but all the food was floating. At first, I thought, aha, budget cuts, and then I realized food doesn’t float. But I don’t think I was fully lucid because instead of taking over, I just stood there and watched the lasagna orbit my head. By the time I thought, Maybe this is a dream, I woke up again.

I press my lips together, a weird feeling spreading in my stomach when I read the entry from a few days after this one.

Managed it. Sort of. I was in Mom’s kitchen back home, making pancakes, and halfway through flipping one, I just knew. Like someone turned on a light inside my skull. This is a dream, I thought, and everything got sharper, including colors, sounds, the smell of butter. I got so excited about realizing it that I woke myself up again. Ugh, it’s so frustrating!

Then there’s an entry where it stops being about anecdotes and starts sounding like… study notes.

If you can dream at all, you can learn to lucid dream. That’s what the book swears. Also, anyone used to getting into “the zone” finds it easier because it’s the same trance-y focus, just inside your head.