WE ALL ATE LUNCH AT Tio Juan’s, our favorite Mexican place downtown, and I was feeling awfully full from an overload of enchiladas. Before I took a siesta, though, I needed to corner Kristina.
“Time to explain,” I said once I’d crawled into bed.
“Baylor, really, there’s nothing much to explain here,” she said, sitting at the foot of my bed. “You visited Bobby’s dream. And Ella’s, too. It’s not a big deal.”
“You’re kidding, right? It’s not a big deal? It’s a huge deal. I can enter people’s minds, basically.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re not entering their minds, Baylor. Believe me. You’re just entering their dreams. It’s very different.”
“You’re acting way too calm about this.”
“Well, it’s not a coincidence this happened the first night you wore the amulet. It’s probably knocked down some kind of mental barrier now!”
“So I should stop wearing it then?” I asked, semihopeful. After we’d transformed the amulet, it wasn’t as noticeable as I’d feared. Still, there was always a chance someone might notice it.
“What? No. Always wear it.”
Not the answer I was looking for, but I had other pressing questions. “So I can walk into anyone’s dreams?”
“Not just anyone,” she said. “They have to be loved ones.”
“But I shouldn’t be able to just saunter into other people’s dreams like that. It could be dangerous or something.”
“You were perfectly safe. And do I need to remind you that you were the one who chose to go into their dreams? You could have stayed put in your own dreams.”
“But . . . but . . . it feels wrong! It’s intrusive.”
“It is, but really, we shouldn’t get into the intrusive conversation,” Kristina said. “How many times have you gone up to strangers innocently going about their day to deliver a message from the other side?”
“That’s different,” I said.
“How?”
“Because . . . because . . . ,” I stammered, unsure of how to explain myself.
“And that’s real life too,” she pressed on. “You’re intruding on people’s actual lives. But dreams aren’t real. They’re just silly stories, really.”
“But I’m entering another person’s mind!” I said, throwing my hands up.
“Do you not listen to me at all? You weren’t in their minds. It’s not like you could control them or anything. It’s more like you’re just participating in a story.”
“This is so weird.”
“It’s just another element of your gift manifesting itself.”
“But still. That story happens in their head. In their brain. What if my gift manifests itself in a new way and I can suddenly take control of someone’s body or something?”
“Baylor,” she said, frustrated. “How many times do I have to say it? You’re not entering a person’s mind.”
I stared at her. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She sighed. “It’s complicated. It’s not worth getting into.”
“Tell me.”
“Fine,” she said impatiently. She stood up and closed her eyes, and a light dusting of blue energy began to emanate from her hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sweet dreams, bro,” she said, blowing the energy over me.
“What is—?”
But before I could finish speaking, I passed out and found myself in the star-filled dream room with Kristina.
“Where were we?” she asked.
“Well, we were chatting, and then you dream-drugged me,” I said, amazed at how quickly I’d fallen asleep. “Pretty sure that’s illegal in most states.”
“We were talking about how you don’t enter a person’s mind when they’re dreaming,” she said, totally ignoring her crime. “In a nutshell, when people are asleep, their souls leave their bodies, and dreaming is what happens before and after the journey.” She pointed down to the stars. “When these are illuminated, that means the person’s dreaming and you can enter the dream, but when they’re dim, the person’s either awake or not available for visits.”
“Wait,” I said. “What? Their souls . . . they what?” She’d spoken as though she were teaching me some basic rule of life, like she was introducing gravity to me for the first time.
“See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you,” she said as the shooting stars that marked each door flickered at our feet. “It’s complicated.”
“Where do their souls go?”
“To learn lessons.”
“But where?”
“In a place between here and the Beyond.”
I rolled my eyes and took another look around. “And what is here, exactly? Where are we?”
She frowned. “It doesn’t have a name, actually,” she said, shrugging. “There’s never really been a need to name it before you got here. The Dream Portal?”
I smiled smugly. Baylor Bosco, the grand adventurer, the brave explorer, the next great pioneer of the other side.
“Can you please wipe that dumb look off your face?” she asked.
“We can discuss names later, though I do think Baylorville has a nice ring to it,” I said. “Anyway, isn’t it dangerous for a soul to leave a body?”
“Nope,” she said simply. “In fact, considering seven billion people do it every day, I’d say it’s perfectly safe.”
“But . . . but . . . that doesn’t make sense,” I said, stammering to figure out exactly why it didn’t make sense in my head. “How could a soul just leave a body? What if it got lost on the way back, and it ended up in the wrong place, and then two people wound up switching bodies?”
“That is,” Kristina said, “quite possibly the dumbest question I’ve ever heard.”
I frowned. It seemed perfectly reasonable to assume it could happen.
“But you should be aware of a few things.”
“Okay,” I said, my brain already feeling numb. There was so much I still had to learn about communicating with dead people, and now to have this new dream thing tacked on felt exhausting.
“It’s rare, but demons can lurk here. Use caution, and always wear your amulet.”
I shrugged. “Demons can lurk anywhere.”
She nodded. “That brings me to my second point. Never trust someone who can’t sleep,” she said.
“What about Grandma Renee?” I asked. “She always stays up really late watching her soaps because she’s got such a hard time sleeping.”
“That’s different,” Kristina said. “Grandma’s a saint.”
“If she can’t sleep, though . . . maybe she’s hiding something.”
“Allow me to rephrase,” she said through gritted teeth. “When someone can’t sleep, it can sometimes mean that something deep in their soul is desperately trying to keep them from sleeping.”
“Because they don’t want to go off and learn those lessons you talked about?”
She nodded. “Their soul resists it. They don’t want to face what awaits them once they’ve drifted off.”
“Because they get punished or something?”
“The truth is a tough thing to face sometimes,” she said cryptically.
“But everyone has to sleep at some point,” I said. “You’ll die if you don’t.”
“They can get by on a few hours of restless sleep every night,” Kristina said. “It’s the dreamless parts—those blocks of time no one remembers once they’ve woken up—that matter. If you can’t remember your dreams when you wake up, you’ve been off learning a lot of lessons.” She jumped. “Speaking of which, I’ve got to head out to the Beyond. I’ll see you in the morning. And remember, just because you can access other people’s dreams doesn’t mean you should.”
I still had so many questions. What kind of lessons? And what point did they serve if I couldn’t remember them when I woke up?
She gave me a pointed look and disappeared in a zap of blue light before I could ask them. It’s not like I was going to do anything weird. What was the worst that could happen? Still, her words bounced around in my mind as I strolled down the path to explore, and I decided not to dive into any dreams tonight. There were so many doors—I didn’t count, but I couldn’t believe how far the lane stretched on.
Once I’d reached the last door at the end of the path, I’d expected to hit some kind of wall, but instead, another incredible display of bright stars had appeared, somehow more incredible than what I’d just seen. Splashes of purple and blue colored the black canvas, space dust that drifted carelessly through the heavens. There were countless twinkling lights beckoning me forward to gaze into the infinite galaxies.
I stepped into the dancing lights and found myself transported seamlessly from the blackness of the Dream Portal to the blackness of an immense ocean, a light breeze blowing through my hair as the waves rolled gently by. The moon was nearly full and shining brightly, and together with the abundance of stars, they reflected off the surface of the ocean so vividly it was like I was swimming through the sky.
Was I back in my own dreams again? I didn’t think so. I was still fully aware. I knew I was dreaming and not actually in the ocean. I didn’t feel wet or cold. It was so peaceful.
Yet there was a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach, like no matter how serene and beautiful this setting was, something bigger was at play . . . something terrible.
I glanced around as a wave lifted me up and brought me back down. For a second, through the light of the moon and stars, I thought I saw a figure in the distance, but it disappeared. I stared hard, squinting, hoping my eyes would adjust and spot it again, but nothing happened.
I let the ocean wash over me for a while longer, but I couldn’t relax. Soon enough, I wished I were actually dreaming and not partaking in this lucid dream.
If this were a real dream, then I could write off the feeling in my stomach as nothing more than the product of my overactive imagination.
If this were a real dream, I could wake up and laugh off the anxious feeling, not a care in the world.
But that wasn’t the case. I was in someone else’s dream, and the inexplicable dread and fear I felt were entirely too real.