Page 53 of In Somnis

Cooking = zone

Service rush = tunnel vision

I can do this!

Then she underlines a sentence twice, the ink a little smudged.

Lucid dreaming lets you do anything you’ve ever wanted.

Anything.

With anyone.

Without consequences.

There’s a new paragraph after that, a little messier, like she rode a wave of feeling without lifting the pen.

Motivation matters. The book keeps repeating “you need a good reason.” Mine’s easy. My dreams are better than my waking life right now. In here, I’m stuck wondering if he’ll ever choose me, or if I’ll wake up one day and see a wedding announcement. In there? I can say fuck it and never think of him, or I can think of him as much as I want, but on my terms.

I want that.

My heart twists. Tessa always joked about being dramatic, but reading her actual words, she meant every bit of it.

Reality Checks

–Read something twice (book, sign, text)

–Check the time, then look again

–Count your fingers

The dreaming brain sucks at keeping those things consistent. Words scramble if you read them twice. Clocks change. Fingers decide to cosplay spaghetti. If it looks wrong, you’re probably asleep.

“Spaghetti?” Seriously?

I lift my hand and wiggle my fingers, just because. For one stupid second, my heart leaps, what if?

But no. Five fingers. Normal. Calm down, Lenny.

Every time something even slightly off happens in waking life, I do a reality check, too, pause, and ask, “Am I dreaming?” It feels silly, but the idea is to build the habit so deeply that it follows you into sleep.

It dawns on me how often Tessa checked her watch back in school, during lectures, in hallways, even while we were cooking together. I always assumed she was bored out of her skull or counting down until lunch. But maybe that wasn’t it at all.

The words blur for a moment as my eyes sting.

“What even is all of this?” I whisper. “How did I miss it?”

But then again, I’ve always been good at missing things when the version I wanted was easier to live with.

I’m so confused, but still, I flip forward a few more pages.

Fully lucid. FINALLY. I walked through the door on the beach, checked the time, then again, and it was all wrong. Knew right then. So I turned the sky purple. It looked ridiculous. Then I made it rain pasta because I could.

I smile to myself. Of course, Tessa made pasta rain, but the next entry, that’s from a few weeks later, wipes the smile right off my face.

Class was a blur. All I could think about was getting back to dreaming, back to the place where he didn’t exist at all. I know this might be a problem, but I also don’t care.

Lucidity is getting easier and easier. I manage it almost every night now, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever experienced. But I always feel like I’m being watched. Like there are eyes on me, but I can’t see anyone. I tried to look it up, see if that’s a normal side effect, but nothing is mentioned in the book, so I’m ignoring it for now.