Page 173 of Ex Somnis

“Okay,” I tell it, very seriously, because you don’t disrespect a reading because the querent is a vegetable. “So this is about something you’re avoiding.”

The pickle doesn’t object, and I look down at the card, giving myself a moment to think about the wording, because I want to get this exactly right.

Huh.

It’s not the Five of Cups anymore.

It’s the Sun.

I look at the deck in my hand, fan it out, find the card again, and it’s something else entirely now, some card I don’t even recognize, gold foil edges I definitely don’t own.

That’s not how cards work.

“You’re not real.”

The pickle somehow manages to look offended.

I sit up straighter.

“Oh my.”

The crystals hanging from the trees.

The tarot-card paper planes overhead.

The fact that I’ve spent the last ten minutes providing emotional support to a cucumber.

“Oh. My. God.”

My pulse kicks hard when I look down at the cards one more time.

They’ve changed.

Again.

This is a dream…

…I’m dreaming.

The pickle is gone, but there’s a paper plane made from a tarot card lodged in the dirt three inches from my knee, vibrating as if it had just landed.

I am dreaming, and I’m still here, fully present behind my eyes, not floating off into static like I always do when I try to turn lucid.

I don’t move or breathe, afraid to spook this out of existence, because two days of napping like it’s my full-time job, two days of forums and YouTube videos at three in the morning, of Mabel asking gently if I was eating, have led directly to this exact moment. I refuse, on principle, to fumble it now because I got excited.

The sky is thick with tarot-card paper planes looping and diving, occasionally colliding into tiny papery explosions before reforming and going again, completely undisturbed by the fact that I’m having the single most important psychic experience of my entire life below them.

I’m lucid.

I’m actually, finally, factually lucid, and nobody is here to see it, which feels deeply unfair given how much manifesting I’ve done about this outcome.

“Jasper.”

I turn around so fast I nearly trip over my dream feet.

Mom stands in the gold light with her silver hair loose around her shoulders, the scarf on her billowy skirt drifting like it’s underwater, every crystal she owns absorbing the golden light and throwing it back twice as bright, and her eyes are here. Focused. Looking right at me like she knows exactly who I am and where we both are, which she has not done, not once, not really, in years.

“Mom?” My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to.