GC must have said something, but I didn’t hear him. I was vaguely aware Francis had, eventually, agreed with me. Or, maybe I had imagined it? I drifted to sleep, my eyes closing and my breathing turning deep and even. I didn’t want to sleep, but sleep took me, nonetheless. When I opened my eyes… my mind’s eyes… I was someplace else.
* * *
A field of green and yellow stretching toward the horizon. A sky so blue and cloudless that at first, I thought it was the sea turned upside down. I looked at my feet, and they were bare, hovering a few inches above the ground. I was floating. Joy bloomed in my chest, I smiled, and willed my knees to propel me higher.
“I’m awake,” I whispered to myself.
Sleeping, but aware. I was having a lucid dream. The colors were so vibrant that my human eyes could barely take them in, could barely focus on one thing at a time. I floated for a while, until I came at the foot of a hill. I could sense there was something beyond it, so I floated higher and higher, until I was almost afraid I might become weightless and the wind would take me away.
Ruins on the other side of the hill.
I floated toward them, knowing someone was waiting for me there. My feet touched the ground, as if the air among the ruins was heavier and denser. I stepped between crumbled walls and patches of weeds and wildflowers. The girl had her back to me, her hair was long and blond, shining in the hot sun.
“Where am I?”
When I’d started lucid dreaming a long time ago, in my teenage years, I’d promised myself I’d ask two questions every time I met someone in one of these dreams: one, “Where am I?, and two, “What’s your name?” Later, I found out it didn’t mean much, because the names these people (people?) gave me were too complicated and unusual to remember. Still, it was as if I’d programmed myself to ask the two questions no matter what.
The girl turned, and my heart stopped. She was me. No. She only looked like me, but a version of me who hadn’t covered her naturally blond hair with layers and layers of blue dye.
She opened her mouth to answer me, and I could swear she said something, but the name of the place eluded me. It was as if the sounds she made went straight past my ears, without ever registering.
“What’s your name?”
The same. I was starting to think that maybe I was the problem, and this was one of those dreams where I’d lost one of my senses on the way while all the others worked fine. It had happened before to end up in a lucid dream half blind, and now it seemed that I was at least half deaf.
“I can’t hear you,” I said. “But you’re me.”
I stepped closer. She had my eyes, and even the soft wrinkles I’d collected at the corners after years of forgetting to wear my sunglasses. For a second, it was as if her features glazed over, then came back into focus.
“I’m not you,” she said in a gentle voice that seemed to come from miles away. “I just look like you because I had to take a form you’d recognize.”
I shook my head, confused.
“There are many you’s, in many universes around us. If you want, you can travel there. But I’m not you.”
“I don’t…” My head started buzzing. I touched my fingers to my temple and struggled to stay
aware, stay awake, stay connected.
“Mila.”
A voice that was even more distant than my double’s.
“Mila, wake up. It’s time to go.”
My blond doppelganger vanished before my eyes, and the dream started coming apart at the seams, until it came apart completely and there was nothing left of it.
I jumped awake, and I was back in the secret rose garden.
“Rise and shine, goddess,” GC chirped. “They’re waiting for us.”
The sun was setting.
“How long have I slept?”
Francis stole a glance at his wristwatch, then shrugged.
“Not sure. Time seems to flow differently here.”