“I’ll . . . I’ll go upstairs and kill him,” I say.

“No!” she screams, even louder than before. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone.”

She holds me tightly, physically restraining me from carrying out my plan. I break our embrace.

“Stay here,” I say sternly, then turn toward the stairs and slowly begin to ascend. I’m petrified, my knees shaking with each step.

On the second floor, I come to the kitchen—even though in our actual home the kitchen was on the ground floor. I step off the stairs and grab a large knife out of the butcher block. Then I continue to the third floor, to my parents’ bedroom.

By now my heart is beating so loudly that my chest hurts. I am certain Lecter’s going to kill me. But I don’t even think to stop. Instead, I open the door to my parents’ bedroom.

The room is pitch-black. I can’t even see my hand. But I know from the way the hair rises on the back of my neck that I’m not alone. In desperation, I begin to stab the darkness, the way Anthony Perkins killed Janet Leigh in Psycho.

The knife plunges into someone’s body. Hannibal? My mother? My father?

I’ll never know, because that’s when I woke up with a jolt.

I told Allison about the dream at our next session, which was the following morning. Her reaction wasn’t at all what I had expected. I obviously saw the parallels between my action in the dream and my killing Charlotte’s murderer, right down to using a knife in both instances. But the questions she posed suggested she believed that more was going on than just an imaginative reenactment of how I murdered a deadly sociopath.

“How would you describe your reaction when Charlotte told you that Hannibal Lecter was in your home?” she asked.

“Terrified,” I said.

“Of course, but it seemed in the dream that Charlotte had let him into your house. Were you angry too? I mean, she let the world’s foremost cannibal and serial killer into your family’s home, right?”

“It wasn’t her fault, though.”

“Oh? Why do you say that?”

Truthfully, I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember the dream any longer, at least not in enough detail to probe my thought process during it.

“I don’t know. I just don’t think I felt that way.”

“Okay. So you protected your sister in the dream.”

There was no question posed, but I knew she was asking me to contrast my dream with what happened in real life. Even though the thought that I failed my sister was nothing new to me, it still had the power to move me to tears. I expected Allison to comfort me, maybe even to apologize for upsetting me. Instead, she silently handed me a box of tissues.