Owen woke on his back to sleep paralysis. It didn’t matter how many times it happened; it was always frightening and put him in a panic until his ethereal self let go of his body and he began to rise. When he passed through the roof of his house, he immediately heard the rain. He didn’t feel the cool drops, but the sound of them on leaves in the street, in puddles, sounded like music to him. The wind from the dream with his father followed him into the night world. This weather in his waking life would have drawn a scowl, but now the streetlight glistened off shimmering leaves and he found it enchanting.

By now, he was able to run without launching himself to the moon, and he bounded away to the yard with the picnic bench. His heart sank when he discovered Melody wasn’t waiting for him. The rain bounced off the tabletop and he wondered how it was he could sit at the table or run along the roofs but could also pass through walls unseen and unfelt. There were shifting abilities to his perceived mass, and they seemed to be at the whim of his newly discovered state. It was still true, though, that he couldn’t touch anything, and so it didn’t make much sense at all. In the house behind him, a child was screaming. The parents screamed back. Owen got up and walked closer to the back door. Finally, he heard the child yell as if she was falling off a cliff, “There’s a ghost in the backyard.” So the spirit couldn’t sneak up on him, he turned, and halfway through his spin, he realized the child was referring to him.

He passed through the hedge at the back of the property to hide. He shook his head while muttering to himself. There were so many exceptions to the rules of the night world, he wondered why there were even rules. He sat on the ground in the rain, peering through holes in the hedge, watching to see if Melody came. Eventually, after having time to think about it, he had to concede that there were just as many exceptions in the waking world. In fact, he loved those contradictions and sought them out for his reading online—Schrödinger’s cat, spooky action at a distance, the double-slit electron study. These so-called “anomalies” were the loaves and fishes of his days, allowing him to believe reality had a mind of its own. An hour passed and Melody never showed. Feeling unsure, he struck out on the night’s mission. It was too boring to just sit, staring through a hedge, not being able to control when he would awaken.