“His telepathy. He likes hearing people’s thoughts,” I explained. “I didn’t get that. I just thought it was really annoying to have a brother who could hear what I was thinking. And a little creepy. But it’s not a voyeuristic thing for him. He tried to explain it to me once. That he wasn’t listening to spy on people or to learn their deep dark secrets, but to understand them. He talks about how it’s not just the thoughts themselves but the shapes of them—the patterns they make. He makes it sound like art or music. Something beautiful.”

“And that’s what dreams are like for you?” Dr. Bright asked, bringing me back to the present.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “They are beautiful. I wish I could show them to you. To see what I see … it makes people make sense. I mean, dreams don’t always make sense, obviously. A lot of the time it’s just visual gibberish. Well, and sometimes actual gibberish. But once I got good at going into dreams, it was easier to find the truth.”

“The truth?”

“People’s true thoughts and feelings. Or, at least, some of them. Everything that lies underneath. Everything that people try to bury every day. You can’t hide from those when you dream.”

I don’t think I did a good job explaining exactly what that’s like—the feeling of truly understanding, truly connecting with someone when you’re inside their head, while at the same time never getting a clear answer from the dreamworld. I tried to tell Dr. Bright about the dreamdiving I’d done in the past week—another nightmare of my mom’s that this time I was able to change, a dream the other night when Aaron and I played in the snow, pelting each other with snowballs.

That was one of the dreams where Aaron was awake in the dream, reading my thoughts, making it so that we could communicate with each other inside the dream, like we did the very first time. And it was … good. The first time in a long time that I’d seen Aaron laugh, running around cackling maniacally as we both used the magic of the dreamworld to throw snowballs without actually lifting a finger, modeling the telekinesis that my dad has been using around us since we were kids.

The next morning there was fresh snowfall on the ground. We were both in the kitchen, looking out over the newly coated yard, and caught each other’s eye. It felt like each of us was waiting for the other to make the suggestion that we go out into the cold and have a snowball fight for real, but in the cold light of the winter morning, I felt so old, so much older than I had been as Dream Me, and running out into the yard with my brother for some lighthearted fun felt completely impossible.