“I know, I know, I gave her the whole spiel. And she took it in stride, like she does with everything, but telling her that, actually, I have a completely fake-sounding, fantasy-novel condition might be a hard pill to swallow. I don’t know that’d she’d believe me. I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t grown up in this world.”

“And what if she does believe you?” she asked.

“Then I worry that she’ll call me a freak,” I said. “That she’ll break up with me.”

“How would you feel if that happened?”

“Completely devastated,” I admitted, afraid to say the full truth but saying it anyway. “I think—I think if I let myself, I could fall in love with her pretty quickly.”

“If you let yourself?”

“I’ve been trying to keep a bit of mental distance because, well, I’m scared,” I said, exhausted already by this degree of vulnerability. “If I let myself fall head over heels and then tell her and she rejects me, I don’t know what I’d do. The stakes feel really high. Like this is a huge thing that I could so easily mess up.”

“How do you think you’re going to mess it up?” she asked.

“By telling her or not telling her. There’s no good answer. I tell her, she might freak and leave. I don’t tell her and we get serious, I have to hide who I am forever. I want an option C.”

“What do you think option C would be?”

“To stop dreamdiving,” I said, the words leaving a terrible taste on my tongue.

“But you said yourself you don’t think that’s possible.”

“That’s what I thought at first but the AM, the pills they gave me … they worked really well. Totally dreamless sleep.”

“And that could be a long-term solution? I thought those drugs were only for detox.”

“I guess they’ve tweaked the formula, because they said they were basically like normal sleeping pills now. I could take them regularly.”

“Is that what you want to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe sometimes … sometimes when it gets to be a bit too much. But not every night, I don’t think. I want to … I want to find a safe and healthy way to do it. To dreamdive.”

“Then you do whatever is going to help you find that balance,” Dr. Bright said, like it was easy. “As long as it’s within the bounds of what your doctor said was safe for you to do. And if there are any problems or you want to reevaluate, you should call them right away.”