She stopped. At first I didn’t know why but then I realized—I stopped her. Her mouth snapped shut because I didn’t want to know this. Didn’t want to know that my mom’s magical ability was like this. I didn’t want to look down the barrel of my own future, be forced to think about a version of my life where my dreamdiving isn’t just an unwieldy nuisance, isn’t an interesting new part of my life I get to explore, isn’t a place for me to belong or be useful, but is instead something that plagues every moment.

I tried to relax, to concentrate on just being in the dreamworld, not controlling it. I tried to feel my feet on solid ground, focus on rolling my toes one by one and my hold loosened, my mom’s jaw relaxing.

“I won’t apologize for not having the answers to everything, Rose,” she finished. “I wish I had known, I wish that there was something I could have done. But we know now. And you running around as much as possible, avoiding this family like we’re a chore you don’t want to do, will not fix this.”

“Nothing will,” I snapped. “So what’s the fucking point?”

Before I could hear her reply, I was pushed back from the dream, sent hurtling through the nether realm and back into the black void.

I don’t know what to think. I woke up feeling … relieved? Less heavy than I felt when I went to sleep. Like saying all those things, hearing my own roaring voice in my mom’s dream, hot air pushing down the walls of her carefully constructed classroom, lifted a weight from my chest. But a big part of me is terrified that Dream Mom was somehow my real mom, and she’ll remember all of this in the morning.

I think I understand her a little better now, at least. Always struggling to be taken seriously when everything is stacked up against her. People overlook her at work because she’s a nurse, not a doctor, and people are dumb and cruel and think that nurses aren’t as important even though they do, like, 90 percent of the work. And then in the Atypical community, she’s shunned because she’s a psychic and for some reason, in a group of people who can, like, READ MINDS, and TIME TRAVEL and shit, being psychic is too hard to grasp!?!?