Many people believe dreams are nothing more than the subconscious projecting thoughts, emotions, and leftover turmoil from the day – a way to calm the mind before a new dawn rises. Some dreams are abstract, twisted, surreal. You can’t grasp them with your hands or wrap your mind around them. They’re the otherness of the subconscious: a faint whisper you can’t quite place, an unseen guide. Submerged in your own mind, dazzling landscapes appear, time reverses, animals talk. It should be a safe place where nothing and everything exists at once.

  Unacknowledged.

  Unquestioned.

  Other dreams are frightening, the kind that remain, coiling in the back of your mind like a snake waiting for the perfect moment to strike. You bury the memory under the grind of the waking world, but at night, when everything goes silent, it resurfaces. Pain, anguish, unbearable sadness, all the things you shoved down into the recesses come slamming back into you, stealing your breath.

  Sometimes the euphoria of love and happiness winds its way in. Someone you miss might appear, embrace you, tell you they love you. Maybe you dream of your boyfriend, your mother, your sister, your aunt; a loving adventure you take together. Or maybe you dream of eating a mountain of ice cream, logic becomes suspended, joy unrestrained. Rare as they are, those dreams leave you warm and accomplished in a way you never expected. You wake refreshed, smiling, ready for the day.

  Maybe you remember only a sliver, the faint taste of chocolate on your tongue, a lingering image. On your commute, you pass an ice cream parlor and feel a small smile tug at your lips. You may be content, happy even.

  Me? I wasn’t one of those lucky few.

  I can’t remember a time when dreaming meant just that- dreaming. Most children have a mix of joy and fear in their dreams. I didn’t. I can’t recall dreams about toys or clouds or amusement parks with my family. It’s not that they didn’t happen, statistically, they must have– but I have no memory of anything before I learned to dream?walk.

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  Yes, dream?walk. I’m one of the few, maybe one of the only, who can do it. I’ve never met another person with this ability. Maybe there are others exactly like me, hiding in the shadows, pretending they’re normal. In daylight, it’s easy to slip on a mask– to pretend nothing is amiss. But the emotional toll leaves a dream?walker mentally drained and physically exhausted. We walk a precarious path, balanced on a tightrope where one slip, one distraction, means disaster. Surrounded by people, but completely alone.

  I lived by three unspoken rules. First: never interfere with someone’s dream. If the dream was dark, traumatizing, or unstable, I watched silently as they worked through it. It wasn’t my place to change anything. If they couldn’t handle their own subconscious, that was between them and their mind. Second: always leave before they wake. Lingering had consequences in the waking world.

  And third, the most important, never let the dreamer become aware of me. I appeared as a spectator, an invisible shadow at the edge of their vision. A sensation they couldn’t place. I didn’t know what it felt like to be on the receiving end, but I wasn’t about to find out.

  My rules were absolute. Unyielding. Untouched for years. Nothing could shake them nor change them.

  Until I met him.

  A man whose very existence made me break every rule, shatter every assumption, and drag me into a physical and psychological nightmare.

  My name is Mara Cadell.

  Just your average twenty?six?year?old in her final year of college, trying to keep her life together.