"Any more dreams since last week?"

"Every night"

"Anything special"

"They're getting worse. I have a new one." She took a deep breath. "I was in the house, and my mom was sick in bed, we had locked ourselves in the room and the killer was in the living room. He was trying to kick the door down and the whole room shook every time. And then, I heard a key working in the lock, and the knob turned. And the door opened, and I didn't wake up. I saw him."

"Was that the first time you got a good look at him?"

"Well..." She thought real hard. Dreams are easy to forget. "Might be. I can't remember a dream where I could see him so clearly." That send him into a note-taking frenzy. She hadn't realized that before and felt a bit silly that the doctor zeroed in on it so easily. It seemed important.

"What did he look like?" he asked when he finally raised his head.

"He had no face. Just a black hole. And a gun in his hand. He aimed at my mom. She couldn't move. She was unconscious in the bed. I jumped between the gun and her. He moved so he could shoot her without hitting me. But I moved too. And he fired the gun. And I took the bullet in the chest. And I saw the blood running out of me. I turned around, and I saw that the bullet had gone through me and still killed my mother. In the head. I collapsed. I saw him leave while I was dying. I still didn't wake up. It's only when I died in the dream that I found myself suffocating in my bed."

"That's very peculiar"

Eeva couldn't get used to his detached manners. When she started telling her dreams and couldn't do it, he wouldn't even encourage her. He'd just sit there, gazing straight into her eyes. But not like he was focused on her or anything like that. More like he had put his eyes on her for them to rest a bit after spending too much time on the computer. And now, she had just told him she had died in a dream, and he was probably going to bitch about some minor detail.

"Most people would have woken up when he broke in. Weren't you not scared at that moment, in your dream?"

"You kidding me! I was shitting my pants." She actually had wet the bed, but she wasn't going to tell him that.

"Failing that, you should have woken up when he shot you. Right before being hit actually."

He fell silent again, expectant, unbearable. She felt he wouldn't speak again before the end of times unless she stepped in.

"Well, I didn't."

"You stayed in the dream for as long as the dream would allow you to. Right until the end."

Another please-break-me silence.

"So what?"

He leaned forward. "There seems to be a part of you that is stronger than your own will and that wants these dreams."

"That's bullshit! I want them to stop. Just do it! It will work!"

"On the contrary. From what I have gathered, hypnosis might make it worse. Until we figure out what it is that makes you stay in-dream even after obvious wake-up cues, hypnosis would be a very dangerous step."

"Fuck!"

She stormed out again. The one cool thing about this doctor was that he never seemed to take notice when she cursed or did something impolite like storming out of his office before being dismissed.

Both of which she did quite often.

It was night when she hopped on the tram. She had one connection before getting home. She got there just in time for dinner. Her sessions with the doctor were scheduled for after school. It made a long day into a never-ending bore. She was exhausted when she got home. Grandma had fixed some dinner, as usual. Normally, Eeva would do most of the kitchen chores. Grandma wasn't in the best of shapes. She got tired easily. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or something in the way of that. What a family of psycho-girls they made. For a second, she wondered what kind of nutjob her mom might have been. Didn't remember enough to guess.

But she did remember many bits and pieces, starting from when she was three. She and Mom at the park, at the McDonald's, in the bath, watching TV together, eating in the kitchen... Short and simple stuff, always happy memories. The very stuff that was surfacing in the mom-dreams. But she couldn't remember specific stuff. Like her mom's voice, or even what she looked like. Grandma could only find pictures from when Mom was a little girl, so she was stuck with her imagination.

They had dinner in front of the TV. She cleaned the dishes. By the time she got around to starting her homework, it was already bedtime. That was fine, she never went to bed at bedtime. She wished she could just not sleep. But tiredness caught up with her, and by 1:30, she was lying on her bed, lights still on, laptop open next to her, casting crude light on her closed and twitching eyes.

She woke up feeling really weird. She couldn't remember a nightmare. That was unusual enough. It was daybreak, which meant that she had slept all through the night. But there was something else. The ceiling had a weird stain. The bed was missing a couple of boards, and the room... Shit! This is not my room!

She got up as silently as possible, trying to put her feet on the unstained bits of the rotten carpet. This place was a cesspit! The paint was peeling off the walls, the scarce furniture was all broken, where am I? She walked past a cracked mirror askew on the wall. In the mirror, there was a fat girl with sleepy eyes staring back at her. She suppressed a scream as it was leaving her mouth. The fat girl squeaked as well.

She kept staring at her reflection, unable to process the information. After a whole minute of it, she looked down at her body. That was why she felt so weird. She had put on ten kilos overnight in addition to waking up in a new room. What was this? The twilight zone?

The door behind her opened suddenly: "I thought I heard you yell." She turned to face the woman whose face she had forgotten. She recognized her instantly nonetheless. Tears burst out of her eyes. She took a step forward, extending a hand towards the bewildered apparition: "Mom!"