What Dreams May Come
Time Travel
Lily woke with a gasp, her small chest heaving beneath the lavender comforter her grandmother had made. The images clung to her like morning fog: a taller version of herself standing in a room full of humming machines, pressing buttons on a screen that floated in midair, laughing at something a woman with silver hair had said.
The nightlight cast soft orange shapes across her ceiling. She was seven. She did not know what the machines were for or why her future self had seemed so comfortable among them.
She slipped out of bed, her feet finding the worn path in the carpet that led to her door. The hallway was dark except for the thin line of light beneath her mother’s room. Lily pushed the door open without knocking, the way she always did, the way her mother had told her she always could.
Mom was sitting up in bed with a book, reading glasses perched on her nose. She looked up and her face shifted immediately from surprise to something softer, something that made Lily’s throat feel less tight.
“Another one?” Mom asked.
Lily nodded and climbed onto the bed without waiting for an invitation. The sheets smelled like the lavender spray Mom used, the same scent as the comforter, and Lily wondered if she would always associate that smell with safety.
“What did you see this time?”
“I was old,” Lily said. “Like, really old. Maybe thirty.”
Mom laughed, a quiet sound that vibrated through the mattress. “Ancient.”
“There were machines everywhere. And a lady with gray hair. I think I worked there.”
“That sounds like a good job.”
“I don’t know what the machines did.”
“You will, eventually.” Mom set her book aside and pulled Lily closer, tucking her against her side like she was something precious and breakable. “Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll do something completely different.”
Lily frowned. This was the part that confused her. At school, Mira Patterson had seen herself as a veterinarian in a dream, and now she told everyone that was what she was going to be when she grew up. But Lily had seen herself doing at least four different things in the past month alone: working with machines, teaching a classroom full of children, standing on a stage with a guitar, sitting alone at a desk writing something in a notebook. The dreams did not agree with each other. They seemed to argue.
“Mom?”
“Hmm?”
“Are the dreams real?”
Her mother was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car passed on the street below, its headlights sweeping briefly across the curtains before disappearing.
“That’s a big question for one in the morning.”
“I know. But are they?”
Mom shifted so she could look at Lily properly. Her eyes were tired but kind, the same brown as Lily’s own, the same brown as the photographs of Grandma that lined the hallway.
“The dreams are real in the sense that you really have them,” she said. “And they come from real places, real futures that could happen. Scientists figured that part out pretty quickly. Something about quantum mechanics and consciousness, though I’ll admit I stopped understanding the articles about a year in.”
“So the future is real?”
“Futures are real. Plural. That’s the thing everyone got wrong at first.” Mom smoothed Lily’s hair back from her forehead, a gesture so familiar it made Lily’s eyes feel heavy. “When the dreams started, people thought they were seeing The Future. Capital T, capital F. They thought they could learn exactly what was going to happen and plan for it. Some people quit their jobs because they dreamed they’d be rich. Others got scared because they dreamed about bad things.”
“What happened to them?”
“Mostly nothing. The dreams weren’t wrong, exactly, but they weren’t right either. The man who quit his job did become rich in one future, but in the future where he quit his job to wait for the money, he just ended up broke and confused.” Mom’s voice had taken on the quality it got when she was trying to explain something important, careful and steady. “The futures shift. They change depending on what you do and what everyone else does. The dreams are real, but they’re only one possibility out of thousands.”
Lily thought about this. It made a kind of sense, though it also made her head feel fuzzy.
“So I might not work with the machines?”
“You might not. You might do something the dreams have never shown you at all.”
“Then what’s the point of having them?”
Mom was quiet again. The house settled around them, creaking softly the way old houses do, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked once and then fell silent.
“I don’t think there is a point,” Mom finally said. “Not in the way you mean. The dreams just happen now, like weather, like growing older. We can look at them and wonder about them, but in the end they’re just dreams. They can’t make you do anything. They can’t take anything away.”
“Mira says she’s definitely going to be a vet because she saw it.”
“Mira might be a vet. She might be a wonderful one. But it won’t be because she saw it in a dream. It’ll be because she decided she wanted it and worked for it and got a little lucky along the way.” Mom pressed a kiss to the top of Lily’s head. “The same way it’s always been.”
Lily yawned. The fear that had driven her out of bed was fading now, replaced by the heavy warmth that came before sleep. She burrowed deeper into her mother’s side.
“Can I stay here tonight?”
“Of course.”
“What if I have another dream?”
“Then you’ll have another dream. And in the morning we can talk about it over pancakes, and then you’ll go to school and learn about fractions, and the dream will fade the way they always do.” Mom reached over to turn off the lamp. The room fell into comfortable darkness. “That’s the secret nobody tells you about knowing the future. It doesn’t change anything about today.”
Lily closed her eyes. Her mother’s heartbeat was steady against her ear, slow and certain.
She dreamed. Of course she dreamed.
She was older, much older, wearing a blue robe and a flat cap that kept slipping sideways. Her mother stood beside her, gray-haired now, crying and smiling at the same time. Around them, hundreds of people in matching robes were laughing and hugging and throwing their caps into the air. Lily could feel the sun on her face and the rough texture of a rolled diploma in her hand. Her mother pulled her into a hug and whispered something Lily couldn’t quite hear, and she knew without knowing how that it was something like I’m proud of you and something like I knew you could do it and something like this is only the beginning.
In the bed, in the dark, her mother dreamed the same dream. Neither of them would remember it clearly in the morning. Neither of them needed to.