It was just a dream. It was just a dream. It was just a dream.

She closed her eyes and tried hard to remember. Under her blankets, with the faint morning light coming into her room, the birds outside her window, she could almost grasp it. Almost reach out, touch it and bring it back to herself. But just when she thought she had it: nothing. There was nothing there to touch.

She had been having a dream. For so long, it seemed, she had been having a dream. In her sleep, she had laughed, she had cried, she had felt so alive for the first time in a long time. In her sleep, she had danced and driven, oh, how she had driven, and waited for so long. In her sleep, she had smiled and frowned and whispered incessantly into a small, silver device that may or may not cause cancer. In her sleep, she had dreamt. She had dreamt the greatest dream. And she had believed. She, the nonbeliever, had believed. With all of her heart and all of herself, she had believed. Impossible. 

And then. Just when it seemed that the dream would go on forever. That she would go on laughing and crying and dancing and smiling, she woke up. Slowly, with resistance, she woke up. And even before she fully opened her eyes, even before she pulled the covers from her body and made her way to her bedroom door to start her day, she began to forget. The dream began to slowly fade away. And she knew, in her heart, that it would only get worse with time.

Until no one, not even she, would be able to know that she had ever dreamt at all.