A certain species of time travel is possible, but only under extremely special and rare circumstances, a vortex of time lines, difficult to talk about, because cause and effect, before and after, past and present, are all merged.

Dreamy at age 12 wakes from a scary vivid dream that she can’t quite remember. But she remembers that she had it. She obsesses over it; believes it was vitally important, and tries desperately to remember. But she can’t. Periodically through her life she thinks of the unremembered dream…​

She grows up, follows a shaded path, and at 24 becomes involved with a violent criminal boss. One day while on his yacht he fell into a psychotic rage. He tied her up, clipped on scuba weights, and threw her overboard. As she is drowning she remembers that she had the dream. She thinks "if only my past self could see this…​"

In the real timeline, whatever that means, her 12 year old self wakes with a more detailed dream, and a more certain understanding that her future self is communicating with her. She obsesses over her dreams, and keeps detailed notes. But in her quest for knowledge of the future she misses an important detail: she only learns from the future what her future self makes a particular kind of effort to communicate with her.

Now (whatever "now" means) she has had a life where she remembered more of the dream. It’s a warning of her drowning, and she developed a fear of water.

Unfortunately, despite this change, Dreamy is not too wise. Again, she meets a charming psycho and is drowned. As she fades, she berates herself for not communicating more useful information, information that could have kept her alive, could have kept her from the clutches of bad men.

But she has many dreams, and she loses the message "stay away from bad men". More precisely, she had a very hard time understanding what "bad" meant in the context of men. For sure, she realized, good men were hard to find.

But after she dreams of her fifth untimely death she became convinced that bad men were bad news, and should be avoided. She still didn’t have a clear idea what constituted "bad", so she developed an aversion to men. Now she remembers haunting dreams of bad women.

In her fifteenth year it occured to her that she is in the future, relative to her twelve-year-old self, and that perhaps she could try to send, somehow, information to her earlier self. Her twelve-year-old self, she now remembers, did not only dream that her future selves could communicate with her, but that she knew that it was possible.

By sixteen she was remembering so many details that her dream world and real world began to overlap. It was at this time that her aura of constant distraction earned her the nickname "Dreamy", though truth be told, she could as easily have been called "Lucky" — someone who was always in the right place at the right time.

It wasn’t that she was "remembering" many many futures — while not as open-ended, she was remembering many pasts as well — she remembered the life from 12 to 24 when she experienced her first death. She wasn’t remembering events, she was remembering entire lives, and it was overwhelming.

TBC…​

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