Free Kissing Kate by Lauren Myracle Page A

cage, and I braced myself against the sensation. Eventually it passed. And then my body gradually went numb, starting with my fingers and creeping up my arms to my spine. My heart pounded, but I hung on, telling myself everything was okay, I wasn’t going to have a heart attack.
    And then BANG.
    I am outside. I am alone. The sky glows a deep, velvety blue, and an enormous moon looms above the trees. Everything looks more sharply defined than in the real world. I can see the air particles, I swear I can.
    It lasted only an instant, and then I was back in bed. The house was quiet in a flat, familiar way, and my room was the same as ever. The only thing different was me. My body tingled, as if I’d dropped from a strange and wonderful world into this quite ordinary one.
    I pushed myself up, blinking in the afternoon sun. What had just happened? It wasn’t a lucid dream, at least not the way the book defined it, because I certainly hadn’t been in control of what happened. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if I’d had an out-of-body experience. That’s what it felt like—as if I’d been flung out of my body and into a new realm altogether.
    But I did know better. One thing my dream book taught me is that there’s no such thing as an astral body that separates from your physical body and goes drifting off into space. Sometimes people think they’ve left their physical bodies, but that’s just their brains’ way of dealing with the vividness of the dream. The experience feels so real that people assume it is real, and their brains, whose job it is to process information, come up with the best explanation they can: they’ve had an out-of-body experience. Or astrally projected themselves. Or whatever.
    I thought it was interesting how the brain worked that way, how it went to such lengths to make things fit with prior experience. It reminded me of the time I’d gone to the beach with Kate’s family, when I’d spent an entire morning searching for sand dollars. For the longest time I couldn’t find any, because I was used to seeing nothing but sand, and so that’s all I was able to see. But once I found my first sand dollar, I was able to find them everywhere. I just had to develop a new way of seeing.
    That’s what I had to do now, only with dreaming instead of seeing. Next time, if there was a next time, I had to remember that I hadn’t really left my body, even if that’s what it felt like. Once I could accept the fact that I was actually dreaming, even if it felt like I was awake, then I could enter fully into the dream and explore it intentionally. At least, that was my hope.
    I drew my legs to my chest and thought again about what had just happened. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t a normal dream, that’s for sure. Which meant that maybe I was making progress. Who knows?
    I rested my cheek on my knees, letting the memory of the dream wash over me. I’d never seen a moon like that in my life.

CHAPTER 11
    IT OCCURRED TO ME, THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCH, that maybe my moon dream was a lucid dream after all.
    “Mashed potatoes?” the woman behind the counter asked.
    “Huh? Oh. Yes, please.” It had to be, because it had the same larger-than-life quality as the dreams described in my book, the same feeling of wow, this is totally incredible.
    “Carrots?”
    “No, thanks.”
    She handed me my plate, and I picked up my tray and headed for a vacant table at the far end of the cafeteria. So all I had to do, I concluded, was figure out how to stay in that strange dream state long enough to control it. And I could do that. Right now, with the buzz of excitement giving me a rush, all sorts of things felt possible.
    “Hey! Lissa! Over here!”
    I turned. It was Kimberly/Ariel, gesturing to the empty seat beside her. Or rather, to the many empty seats beside her. The only other person at her table was Finn O’Connor, a guy I vaguely knew but had never really talked to.
    I hesitated, and Ariel’s expression