This morning I woke up to find I was thirteen again, living with my parents in a gigantic apartment building in the city. Five hundred residents packed like pigeons in cubbyholes, hearing one another's chatter all day long. I'm a little excited—so many people, maybe one or two will be like me! But no. I'm the only one.

So I get lonely, and bored. The meadow behind our building is the one place I can go to be myself, when I have the time and no one is here to stop me. My parents are always busy and snappish lately; if they see me doing something other than schoolwork, they assume I'm just blowing it off and they get mad.

This weekend I've been grounded again. No one around, nothing to do. Lie around in our gray apartment reading comic books. I'm getting restless. No, antsy! Finally fling my book down. My parents can't keep me here. I think I'll go out to the meadow. I'm not even going to put on a shirt over this sports bra; in fact, I'm going to take this bra OFF and go outside in nothing but my blue jeans!

Out I go, feeling reckless and kind of sexy. I didn't think I was into exhibitionism…wait, that's not it. I'm into freedom. Nobody's outside anyway. It's gray and misty because it rained earlier, but it's warm. The feeling of isolation is incredible; in the heart of a city, I am alone.

Wandering in the mist, I reach out my fingers to brush raindropped tall grass. Suddenly the base of the plant shudders, and out pops a tiny cute creature. It looks like a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel—a pint-size bunny with a long lush tail.

I kneel and call softly. I want so much for it to trust me. For long minutes we regard each other, eager human and reluctant rabbit. Finally it reaches some private decision, hops forward and lets me stroke its ears.

And then! A voice in my head says My name is Karma.

This rabbit's telepathic!

Humans come to the field sometimes, but you're different, she says. Do you come here often?

I laugh. She hears in my mind that humans use that as a pick-up line.

Maybe I knew that already, she says slyly.

Is she serious, I wonder? Yes. We flirt. Honest attraction on both sides. Karma gets right to the point:

Come back later when they leave—people have emerged to walk their dogs—and we can play.

Play?

Sex.

Oh.

Karma says Meet me by the forsythias in half an hour, and bounds away toward the woods at the end of the field.

I run back to my apartment and don't even notice people staring. Shut myself in my room to wait, thinking about sex with a long-tailed telepathic rabbit. We're both girls now, but if she wants, I can change sex. Hell, I can probably shapeshift into anything she likes. The possibilities...

Half an hour later, I peek out of my room, ready to leave. I'm still shirtless. Then a noise from the hall outside freezes me. My dad is home! I hide in my room with the door closed, as he makes coffee and then starts vacuuming the carpet. Maybe I can sneak past him. When the noise moves past my bedroom, I open the door a crack. My dad is vacuuming down the hall with his back to me. It's risky, but…I slip out and run for it, burst out of the apartment without hearing anything from him. Maybe he saw me and maybe he didn't. I don't really care. Down this hall, up that one, out the door!

...And find that while I was indoors, the field's been mown. And there are two soccer teams gearing up to play. If I can make it to the far side of the meadow, I can hide in the woods and I'll find Karma somehow. So I run, or pretend to run—I'm actually flying, just skimming my feet over the grass.

Halfway down the field, I see two brownish shapes on the ground. They look like dead animals. I stop and fall out of the air as I realize it is dead animals. It's Karma and a bigger rabbit—her parent? They got hit with the lawnmower. I'm devastated. I consider trying to resurrect them, but that's one kind of magic I've never been good at. Might make things worse.

I'm kneeling beside Karma, crying, when I hear two voices in my head. They sound a lot like Karma. Littermates? Of course; rabbits never have just one. The owners of the voices pop out of the deep grass beneath some trees: two bunnies the same size as Karma. They see me and tense.

Thought you were a rabbit, one says.

"I'm a friend of Karma's," I say softly. Or was, I think.

We start to talk. I was right; they're Karma's sisters, and the other dead rabbit was their mother. So Karma was only a teenager like me.

I learn the other sisters' names. The fat angry dove-gray one is Mahakali. The other one is brown like Karma but has white, sticky-up fur on her head, almost like a Mohawk. Her name is Unicorn.

They want to bury their mother and sister, and they ask me if I'll carry the bodies to a better spot since I have hands. I cradle them in my arms...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

There's another dream on this site about telepathic teleporting long-tailed rabbits, Rabbit World by Wayan. In that dream they only lived on one planet; seems like maybe they've spread out since then.

I'm still too heartsick to pick this dream apart for other meanings. But here's one thing. For a while now I've been annoyed because I feel I've been missing out on something so common to most other dreamers: I don't have sex dreams. That is, there can be love, lust and sexual content, and other characters can fuck each other, but I never get any. Every time I get close to someone, something happens--I wake up, my attention is suddenly required somewhere else, my potential lover was just teasing, etcetera. But I've never had someone die before!

This feels like a warning. No sex/love for you! We'll go to extreme lengths to make sure! (Whoever "we" is.) But that's not what's bothering me this time. Karma and her sisters seemed real. What if they are real—not fabricated characters, not actors? What if somewhere, Unicorn and Hali are mourning because a dreamer with a curse got involved with their sister?

Those are some big "what ifs," I know. To anyone who hasn't had experiences like mine, it seems ridiculous. But...I'm afraid, and I'm mourning.

As a last gift to Karma, I drew the three of them together, happy…

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