You dismissed the class twenty minutes before the bell rang, slumping into your chair immediately when it ended as your students fixed their things before leaving the classroom. You rubbed your fingers on your temple, attempting to soothe away the headache that just won’t go away ever since you had your dream—The Dream, rather—about Moonlight.

That was the nickname you had given to the mystery man that barged into your slumber a few days ago. You didn’t name him that because you were fond of him; in fact, you felt the complete opposite. The medicine that you took to help you sleep better didn’t work like they used to after that little wretch appeared out of nowhere, and you had been waking up for the past few days feeling drained rather than feeling recharged.

It didn’t help that Moonlight popped inside your head every time you closed your eyes, his silver hair seared behind your eyelids like an embarrassing moment your brain wouldn’t shut up about, always giving an unsolicited reminder every second of the day.

Junmyeon was right: you should’ve prepared for it instead of denying it, and now you were almost at your tipping point, on edge as ever, about to choke from the anxiety that it gave you.

When he picked up your call that night, his voice was still foggy from sleep—well, it was one o’clock in the morning—but the moment you mentioned your dream, he said with his voice suddenly stern, ‘Let me put you on hold. I’ll get you an appointment with my brother.’ A few moments later, he told you that he had set you up for Thursday.

Today was that day, and you just dismissed your last class.

You wanted to hold the lecture until the bell, but you were discussing Edgar Allan Poe’s A Dream Within a Dream today, which only worsened your already-sour mood. Last week, you had A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and now there was this stupid poem; it made you want to beat the lights out of the person who decided that this is what twelfth graders should be studying for Literature through next week.

“Are you feeling okay?” A voice asked in front of you.

You didn’t even realize that you had your eyes closed, and when you opened them, Sehun stood there looking at you with a worried expression.

You nodded and forced a smile on your lips. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“You just… seemed distracted today,” Sehun said as he fiddled with the strap of his backpack that hung on his right shoulder. “Like you’re here but your mind isn’t.”

My mind is here, you wanted to say. A rascal’s just invading it.

“I’m really okay, Sehun,” you said, and you didn’t have to force yourself to smile this time. Sehun looked like he was really concerned about you, and your heart warmed at the thought of it. “Have you thought about what I told you yesterday?”

The local newspaper was having an essay writing contest for high school students a couple of weeks from now, and all the English and Literature teachers in your school were asked to select at least one student from their classes to participate. Of course, Sehun was the first one that came to mind, as he always got the highest mark in class when it came to write-ups.

He looked down, and you saw his cheeks blush a little, not sure if he was embarrassed or afraid. He probably felt both.

“I’m still thinking about it,” he answered, and you could practically hear the lie in his voice.

You sighed. “Sehun, you’re a really talented writer. Trust me, I teach Literature for god’s sake. It would be a shame to put your talent to waste.” When he didn’t say anything after that, you added, “The contest is about six weeks from now. If you want to join and need help, you know where my office is.”

“Okay.” He gave you a small smile. “I hope you’ll feel better soon,” he said before leaving the room.

Just like how you knew he was lying about considering joining the contest, maybe he heard the lie in your voice too when you said you were okay.

 

—

 

After taking care of a few more things before you left the high school building, you were surprised to see Kyungsoo outside. He was leaning against his car with his hands inside his pockets, his face lighting up when he saw you walking towards him. It looked like he was waiting for you.

You approached him with a hug and asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Do you know a place where we can talk?”

You brought him to the far side of campus where there was a walkway lined with benches on either side. The place was surrounded by trees that showered the pavement with yellow and pink tufts of flowers you didn’t know the name for, and it reminded you of how pastel colors would wash the sky when your favorite time of the day came.

It was dubbed the Lovers’ Lane by students and faculty alike, but no one really came here often since it was quite the distance from the buildings that housed classes. You came here sometimes just to watch leaves and flowers fall from the trees, engulfed with the sound of branches rustling in the wind and flora softly hitting the ground—quiet but not stagnant, serene but not lifeless.

“What did you want to talk about?” You asked Kyungsoo as the two of you sat down on one of the stone benches that dotted the path.

Kyungsoo heaved a deep sigh, like he was about to finally get baggage that weighed a million tons off of his chest. You had been friends with him as long as you had been friends with Chanyeol and he was one of the few people on this planet that you would take a bullet for.

As he looked at you, his eyes burned with an intensity you couldn’t quite put a finger on.

And then he told you about how he got The Dream the night before Chanyeol got his, and how Jongin was in it.

It didn’t surprise you, really. The two of them had always had this weird dynamic between them that was just a little bit over friendship, and you often wondered if they noticed it themselves. You wanted to smile and congratulate him, but the expression that he had stopped you from doing so. He looked remorseful—disappointed—and you couldn’t understand why.

“What’s wrong?” You asked, taking his hand into yours. “Aren’t you happy?”

“Is this something to be happy about? Am I required to be happy when I get The Dream?”

Well, he did have a point. You, for one, weren’t happy when you had yours. It did make you feel something you never did before, a strange sensation that ignited your insides and catapulted your head to cloud nine, but after that feeling faded, all that lingered in your mind was that stupid little silver-haired pain in the that had a breathtaking smile that was too much for you to handle and for once in your life your brain didn’t want the distraction.

But you couldn’t say that to his face, so instead you said, “Don’t you think that it’s easier that it’s Jongin? You know him already. You don’t have to go through that awkward getting-to-know-you stage with your soulmate.”

“That’s the thing: I don’t want to be soulmates with him.”

You looked at him in surprise. “Why? You don’t like him?”

“It’s not that.” He ran his fingers through his hair—what was left of it, anyway, as he had a buzz cut—and sighed. “I don’t want to risk our friendship and tell him, ‘By the way, you’re my soulmate.’ What if he hasn’t had The Dream yet? He would probably look at me like I grew an eye on my forehead. I mean, I would if I were him.”

“But you’re not him,” you argued. “You’ll never know how he would react if you don’t ask him about it. Just casually sneak the topic into one of your conversations and work from there, look for signs.”

Kyungsoo scoffed. “Just ask me to jump off a building. I think that’s easier.”

He was right. At that moment, you realized that your previous notion about The Dream being easier when it was someone you knew was thrown out of the window because if anything, it was a whole lot harder. You had to take into consideration your prior relationship with that person, to look for indications that they had The Dream too and above all, to think of how to break it to them without forcing yourself on them.

One of the many annoying things about The Dream was that you and your other half may or may not get it at the same time. You couldn’t imagine how frightening it was, waiting for each other to talk about it, constantly reaching out in the dark, waiting for something concrete to hold onto. If both of you didn’t have the guts, it would just be an endless waiting game of who would say it first until it ate you up from the inside and left you hollow.

You froze for a moment, realizing that you, Chanyeol, Kyungsoo, maybe even Jongin, all had The Dream within the same month. Junmyeon was right; it was like a domino effect, how it worked—visiting one person after another in your circle like a sinking ship that took everything down along with it.

You tried hard not to make your realization obvious, but Kyungsoo noticed anyway.

“What? What’s wrong?” He asked.

You couldn’t bring yourself to tell anyone besides Junmyeon—and soon, the other Dr. Kim—about Moonlight just yet, afraid that if you talked about him, you would speak him into existence and he would suddenly show up in the flesh, and you weren’t ready to address the elephant in the room just yet.

“I just remembered I have a doctor’s appointment today.” It was sort of the truth. Sort of.

“Already? I thought you saw him only once a week.”

“Uh…” You racked your brain to come up with an excuse. “My mood’s been weird lately and I think that’s my body telling me to see my doctor just to check if everything’s okay.”

“You’re hiding something,” Kyungsoo said, narrowing his eyes. You were about to lie again and deny it, but he continued, “But I won’t pry it out of you. We all have something to hide, anyway. Just tell me what it is when you’re ready.”

You smiled at your friend lovingly, wondering what you did to deserve someone like him.

 

—

 

The only good thing about seeing the other Dr. Kim was that his clinic was a lot closer to your place than Junmyeon’s was.

You weren’t exactly hyped to see another doctor—Junmyeon was enough for a lifetime—but it wasn’t like you had a choice, anyway. Your body’s response to The Dream wasn’t normal, you assumed, as the “magic” that your sister and Chanyeol talked about didn’t even last the night when you had it. You wanted answers even though you didn’t know what questions to ask, and maybe that was what you were about to learn today from Junmyeon’s brother.

If Junmyeon’s clinic looked like a wealthy man’s penthouse, the other Dr. Kim’s office seemed more like a temple than anything else: marble floors, miniature Corinthian pillars, and grey furniture defined the place. A huge painting of a man with wings lying down hung on one of the walls, and being the Greek mythology geek that you were, you knew that it was a painting of Morpheus by Jean-Bernard Restout.

“You must be the girl Junmyeon was talking about,” a voice softly said from behind you.

You turned around and saw a handsome man with a doctor’s coat smiling at you, his eyes travelling back and forth between you and the painting you were examining.

If Junmyeon hadn’t told you that the man before you was his older brother, you wouldn’t have noticed it. They both had the same glassy skin, like they bathed in pure milk at the end of every day, but the resemblance stopped there. Junmyeon had slanted eyes whereas the other Dr. Kim had upturned and round ones that reminded you of how your sister’s cat sometimes stared at you like it knew every dirty secret that you had tried to hide.

You introduced yourself and then bowed. “Thank you for taking the time to see me, uh, Dr. Kim.”

“Dr. Kim makes me feel so old,” he laughed. “Please, call me Minseok.”

What was it about the doctors you were seeing and them insisting you call them by their first names? Couldn’t they just let you call them however you wanted to?

“Um, okay, Minseok,” you finally said. “I’ve been calling you ‘the other Dr. Kim’ in my mind ever since Junmyeon told me about you.”

Minseok laughed again. “You have a good sense of humor. I like that.” His eyes flickered once more at the painting and then asked, “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams,” you answered. “It fits the whole ‘dream specialist’ image. You pay attention to detail. That’s nice.”

You didn’t know why you were speaking so comfortably with someone you just literally met, a doctor, no less, but Minseok had this peculiar aura to him that made you feel like you already knew him. Maybe it was his eyes, strong but gentle, or his smile, playful but not teasing. He radiated wisdom, but it wasn’t intimidating.

“Well, anyone who knows their Greek mythology is okay in my book,” he said as he sat down on one of the ash-colored sofas and crossed his legs. “Please take a seat.”

You hesitantly took a seat beside him and asked, “Are we starting right now?”

“Starting what?” He questioned as he playfully smiled once more.

“The session?”

He chuckled, but you knew he wasn’t mocking you. It seemed like he found you amusing, like you were a cute little lost puppy that he was playing around with. It didn’t offend you or anything; you just found it… odd. Odd in a way that you didn’t feel the need to build a wall around yourself like you usually did with strangers. It was disorienting but also strangely familiar.

“There are no ‘sessions’ in oneirology, my dear,” Minseok said. “The line between science and art is often blurred in this field, which makes it thrive on spontaneity. The Dream has a similar nature, if you can notice.”

“So… we’re starting.”

Minseok shook his head and smiled. “Junmyeon was right about you. You’re one interesting girl.” You were about to ask what his brother had said about you, but he continued, “Okay, yes, we’re starting. Everything started the moment I saw you staring at Morpheus. Now that I answered your question, tell me about yourself.”

You weren’t sure what he wanted to know, but you somehow knew that he wasn’t talking about The Dream. So you started off with the basics, which wasn’t really much since you were a boring person in general.

You had lived in this town all your life and you rarely did anything in or out of it, save for the times Chanyeol would drag your to different places for ‘A change in scenery,’ he had said—the beach that was four hours away from town, the woods where he used to hike with his family, his favorite music store in his hometown—back when the two of you were in college.

Even though you had a sister, you had lived alone after she got married and your parents passed on. You moved out of their house, the memories of them too much for your heart to take on, so you used up half of your life savings to buy a nice little apartment at the west end of town, partly because you never liked how things moved fast in the center of the it, but mostly because the place had a nice view of the sunset, which you were rarely home to see, anyway.

Before the accident, you were an athlete, but since your limbs couldn’t handle sports anymore, you kept them busy by painting in your spare time apart from your job as a Literature teacher. It seemed that you had a lot of those, even with classes to teach in between, as the walls of your place were decorated with canvases too many to count with your two hands, most of them about the sky.

Minseok listened intently, not once interrupting you and you found it surprisingly easy to tell him about your mundane life even though you hadn’t even been in his presence for too long.

“That’s pretty much it,” you said when you finished narrating. “I live an uneventful life.”

“Living an uneventful life is relative,” Minseok laughed. “You know, you don’t seem like you’re suffering from… something at all.” You noted how he avoided using technicalities. “Junmyeon helped you a lot, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” you agreed. “I don’t have the best memory but I think he said something about it being acute, and it was more likely to improve than the chronic kind. He also mentioned how I’ve improved a lot after three months, but then… it happened.”

Minseok nodded. “I was about to get to that. Let me guess, you had trouble sleeping again.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell Junmyeon to adjust his prescriptions,” Minseok said as he scribbled on a small notepad that was just the size of his palm, which you noticed just now. “Any nightmares? Like violent and vivid ones that would wake you up at night and give you a hard time closing your eyes again? The patients like you that I used to consult mention things like that.”

Now that you thought about it, you didn’t have any bad dreams, even the usual that you had. They were just simply… well, dreams about Moonlight. Regular dreams, visions about him smiling and talking to you even though you never understood him. They were vivid, but they weren’t violent, at least not in a way that your mind would consider them to be, but your body would react otherwise, like it didn’t welcome the thought of Moonlight coming into your life.

“No, there are no nightmares,” you said after a while. “I mean, they don’t really scare me, but they got a little too repetitive. I see him even if I close my eyes for a little while. I think that’s where the headaches are coming from, and it makes me irritable.”

“Ah, so it’s a man,” Minseok looked up from his notepad. “Do you know him?”

You shook your head. “I nicknamed him, though. I call him Moonlight.”

“Hm? Why Moonlight?”

“He has silver hair.”

Minseok chuckled. “You’re poetic.”

“Well, I do teach Literature.”

“Touché,” he smiled as he directed his attention back to writing. “You don’t know him, so it’s a Type B then.”

When you asked him about what that meant, he patiently explained that The Dream was classified into two types: Type A was when you dreamt of someone you already knew and Type B was when you didn’t. You and Chanyeol were Type Bs, while Kyungsoo and Jongin were Bs.

“Can I ask you something?” You questioned, and Minseok nodded without looking up from his notes. “How do I know when the person in my dream has dreamt about me too?”

He stopped scribbling for a split-second, and resumed like nothing happened. “For Tybe Bs, there are usually the obvious signs like they suddenly take interest in you even though the two of you just met, but you won’t really know if you don’t ask them. The latter also works for Type As.”

“Oh. Okay. I have another question.” He nodded, signaling you to go on. “What happens when you fall in love before The Dream?”

Minseok thought for a while. “Not much, really. It’s human nature to fall in love. That’s something we have no control over, but… sometimes people get a little too daring with love that they try to work against The Dream, dating people before it came to them. It never works, though. It all ends up the same—horribly.”

You thought about Chanyeol and it hurt like a good punch to the gut, and you couldn’t hide the bitterness in your voice when you spoke.

“I think that’s unfair.”

“Life has always been a dirty player. That’s not news,” Minseok laughed and put away his pen and notepad, shoving it in the front pocket of his doctor’s coat. “But life can also be a little merciful sometimes.”

“Yeah, I’ve never experienced that ‘sometime’ when life was merciful,” you muttered.

“Well, like I said, life’s a dirty player. She’s not merciful to everyone, and only a few people are lucky enough to witness her small mercy.” He leaned back more into the couch that the two of you shared, his eyes trained into yours like he was calculating your expression. “I call it The Vision.”

“What’s that?”

He crossed his arms across his chest and a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “It’s when you know that you and your destined partner had The Dream at the same exact time. It’s really rare, only happens to a few people. A few days, weeks, or years, even, after meeting your soulmate in person, the two of you will be visited by it. It comes really randomly, and the funniest story I’ve heard about The Vision was that it came to a couple while they were having .”

It was the first time that you laughed a genuine one in a long while, temporarily forgetting that you were talking to a doctor and not a close friend.

“That would make a great story for their kids,” you said as you bit your lip to contain the laughter from behind your teeth. “What happens in The Vision, exactly?”

Minseok smiled knowingly. “The magic of it is that the two of you would see the exact moment when you first met. It doesn’t have to be a prolonged encounter, in the case of Type Bs. It can be the first time you saw each other, like a brief second of eye contact on the bus while you were on your way to work, things like that.”

It was indeed magical—the idea of anyone you encountered in the span of a day could potentially be the most significant person in your life.

The Dream was like a huge inconvenience for you—for all the right reasons—but now you were seeing it in a different light because of how Minseok was talking about it with so much passion and admiration for a phenomenon that happened once in a person’s very short life.  You understood now why people like him chose this profession: the possibilities were endless, like how humans had only explored less than five percent of the ocean or how the Milky Way was just a speck of dust among the infinite number of galaxies in outer space.

To think that The Dream came to people all around the world every day under different circumstances made you feel small, but it also made you realize how precious every single moment of life was.

Suddenly, noticing even the smallest details of things didn’t seem like a bad product of an unfortunate life-changing event in your case. Now, you wondered where you first saw Moonlight, if he was a stranger on the bus just like Minseok said, and you regretted how you missed so many fleeting moments without taking the time to consider if they eventually had an effect in the bigger scheme of things.

“I think we’re almost done here,” Minseok announced as he looked at you, a ghost of a smile playing on his lips. “I just want to warn you to get ready to meet Moonlight sometime soon. The dreams you keep having, they’re an indication that your paths are about to cross.”

You didn’t know how you felt about that, but you were sure it wasn’t excitement. You swallowed hard, hoping that your anxiety went down with it.

 

—

 

The weekend passed by quickly, Moonlight not visiting your thoughts at every waking moment like he did last week.

You were supposed to visit Junmyeon earlier today but you had your scheduled session moved since it was Chanyeol’s birthday and he was throwing a party at his place tonight.

Chanyeol had invited a lot of people, most of them he met through work, which meant you were often left alone with Jongin and Kyungsoo, who, surprisingly, weren’t as awkward as you thought they would be after what you and Kyungsoo had talked about when he visited you in school. It was probably because almost everyone—except you, of course, as you weren’t allowed to drink—was tipsy, conversing in slurred tones and untamed laughter. It felt weird, being the most sober person in a party, especially in contrast to how you were at parties months ago.

You swayed to the beat of the music as it floated all throughout Chanyeol’s apartment, making you almost forget how the past week had been so ty.

Almost.

You saw him before he saw you, his silver-hair unmistakable among the sea of half-drunk people. He was with Chanyeol, you weren’t sure why, but they seemed to know each other as they both came up to you with smiles on their faces.

There was it again, the stunning smile that occupied your dreams and took your heart and left you breathless, but now it wasn’t just in a dream or in some distant memory, but in front of you, a part of an actual living, breathing person that Minseok had foreseen you would be meeting soon.

Too soon.

You locked your gaze on his eyes, downturned like they were when you first met him in your sleep and it was hypnotizing, like an invisible string was pulling you towards him. You wouldn’t be surprised if he had his own gravitational field as he looked too majestic to be human, his dazzling smile that showed his perfect teeth put the sun to shame. He was just like how you dreamt he would be, radiant like a star too close to the Earth, a beautiful celestial body that you weren’t worth looking upon, even from far away.

“Guys, this is Baekhyun,” Chanyeol said.

Baekhyun.

Moonlight finally had a name.