Dreamer's Burden

The first dream felt like a gift.

Mira woke with the image burning bright behind her eyelids: a girl in a yellow sundress emerging from a weathered red barn, sunlight catching the wheat-colored meadow around her like spun gold. The girl's face remained frustratingly out of focus, but her movements were graceful, unhurried. Peaceful.

Mira sketched it in her journal—something she'd started doing after her therapist suggested it might help with her anxiety. The drawing was crude, but it captured the essence: the barn's tilted door, the girl's flowing dress, the endless field stretching toward a horizon that seemed to shimmer with promise.

She forgot about it until three days later.

Mira had driven out to interview a farmer about sustainable agriculture practices for the magazine where she worked. The assignment was routine, forgettable—until she crested the hill and saw it. The red barn. The golden meadow. And walking out of the shadowed doorway, a girl in a yellow sundress.

Mira's hands trembled on the steering wheel. She pulled over, heart hammering, and watched the scene unfold exactly as she'd dreamed it. The girl moved with that same unhurried grace, pausing to shield her eyes from the sun before walking toward a farmhouse Mira hadn't seen in her dream.

A coincidence. Had to be.

But the sketch in her journal proved otherwise. Every detail matched: the barn's peeling paint, the way the grass bent in the breeze, even the girl's posture as she emerged into the light.

That night, Mira dreamed of rain.

* * *

The second dream came two weeks later. Mira stood in what looked like her childhood elementary school's cafeteria, but the lunch tables were covered in newspapers instead of food trays. The headlines swam and shifted, unreadable, except for one: "LOCAL TEACHER WINS LOTTERY." Below it, a photograph of a woman Mira didn't recognize, holding an oversized check and beaming.

Mira woke feeling oddly buoyant. A lottery win—how wonderfully mundane and happy. Maybe these dreams, if they meant anything at all, weren't necessarily harbingers of doom.

The next morning's paper proved her right. Page three: "Riverside Elementary Teacher Strikes It Rich." The same woman from her dream, down to the floral blouse and crooked smile.

Mira stared at the newspaper until the letters blurred. Two dreams. Two perfect matches.

She called in sick to work.

* * *

The third dream shattered her world.

Mira stood in a hospital room she'd never seen, watching a man in a blue shirt collapse beside a bed where someone lay connected to machines. The steady beep of monitors filled the air, and the antiseptic smell burned her nostrils with dream-reality that felt more vivid than waking life. The man's shoulders shook as he wept, and Mira tried to approach him, to offer comfort, but her feet wouldn't move.

She woke gasping, tears already streaming down her face.

For three days, she jumped at every phone ring, every news alert. She avoided hospitals, took detours around the medical district, and found herself googling "how to stop prophetic dreams" at two in the morning.

On the fourth day, her brother called.

"Mira, it's Dad. He had a heart attack. You need to come to St. Mary's."

The hospital room was exactly as she'd dreamed it. Her brother David wore the same blue shirt. Their father looked so small under the white sheets, connected to the same machines that had beeped their mechanical rhythm in her sleep. And when the doctor came in to deliver the news that would change everything, David collapsed into the chair beside the bed exactly as Mira had seen him do.

She stood frozen in the doorway, trapped between dream and reality, between prophecy and powerlessness.

* * *

Sleep became the enemy.

Mira tried everything: sleeping pills that left her groggy but didn't stop the dreams, meditation apps that promised peaceful rest, even camping in her backyard where the unfamiliar sounds might keep her in lighter sleep. Nothing worked. The dreams came anyway, more frequent now, more vivid.

She dreamed of car accidents and found the mangled vehicles on the evening news. She dreamed of a fire consuming a downtown bookstore and watched the footage two days later. She dreamed of a child going missing and saw the amber alert flash across her phone screen before she was fully awake.

Each dream left her more isolated. How could she explain to her friends that she'd seen their breakups coming, their job losses, their small triumphs and devastating failures? How could she tell David that she'd known about their father before the phone rang, that she'd watched him grieve in her sleep?

Mira started a new journal, documenting each dream with clinical precision. Dates, details, outcomes. The evidence mounted: forty-seven dreams over three months. Forty-seven perfect predictions.

And in every single one, she was nothing but a witness.

* * *

The dream that broke her came on a Tuesday in October.

Mira stood in what looked like her own apartment, but the furniture was wrong—pushed against the walls as if someone had been searching for something. The front door hung open, and she could hear sirens in the distance growing closer. On her coffee table lay a letter with her name on it, the envelope torn open. She tried to read it, but the words kept shifting, reforming, staying just out of comprehension.

But she could see the letterhead clearly: Mercy General Hospital.

She woke to find herself already reaching for her phone, muscle memory activated before conscious thought. No missed calls. No messages. She checked the news, social media, anything that might explain the dream.

Nothing.

But the dread settled into her bones like winter cold, and she knew—with the certainty that had become her curse—that this dream was different. This one was about her.

Mira spent the day cleaning her apartment obsessively, as if she could somehow prevent the dream by eliminating chaos from her waking life. She double-checked the locks, called her landlord about the security system, even considered staying in a hotel.

But dreams don't care where you sleep.

The letter arrived on Thursday.

Mira's hands shook as she opened the envelope, seeing her name typed across expensive hospital stationery just as it had appeared in her dream. The words swam before her eyes, but their meaning was clear enough: abnormal results, further testing needed, please call to schedule.

She sat on her couch—the same couch she'd seen pushed against the wall in her dream—and understood the terrible mathematics of prophecy. She could see the future, but she couldn't change it. Every dream was a preview of a fate already written, a movie reel she was forced to watch but never edit.

The sirens in the distance weren't coming for an emergency.

They were coming for her.

Mira closed her eyes and tried to remember what peace felt like, back when dreams were just dreams and sleep was refuge instead of revelation. But that girl—the one who had drawn barns and believed in coincidence—felt like someone she'd only known in a dream.

And like all her dreams now, that innocence had become just another beautiful thing she could witness but never return to.

Outside her window, she could already hear the sirens beginning to wail.