Page 24 of Chasing Dreams
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“I have a hard time getting back to sleep if I wake up during the night,” he said.
“No problem.” She settled on a sofa and pulled her feet up beneath her, trying to separate the reality of here and now from the equally convincing reality of her dream.
“You already know how to tell which dreams are precognitive,” he said.
She nodded. She knew the difference. And she couldn’t pawn off her last dream as anything other than what it was. The knowledge left her dazed—and a little ashamed. She barely knew him.
“Have you ever gone anywhere without a map?”
“Now that you’ve mentioned it, I guess so.”
“There are things that you know in a part of your brain that has no language. You don’t have to tell me how you know them. It doesn’t matter. Just tell me the things you know. Don’t let your emotions interfere.”
She couldn’t help a smile. “I know what you’re asking.”
“Go ahead,” he urged, and reached over to switch on a table lamp. The warm light revealed his dark hair, attractively mussed. He sat across from her. Against her will, her attention dropped to his feet with their sprinkling of dark hair across the tops. “Elevators?” he prompted.
Shaine stifled her physical reaction to the man, and concentrated on his thought-provoking questions. “Sometimes I find myself standing in front of one before it ever dings,” she replied. “Then it arrives and I get on, thinking that it was a coincidence.”
He nodded.
Caught up in that revelation, she went on. “Once I went to the library for a book I needed for some research, and I didn’t go to the catalogs first. I took the elevator to the right floor, got off and walked directly to the shelf. There was the book.” She paused briefly. “Sometimes it’s like I’m so preoccupied that I don’t take time to think how I arrived somewhere or found something, and I don’t give myself any time to think about it afterward.”
“You’ve set up some self-preservation skills,” he said. “You’ll need to look at those and realize why you’ve done it. Then get rid of them.”
“You’re talking like you’re teaching me how to use this so-called gift,” she said warily.
“No. You have to understand it in order to not use it. How about parking places?”
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“Do you drive right up to a parking place close to a store?”
“No. Can you?”
“I could at one time.”
“That’s incredible.”
“And your library book isn’t?”
She shrugged.
“This is something you feel in kinesthetic form, a physical sensation somewhere in your body,” he said.
“Yes.” She understood his explanation clearly. “It’s a feeling like when you drop something and you think it’ll hit your toe, so you move your foot instinctively. That sensation between the dropping and the landing is what it’s like.”
He studied her with a new respect, she thought, though she couldn’t figure out why. And when he spoke, the single word came out as though he were in awe. “Exactly.”
“Is that how you felt the victims, too?” she asked.
He glanced down at his mug. “Sort of.”
“Tell me. Tell me what you felt when you touched their things.”
