I don’t have dreams. Or at least I don’t remember them. I forget them enough to not really know what they feel like or what separates them from real life. Every so often, though, I feel like I am experiencing something I dreamed before. I don’t know if that’s just regular déjà vu or if I cannot remember my dreams in waking hours because they really are prophetic.

Every so often I wake up feeling seven feet tall. My feet hang off the end of the bed and the bathroom doorway feels like I have to hunch through it. As far as I know, I haven’t grown in ten years and should still be five-foot-three, but at my most recent physical the doctor said I was five-foot-four.

“You must be stretching,” she smiles.

“Huh,” I say. “How about that.”

My friend Junko dreams all the time. Most times we talk, he mentions some strange dream he had involving friends of his I’ve never met. We sit in the coffee shop on Main Street that I chose a long time ago because no one else I know ever goes there. The booths are big and we are both too short for our heads to stick over the top of them. The coffee cups are deep enough to sip for an hour from without seeing the bottom. One cookie is always plenty for two people to share. Two men sit behind us discussing a state college’s softball team from a state we are not sitting in.

“Don’t you have a friend named Dan?” Junko asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Why?”

Junko laughs. “I had a dream about him, I think.”

I narrow my eyes. The two of them have never met. They live three thousand miles apart.

“What makes you say that?” I ask.

“I had a dream about a guy named Dan, light hair, leading a group of college football players in a campus tour. They all stab him at the end. Or at least when I wake up.”

I ask Junko to describe the young man a bit more. It’s the spitting image of Dan. Short, straight back, wide smile.

“Weird,” I say.

“Yeah,” Junko agrees. “At least he’s not actually a tour guide.”

I frown. “But he is.”

“Oh,” says Junko. “That’s weird.”

We spend the afternoon sitting on the beach barefoot. I swear my toes feel like they’re getting extra knuckles. The sand didn’t used to be this fine, but I guess the tide’s moved up in recent years. The other day I saw the water reach the bottom of the cliffs. Usually it’s bobbing in and out a hundred feet away. The water’s close enough to me now that I can put my hand in it and wait for one of the giant pieces of knobby seaweed to graze up against my fingers. Or maybe it’s a fish. Or a crab. These days it’s hard to know what to expect.

We walk up to the top of the cliffs. The whole town got the tsunami warning this morning and want to see what’s going to happen when the aftershocks reach the Pacific coast. My brother and I don’t have too much in common, but we both have a reckless streak, and we want to see how close we can get to the action.

After an hour, the tide’s risen maybe three feet at most. 

“Huh,” my brother says.

“You think it’s worse elsewhere?” I ask.

“Maybe. But here it’s pretty underwhelming,” he replies. We head inland.

He’s usually tall enough to put his armpit over the top of my head, but today I have to crouch down to fit underneath his arm. He asks if I’ll play basketball with him later. I say no and tell him his armpit smells like hell. One of his friends down the street sees us.

“Is that your girlfriend?” the kid asks.

I make a face and my brother shoves me. “Ew, this is my sister, man.”

“Oh, dude. No way!” his friend responds. “The one who was always scared of me? When did you get so big?”

I sigh and we walk home five feet apart.

My mother tells me my phone’s been ringing, so I run to go grab it. On the other end of the line, one of my college friends tells me Dan’s died. It’s all hard to remember after that.

In the following weeks, I fly back to school and join his family and friends for the funeral. I want to be there for everyone, but it feels hard to talk about. No one wants to say anything.

“It wasn’t … he didn’t get stabbed, did he?” I ask someone quietly one evening when we’re all sitting morosely around in a living room.

“No, it was food poisoning,” they answer. “Explosive piece of meat.”

“Huh,” I say. “Okay.”

I wake up sweating on the couch of my brother’s apartment. It feels like a weight is pushing in on me from all sides. I scramble up, crawl to the bathroom and vomit my guts out into the toilet. Everything is hot and stretched and empty. Afterward, I crumble onto the floor, my limbs awkwardly folding in on themselves. It’s the first dream in seven years I’ve remembered.

“I’ve got a headache. I feel like I need some fresh air,” I say. “Can we go to the beach?”

My brother tilts his head. “Nearest body of water is the Sound. About a half hour trip. I’ve got work today, though. You can go on your own.”

I don’t have cash on me and my ATM card keeps getting declined, so I decide to walk all the way there. At some point, I reach Seattle. Someone asks me for cash but I don’t have any. I end up walking into the Gates Foundation Museum because it’s free, even if it’s propaganda. It’s raining so I walk through the whole exhibit on malaria, pretending I’m a kid and way more interested in infectious diseases than I actually am. Eventually I get to a library space and lie down on one of the couches there.

I don’t remember getting home, just that I’m once again on Main Street with Junko soon after. We go to the post office to check his box. He asks me to reach it because I’m taller than him now. I ask if I always was.

He laughs. “Yeah, I think so.”

In the pile of mail I pull out is a postcard I sent him a few days ago. I forget what I wrote but I remember picking out the humpback whale design.

“Why do you keep sending me postcards, man?” he asks. “We live, like, five miles apart.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s just funny.”

Another hand-addressed envelope sits in the pile with writing I don’t recognize. “It’s from Dan, apparently,” Junko says. “Says he got sent your paycheck.”

“Why did he send it to you?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Junko shrugs. “Must have known you were living here.”

We keep walking for a few more miles, down along the trail with that bridge that keeps getting closed for repairs. It’s got a barricade across it now but it’s easy to climb anyway.

“Let’s go down to the beach,” Junko suggests.

“Nah,” I reply. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment.”

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing, just a physical for school,” I say.

It’s now been years since I’ve had a dream I can remember. I keep asking Junko what they feel like, but he doesn’t know how to describe them. Says they feel like real life, honestly. Every so often, I find myself calling Dan just to make sure he’s still alive. “You’re just anxious, dude,” he laughs. “One dream doesn’t mean I’m just gonna up and die.”

“But it was two dreams!” I insist.

“Whatever,” he says. “That’s weird, but it’s just a coincidence.”

We don’t talk about it further. I resist the urge to question why Junko had a dream about Dan despite having never met or seen him. I don’t want to freak anyone out.

The next morning I find that my jeans are slightly too short, so I roll up the cuffs to make it look deliberate. “You look like Mom,” my brother quips.

“Don’t tell me that,” I sigh. “She’s still taller, right?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Hard to tell the difference.”

That evening, our dog kills our cat on the front lawn. The dog probably did more than just kill her, too, because we can see little bits of thrown-up cat in the dried grass. We hold a little funeral for her in the backyard and my mother says with a small smile that she’ll plant catnip over the grave. That cat hated me most out of everyone, but I still feel like crying.

“Don’t worry about it,” my brother sighs. “We all die someday.”

“I don’t want to think about that,” I say.

“Come on,” he says. “It’s just how life goes.”

“You’re not helping,” I reply.

“What?” he asks. “I’m just telling you the truth.”

I massage my shins. “Growing pains,” as my mother calls them. I know nothing’s really wrong, but the dull ache in my legs makes it hard to fall asleep.

Maybe that’s why I don’t dream. You have to achieve a certain level of calm, or something like that. REM sleep. I don’t know what that is but I probably don’t get enough of it.

The doctor tells me to take multivitamins because I don’t get enough B12, so I try to remind myself of it when I wake up in the morning. I get up and reach for the cup of water on the dresser, passing over the journal that was meant to help me remember dreams but that I never fill out in time. It’s not like I have much to say in there anyway.

Maybe dreams don’t always have images, just emotions. Most of the time I wake up with a feeling I can’t shake, like fear or hope or sadness. One night I see a vivid image of the man who will eventually come to stab my brother. I wake up and check the front door — it’s unlocked, so I lock it — but no one is in the house who isn’t supposed to be, not that night or the next. The memory of the dream doesn’t fade, though. It doesn’t feel hazy or dreamlike. It was a real memory in my head and I remember that man’s face as well as I remember my own brother’s. I draw it in my sketchbook just to be sure.

My brother doesn’t live here anymore, so I shouldn’t even be worrying about him. He’s got his own apartment up in Washington and a full-time job. We really are all growing up, I guess.

Sometimes, I still feel like I’m predicting things, though. The remembered dreams are so few and far between that they have to count for something. I have them all written down, five in my life in total. Turtle dream (recurring) — ages 3 through 5. Carrot dream — age 4. Forest stampede — age 12. Dan’s funeral, my brother’s murderer — who knows. Five dreams. Five predictions. Five ways everything could end.

I guess there’s nothing left to do but keep an eye out. The catnip plant sprawls out across the garden. Junko and I still get coffee once or twice a year. My brother has two different locks on his doors. Dan’s considering vegetarianism. I’m old enough I probably shouldn’t be getting taller, but maybe I am still growing. Or maybe it really is just the stretching.