{“A Dream the Two of Us Share” 1}

I felt a sudden, brief shake.

I immediately woke up and remained still, sharpening my senses.

I thought it might have been an earthquake, but there was no further shaking after that one moment. The quiet remained, and the dark room around me, which I wasn’t used to seeing, didn’t seem to have changed at all.

Maybe I imagined it.

Perhaps I was just groggy from sleep. Just then, Miu stirred beside me, inching closer and clinging to my pajama top.

“Did you wake up too?”

As I asked her, I moved to hold her and noticed that she was trembling. Even though we were wrapped in a warm blanket, it was as if she were cold.

“What’s wrong?”

At my second question, Miu answered in a faint voice.

“I had a scary dream…”

She said it in a tone that seemed like she might cry at any moment.

If that’s the case, maybe the shake earlier was Miu flinching from her nightmare. For her to wake up trembling like this, it must have been really terrifying.

“What kind of dream was it?”

She didn’t answer my next question.

She just silently wrapped her arms around my back, clinging to me like I was a body pillow.

Maybe it was the kind of dream that she didn’t want to talk about, one that she didn’t even want to remember. Feeling bad for asking, I whispered in her ear.

“It’s okay. I’m here with you.”

When I hugged her back, Miu finally relaxed and sighed.

“Yeah…”

It had been a while since we started sleeping together, but this was the first time I’d been woken up like this in the middle of the night.

Once I fall asleep, I usually sleep soundly until morning. Occasionally, I wake up a little early and watch her sleep next to me, but most of the time, I wake up just before the alarm goes off.

Miu always sleeps well in the mornings, and I didn’t think she ever had nightmares in the middle of the night—at least not that I was aware of.

“Do you often have scary dreams?”

When I asked her, she slowly shook her head while still in my arms.

“Not that often. But I had one for the first time in a while tonight.”

Her reply made me feel a little relieved.

Miu seemed to be calming down as well. Her body was no longer trembling, and she didn’t seem cold anymore. Still clinging to me, she now spoke with a hint of frustration.

“It’s strange, isn’t it? I’m already an adult, but I woke up because of a scary dream.”

“Everyone has nightmares sometimes.”

I tried to comfort her.

In fact, people apparently keep having bad dreams no matter how old they get. My parents had once told me they’d woken up in a panic after dreaming they’d made a huge mistake at work. It seems adults have their own set of troubles.

“But Atsushi, you don’t have nightmares, right?”

“I’ve had them before too, though not recently… I think the last one was last summer.”

“Really?”

Right now, it seemed like Miu needed to hear about someone else’s experience more than simple reassurance. Maybe she just wanted to feel like she wasn’t the only one.

“What kind of scary dream did you have, Atsushi?”

Her voice was stronger than before as she asked, and I tried to recall my memory from last year.

“It was a dream where I had to participate in something like a battle royale.”

“That sounds like a movie.”

“Yeah, it was probably totally influenced by movies or manga. I was running from someone who was dead set on killing me, and I ended up hiding in a bathroom in a shopping mall. I didn’t want to kill anyone or get killed myself.”

The bathroom was a multipurpose stall with a sliding door. The light came on when I opened the door, and there was a tiled floor, a toilet, handrails, and even a baby-changing station. Even though it was a dream, the realistic details were kind of funny.

“But then I heard footsteps approaching from far away, and in the dream, I thought, ‘I have to fight or I’ll be killed.’ So I braced myself with a knife I was holding, and that’s when I woke up, still feeling tense.”

“Huh,” Miu said in a surprised voice.

“So it wasn’t like someone was coming and then you woke up?”

If it had been like that, I probably would have woken up with a bigger jolt. But instead, I just woke up still feeling tense, and afterward, I felt embarrassed that I’d had such a silly dream.

“I think, deep down, I realized it was a dream. I knew it would be easier if I just woke up. That’s probably why no one ever came, and nothing happened.”

As I spoke, Miu timidly lifted her head. In the dark room, I could see her eyes faintly shining. She wasn’t crying, but maybe she’d been tearing up a bit.

What kind of dream could have scared her so much?

While I was wondering that, Miu, sounding a bit dejected, said, “I wish I could have done that… I got so scared I flinched.”

“So that’s why I felt the bed shake,” I replied.