This chapter's theme song is 'Once In My Dreams' by Otherwise.

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight,

And his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."

- Oscar Wilde

I am the only child of Krypton who has ever dreamed.

Jor-El says that we can't dream; that we don't have anything like humans' REM sleep. He never dreamed, nor did my mother, nor my grandparents, nor any other Kryptonian ever recorded. It took me a long time to convince my father that I could, that I had.

It was my dreaming which finally prompted Jor-El to tell me that at the time of our planet's demise, Kryptonians had been grown in artificial wombs rather than being carried by their mothers. My mother, Lar'Ra-El, had spent her entire pregnancy in hiding: all three of us would have been executed if anyone had discovered that they'd conceived a child together. I was the first Kryptonian to be born from a living mother in more than three hundred cycles… and also, obviously, the last.

My father and I both wondered if the circumstance of my birth had anything to do with my ability to dream. Had it made me something more than I otherwise would have been? Were all my powers and abilities really just a result of Earth's stronger star and weaker gravity? Was my ability to dream a mimicry of human sleep-visions that my brain had learned to produce through some sort of psychosis or osmosis? Or… would I have been a hero on Krypton, too, had the planet survived?

Neither Jor-El nor I can answer that question definitively. We'll never truly know.

So I shouldn't be able to dream… yet, I do. It doesn't happen often, and it's almost always a nightmare about someone I didn't save. When you do Superman's job, some of the shit you see can't be unseen. It's no surprise I have nightmares occasionally: I'm lucky I don't have full-blown PTSD.

The night after I'd caught Evie the first time, I had a nightmare about her. At first, I hoped it might be a good dream. That maybe in this dream, I'd do something completely foolish, like kiss her right there on the street in my full Superman getup… but instead, it took a horrifying turn for the worse. I didn't get to her in time.

When I told Evie about the dream later, I didn't tell her exactly how gruesome it had been. I was so close when she'd hit the pavement that I'd heard the sickening crunch of all her bones being broken at once, the meaty splat as her organs were obliterated. I'd worn a streak of gore down my front; bits of bone and muscle and a thick, gloppy coating of blood. I don't know why I did it, but I went back to the scene and stood looking down at her mangled corpse. The nightmare had rattled me; both because of its gruesome nature and because I'd already saved Evelyn. Hadn't I?

It was the first time I'd had a dream that wasn't a recollection of something, either pleasant or unpleasant, which had already happened.

Then Evelyn landed on me one random Friday afternoon, when I was flying around just to be visible and had no particular route or purpose in mind. The moment I realized that she had been jumping and not falling, I understood the dream. As I spoke with Evie, I realized that it would take more than Superman to really and truly rescue her… she needed me. Not Superman… and not Clark, either… but me.

As she stood before me in the white dress, I had finally understood the dream's significance. Evelyn and I were both broken people: painfully alone and with pasts that had brutalized us. I could tell myself that I'd chosen my lone-wolf lifestyle, even if the truth was that I had become almost cripplingly afraid of letting anyone get close. Evie had come by her solitude through the painful losses of her loved ones… and she'd given up hope of ever finding love in this world again. I can't really describe the feeling I got as I stood there looking at her. I somehow understood and completely believed that by giving her my heart, I could save us both.

There had been no fear in me that night. I did not dream; after I spent half the night watching Evelyn I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep, and woke feeling somehow renewed. The fear did come back… but it was a ghost of itself, more like worry and concern. I couldn't stop myself from worrying that I'd do or reveal something that would finally make her run for the hills. I was concerned for her safety, and worried that the unusual demands of a relationship with someone like me would be more than her fragile mind could handle.

But that second night, she cooked me a gargantuan dinner and told me I couldn't leave the table until I was full. She only asked me one question about Krypton, in the context of asking about my religion. Evie wanted to know about me, about all the things she would have discussed with a normal human man: my religion, my political ideology, my favorite color and food and song. Sitting there chatting with her, full and relaxed, sipping a beer… I felt normal, in a way I haven't felt normal since I was a little kid. And Evelyn… I was starting to see the sort of person she was, who she would be again once her grief was ended and her sorrows laid to rest.

As I slept in her bed that night, with her curled beneath my left arm, I dreamed of her again. We were shopping for a house in the suburbs… because Evie was heavily pregnant with our twins.

The dream itself was so poignant that I can't say it was a nightmare. The worry didn't start until I woke up beside her. For two weeks I worried in secret that her birth control had somehow failed. Google taught me a lot more about the human female reproductive cycle than I ever expected I'd need to know, and didn't even have the decency to leave me feeling reassured. There were plenty of stories from women who claimed to have used their chosen method correctly and still conceived.

Time proved Evie's medicine to be effective, and eventually my worry turned to speculation. The first dream had been a clear message that I couldn't save her just by getting to her before she hit the ground… but the message hadn't become clear until she had fallen into me. So what did the second dream signify? Did it mean that it was possible for us to have children together? Or was it just my subconscious making a wish, finally learning to express something through dreams instead of simply replaying a memory?

Both possibilities were incredible and beautiful.

I didn't tell Evelyn about the dream. I thought about it a lot, and in the end decided that telling her would do more harm than good. A pregnancy scare might have been too much for her to handle emotionally on the heels of a suicide attempt. If it didn't stress her overmuch… it might have had the opposite effect, giving her false hope for a thing that wasn't actually possible. It made me feel a little guilty to keep it to myself… and if Evie had ever asked about my dreams I wouldn't have lied to her… but I have enough nightmares that she might have been afraid to ask what I see in my sleep. I told myself that if a dream was the only thing I ever kept from her, I was still on very high moral ground.

I couldn't have known that I was only saving that dream for the perfect moment… a moment which would not come for a long time.