AN: A shout out to my beta reader A Markov who helped me improve immensely. A Markov is a great writer, check out his work!

Playing catch

There is always a catch. Life is a catch! I suggest you catch it while you can. – Flemeth, Dragon Age

A rush of memories assaulted me and pounded relentlessly against my psyche. They induced a headache so severe that I lost focus, lost time and lost any ability to retain information. My mind was breaking: it was not ready to handle this sudden influx of information for this was unnatural. People were not supposed to remember past lives, especially not new born babes. If I didn't deal with this information soon, I would go insane. Already, I could feel a fight impulse building, responding in time with a strange stimulus in my body.

The only escape I found was in sleep, so, I slept. A lot.

And in my sleep, I discovered a hidden resource. A land of dreams.

In my previous life, dreaming was normal, trivial even. Lucid dreaming was barely worth mentioning. Even controlling your dreams was quite common unless a person's subconscious came out to play, which in the end, amounted to the same thing. But this was nothing like that. It was like being in a different plane of existence, one that could simulate anything that you could think of and be completely conscious of it. If I extended my consciousness beyond my body, I could exert absolute control over the plane and receive information in return. I called it "extending my aura", and did exactly that as I played, designing landscapes around me as if I were god.

Huh.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was that I could slip between this dream world and the waking one easily. Regardless, it was the land of dreams that presented a solution to my problem.

My memories swam in front of me as they always did, pushed aside so that it couldn't hurt me. Today, I was trying to go through them one at a time, in the hopes that finishing it all consciously would make them fade. One memory was of me burning data onto a CD and then packing it away.

It was ingenious. It was obvious. It was ultimately foolish, in hindsight.

I compressed the memories in front of me, in the way that I remembered studying that these disks stored information; laser lights that stored information in 0s and 1s. But the brain worked with electric impulses so instead of numbers I used different voltages to compress this information that would only activate when I 'played' the disk. Then, I tried to burn them onto a rock.

I failed. What I created, instead, was a raging green fire that burned my left hand until weird squiggly lines appeared on them.

I woke with a jolt, shocked to feel a similar burning sensation on my left hand.

Hadn't that just been a dream?

I started wailing.

Lucidity returned even as I bawled. My mother, it seemed, was a tribeswoman. She was attired in hunter gear, with a large bow fastened onto her back. To add to my theory, her reaction to seeing a third degree burn on a toddler was severely subdued. When she noticed the burn on my hand, she only froze momentarily in concern before dismissing it with a sigh. Such an injury probably seemed negligible to her when compared to the dangers of her profession.

For what seemed like the first time in months, she lifted me up into the air and brought me cautiously in front of her face, rocking me back and forth. There was an odd cut that ran across the bridge of her nose and disappeared under a brown eye patch.

Where did that come from? Oh, wait, she's a tribeswoman.

I looked up and saw her hair tied up, flyaways brushing some odd appendage flapping down the side of her head. The appendage reminded me of Bugs Bunny's ears. Or rabbit ears, as it were.

What?!

I focused on her features and a belated realization dawned on me. She wasn't human.

I was surrounded by aliens.

It's okay. It's okay. If I was right and I'd been reborn then it was foolish to assume that in all the infinite planes and species in the cosmos, I'd be reincarnated on Earth as a human. Being the baby that I was, I was probably an alien too. Or I was the alien to them.

I am the alien.

It felt like a life-changing epiphany. It really shouldn't have been, especially with all the hints around me pointing to the fact that I was in a different world. But the realization brought an aching chasm of loneliness I couldn't shake. I need someone, anyone.

The woman carrying me was my mother; there was no bond more sacred than that. I sighed in relief. And suddenly, it registered that there had been no lullabies for months. The hugs, the soft brushes across my face, the nuzzling, the light kisses on my forehead, they had all stopped. Why? Did she know? In the few months I'd been reborn, I'd never left the wooden structure I called home. Was this why? Was she ashamed of me because I was an alien?

I focused on her face and noticed she looked very serious as she babbled some nonsense at me. She kept me at her hip as she lifted my left hand to her face and amazingly, carried me out of the wooden structure that was home.

As it was the first time I had ever been outside, I stopped crying and turned excitedly, trying to take in all the sights. We were in a forest of some kind, and there was a very tribal setup around the campsite. There were a surprising number of people going about their day, churning pots and cutting different plants and vegetables. There was a man working with weapons on the side and a very primitive chemical lab on the opposite end. It reminded me of the poor in my last life who huddled together and shared the few resources that they had.

All of them had different kinds of bunny ears with weird drawings on their faces.

Mama took me straight to an authoritative man seated at the centre of the village. He was full of smiles and laughter, entertaining a group of children.

Mama said something and held out my left hand, dispersing the crowd around him. The man looked young, only barely old enough to be my father. He was my father, right? Why else would she take me to see him?

He stood in concern and approached me quickly, grasping my hand gently as he observed the squiggly lines on my hand. He made a sound of muted dismay and shifted his gaze to me, pressing his palm to my face and neck. I was abruptly handed off to him and there was another exchange of nonsense.

I'm getting the impression I did something I wasn't supposed to.

There was a sudden wave of force against my being, like wind buffeting against me and I yelped in outrage. When the wave came again, I started crying. Who wouldn't? Nothing made sense. My mother wasn't helping, and a strange man was attacking me, trying to blow me away. I was powerless to do anything to stop them.

This is wrong. This isn't how people should react to their baby getting injured. Why weren't they treating the burn? Why were they attacking me? I felt so sluggish; I could barely muster any emotion except the need to cry. I cried mostly because of the pain, not because my mother apparently had no maternal instinct in her body.

There was a jolt of electricity in my left hand and I shuddered in pain before the memories hit me again, playing from the beginning like a movie. But this time, I noticed the man stood in a trance, likely seeing the same images as me.

NO! He had no right! There was another shock and the images stopped.

I screamed bloody murder.

There was a commotion around me, and the man took me inside a private tent. My mother didn't follow me.

I hoped that neither of these adults were my parents.

I lived with the man, the leader, after that. Mama came to see me sometimes, but I suspect it was more to see the leader than me. She'd give me the obligatory check then scuttle off to her do her work.

Months passed, and I tried to be normal. I learned how to crawl, then walk. An accidental "baba" from my mouth resulted in the leader beaming in joy and peppering me in kisses. That was the first word in that language to enter my vocabulary. His reaction confused me; was he my father?

I didn't spend much time with my mother. The abandonment hurt. Curiosity prompted a jaunt into the dream world to find out why; I had stabbed my mother in the eye when I gained awareness in this world. She feared me. And for me. There was a huge bundle of complicated emotions that I couldn't make sense of.

However, Baba wasn't the same. He seemed accepting of my abilities, though sometimes I'd see a look in his eyes that I couldn't decipher. I ignored it, and just assumed that he thought I was a lazy baby especially since I continued to sleep a lot.

But from then on, I refrained from using the strange stimulus that transcended both the waking and dreaming. I couldn't trust them. Either of them.

These occurrences made me realise that whoever I was before, I couldn't be that person again. It was a different world, with different mechanics and rules, and to survive I had to adapt to it.

But when I was alone, I took comfort in those old memories. I even tried to relearn the scientific and mathematical knowledge from that world, trying to find anything useful that I could apply to this world.

The dream world was my refuge. The one place where I could do what I wanted.

I was reliving my old memories again, trying to recapture that feeling of being loved unconditionally by my parents. I missed it. I wanted it. So very badly.

Suddenly there was feeling that I was being watched.

I momentarily freaked, because I was dreaming. Who spies on dreams? But it was a new plane of existence, and in all the ways that mattered, I was a new born babe to the ways of this world. There was nothing to fear. I was the alien. I just had to deal with this like I was a new immigrant to a new country This calmed me down, and I took a deep breath.

I dismissed the memories away, watching them dissipate into green fumes that retreated into my left hand.

Longing came over me and nearly overwhelmed me. Longing to go home, go back to the universe that made sense to me. And I could, all I had to do was…give in? To what?

Hello?

"Hello?"

There was mild surprise that I identified as a foreign emotion.

"Hello? Is someone there?"

"You can speak. Babes your age can rarely speak so well."

The voice echoed around me, as if coming from all directions.

"But being the place this is, I shouldn't be surprised. Tell me child, do you want to go home?" The voice echoed with mocking laughter.

Oh. A land of dreams, that I could easily manipulate like a god. A voice speaking to me from around me. Was this some afterlife plane that I gained access to because I died? Maybe this was a god?

I was surprised religion had the right of it.

"Do you want to go home, child? Back where you came from? I can help." The voice suddenly changed and became soothing and gentle.

If the tone of its voice hadn't changed so abruptly, I would have bought it. That was the only clue that things weren't as they appeared, and despite being a toddler, I still retained some sense of dishonesty. Or perhaps children were better at spotting it.

Alien. Adapt. Just like an immigrant.

"I miss home, but I'm fine where I am. Hello. Where are you?"

"I'm around you. Do you want to see me?"

"If you'd like?"

A frustrated feeling that was foreign washed over me. A dark indistinguishable figure materialized in the periphery of my vision and I turned trying to get a clearer image. It was hard making out a face, as if I was looking at a pixelated image.

"Hi! It's nice to meet you."

Surprised amusement filled the area, "Meeting babes really is a novelty. What do you desire, child?"

I was picking up a theme here. "Are you here to grant wishes or something? Are you a genie?"

Laughter filled the air again. "Yes, whatever you wish. I can grant you power, anything you desire."

This was too easy. In a world where I couldn't even trust my parents, a genie randomly approached me in my dreams to grant me wishes? If the world was really that magical, why were my parents living in an impoverished tribe instead of magical palaces with unicorns? Where was the "foolish" wand waving? Where was Hogwarts?

But, I had to admit, the con was nearly successful. It played on all the assumptions I made.

This time, I was the one who laughed. "We haven't even done introductions. What's your name? Who are you?" Because asking what are you was just offensive.

The figure seemed to glow a little brighter. "I am Desire. I move people into getting what they want, I am not necessity but a want, I make life worth living. I hear all the yearnings of people and provide the ambition to fulfil their life."

It was an emotion. A sentient emotion. Aside from being all kinds of weird, the previous questions suddenly made sense. Desire wanted to know what my desires were. This was like Inside Out. Was I in my inside?

I tried making eye contact with Desire. Its eyes seemed glow brighter. "What do you desire, for I am inside you and can help you achieve it."

It felt like I was under a trance, but there was a fullness in my head and a compulsion to answer. I tried to expel that feeling from me and felt a migraine build up.

"There's too much inside already. What a pity. A somniari like you already filled up."

I couldn't affect pleasantness anymore. Desire had just tried to mind control me and proven it was hostile.

I didn't know what it was. I didn't know how to fight it. The land of dreams wasn't safe for me anymore.

I could only wake up.