Sara rarely remembers her dreams. She has no idea that she’s had more or less this same dream two or three nights a week since the beginning of the semester. She’s sitting there in the lecture hall, and if she were ever able to remember this dream she’d recognize it as the same seat she actually sits in every Tuesday and Thursday at nine-thirty in the morning. She’d recognize Dr. Wallabeck, too, and in the dream he’s wearing one of those dreadful patterned ties he always wears; he’s peering over his awful wire-rimmed glasses exactly the way he does in real life. Every detail of the lecture hall is captured by Sara’s subconscious with almost perfect accuracy, including her fellow students. Two rows in front of her is the tall redheaded girl whose name she can never recall and who nods off in the middle of almost every class; in her row and six seats to her left is Adam Walker, who lives directly above her in the dorm, with his huge thermos full of almost-but-not-quite-undrinkable dining hall coffee. In the dream Sara looks around and sees them and all the other faces she sees in class twice a week, and they’re all just as puzzled in the dream as they usually are in class.

Sara is the only person in the whole room who’s not. If she could remember the dream, she’d understand why: Dr. Wallabeck isn’t lecturing about angular momentum or torque or any of the other mystifying topics that make up Physics 121. Not now. Instead, the good doctor is talking about amino acids and protein structures, a topic that Sara just last week aced a quiz on in her Introductory Biochemistry course. It doesn’t seem the slightest bit odd to Sara that her physics professor is lecturing about biochemistry instead of physics…

Brian’s never properly met Sara, never actually spoken to her. He’s seen her quite often, though. In the dining hall, walking back from class, in the student union or the bookstore, in any one of a dozen other places on campus. Even, once, at a party, where he’d just about worked up the nerve to approach her before she disappeared for the night. But he doesn’t really know her; he doesn’t know anything about her that isn’t revealed in the student directory.

He’s dreaming about her anyway.

Not only about her; Sara is just one character in this dream. She’s there in a cheerleader outfit a size too tight, watching Brian, admiring him, cheering for him, shouting for him as he stands there on the basketball court about to hit the game-winning shot. Sara’s there, admiring and watching and cheering and shouting right alongside every other woman on campus that Brian is attracted to. All admiring and watching and cheering and shouting.

But for some reason Sara’s outfit is just a little tighter than anyone else’s; her voice is the tiniest bit louder than any of the others…

Sara is still in the lecture hall, still the only student in the whole room who’s not completely lost. She’s so far ahead of what Dr. Wallabeck is talking about now that her eyes and her mind begin to wander.

In the back of the room she sees her roommate, Beth. Sara is not surprised to see her in Physics, even though she knows that Beth isn’t actually taking the class. She’s also not surprised to see that all the students sitting near her are male. Long-legged, blonde-haired, beautiful Beth; of course the boys all look at her, she thinks, rather than plain old Sara.

Sara isn’t terribly bothered by this. First of all, Beth is not only her roommate but her best friend, and has been since halfway through the first semester of freshman year. Second, on a campus with twice as many men as women, Sara doesn’t really have to compete with Beth for male attention. The true competition is between Sara’s interest in male attention and her own generally quiet – verging on shy – nature, not to mention the extremely demanding course schedule that the pre-med program requires of her.

Suddenly, Sara isn’t in the lecture hall anymore. She’s sitting somewhere else, on metal bleachers inside a large gym. The bleachers are mostly filled, and every eye is directed towards a tall, dark-haired young man standing at the free-throw line, preparing to take the game-winning shot.

It takes her a moment to gather her bearings. Sara has no idea why she’s in a gym watching a basketball game: she has no friends on the team, and she doesn’t even like the sport. She has the oddest feeling that she doesn’t belong here at all, that she’s not supposed to be here. And then she sees herself down there on the court with the rest of the cheerleaders.

As soon as she sees that, she knows: this is not her dream anymore. It has nothing to do with her. The Sara in the cheerleader outfit is a character in someone else’s dream. She doesn’t know how she knows this, but she has no doubt whatsoever that it’s true. It’s crazy and it’s impossible and it’s happening just the same.

Sara doesn’t know what to do; this is so far out of her experience that she doesn’t even know where to begin. All she does know is that she’s in someone else’s mind – or somebody else is in hers. When the young man with the basketball looks up from the court and sees her, locks eyes with her, it’s all too much.

This isn’t supposed to be happening, Sara thinks, but she doesn’t know how to get out of his dream, any more than she knows how she got into it in the first place. And then panic sets in – what if she’s trapped here, what if she can’t ever get out of his mind, or throw him out of hers, whichever it is – and she begins screaming…