I had a dream about my sister last night.

We were in a vast field, which was very dark because it was the weird time between daylight and full night. Her face was shadowed and I couldn't see it clearly. The sky was dusky and the grass was muted green, flat where we were standing and knee-high around us. I was so angry at her, we had been fighting. I don't remember what about. We were both very young, just kids. She said something that made me so damn mad, and I took out my gun and fired into the sky, in a somehow mopey way. I wanted to shoot her, but not really. That's why I fired into the sky. I watched as the bullet (which was about the width of a penny and flat on both ends) flew up in an arc, slowly, and landed in the right side of her head, breaking away a large piece of her skull. I saw her face finally, as it went dead. She fell to the ground. I had killed her. A moment passed, I could hear the breeze around me. And then I started screaming. I threw down my gun like it was poison and I screamed and screamed and screamed because I thought that if I screamed loudly enough, it would shake everything back into the way it had been, before I had killed her. My whole being was consumed with grief in an instant. I had killed her, she was dead and it was all my fault, and there was NOTHING I could do to take it back.

Then the dream switched, seeming to be an entirely different dream. I was a teenager, sitting with my mom and dad. They were married and we all lived together, a happy family. In the middle of breakfast with them, I had a flashback to killing my sister in the field. I thought It wasn't a dream. I actually killed her. I started to freak out. I tried to tell my parents what I had done all those years ago, but they wouldn't listen to me. They kept telling me to forget it, that it didn't really happen. But I knew it did, and I knew they were trying to make me forget so things wouldn't be difficult and sad. I kept pushing it, I kept telling them that I had to tell people what I did, but they kept dismissing me. I knew I would probably go to jail. I didn't want to, but it was better than silently living with what I had done.

Then I woke up.