"You lived a fantasy in your dreams as a child, only to wake up living the fantasy as an adult?"

The doctor sitting across from me as I relaxed on the couch in their office was derisive and demeaning. How was I going to explain?

I started talking. Telling her what I remembered. Crystal clear and proven, because I had Elanor Delancy's obituary on my computer and a conversation with her parents in email archives.

"My favorite dream as a child was to be a princess, like Belle, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, or Snow White. My parents made the wish come true. I was dying of cancer. Leukemia was ravaging my blood and I was weaker each day as chemotherapy sapped my strength and my immune system. At ten I understood I wasn't going live much longer.

My parents whispered of healing sleep, a myth I thought, until I went to bed one night and woke there. As a princess in a deep jungle city with drums beating and priests calling for me to wake from my trance.

"Citlali come back to us. Guide us like the star you are named for. Citlali be our light, as you always were."

I stretched, languorously like the jungle cats I came to love in my dreams. How I knew where I was and who I was, didn't matter, just that I was alive and not suffering bone deep pain anymore.

Mayan. Like the last lessons I studied in school. I thought their lives had a lovely rhythm and respect for nature. I struggled to remember what role religion had. How was I a grown woman?

"I have had such a strange vision. Of the future or perhaps the past, I know not. A child, ill, dying, and somehow a part of me now."

"Delusions, Caitlyn. You are merely a woman of Mayan descent."

She didn't even let me finish. Her practice description on the internet wasn't even close to what she doing now.

"I guess I was wrong about you doctor. I was hoping you could help me untangle this. Since you won't believe it happened, then I'll call this our last appointment." I swung my legs off the couch and sat up.

"And I'll recommend you be held for assessment."

"To who? I don't have a family here. I'm a single independent woman who stepped into your office on a falsely advertise premise." I lied. I had to protect the ones I love.

I stared her down. Her watery blue eyes slid away from mine, and I opened the door, walking straight out into the hallway and down the hall to the stairwell.

And I was running again, as the chanting in my mind pulled me back.

I can't keep doing this. Bit's and pieces of other lives as I try to help guide my husband and children through the maze of life in the jungle. I hear their call.

"Citlali, Citlali, come back to us."

The traditions of our culture ground and guide us, but I cannot understand these flashes of other lives. And she pulled me back to her once more. I was Elanor, and I am Caitlyn now. Between us stands Citlali. Star and guide to the Mayan leader of Chichen Itza. Something connected us and I have to find a way to disconnect.

Why now? I was living near the ruins, but that shouldn't matter. Our wild chocolate plantation was thriving, and I didn't have time for this distraction.