In the year 2143, humanity eradicated sleep.
It started with research into cognitive efficiency—how much time we waste in unconsciousness, how many hours could be reclaimed. The answer had been elegant: a biochemical supplement that rendered sleep obsolete. No more exhaustion, no more downtime. Productivity skyrocketed. Society moved faster. And dreams—those aimless, nonsensical things—became relics of the past.
However, Dr Elias Voss had for some time been sensing a flicker at the edge of his mind, a shadow in his peripheral thoughts. Then, without warning, it happened.
The dream.
He had no word for it anymore. No precedent. It was like slipping into a long-forgotten language, one his mind had been starved of. A field stretched before him, golden and swaying, beneath a sky of impossible colours. And in the distance, a figure stood waiting.
When he woke, his body trembled. It was an outdated response, one humans had evolved beyond. But the dream had shaken something loose.
The next night, he welcomed it. And the next. And the next. Each time, the figure in the distance edged closer. Its shape was blurred, undefined, yet somehow familiar. Its presence pulsed with meaning.
By the tenth night, the figure of a man was visible before him. A face not his own, yet deeply his.
“You remember.”
A whisper, but it roared in his skull.
Voss felt… wrong. Off-kilter. As if he had glimpsed a truth his body no longer knew how to hold.
When he checked his vitals, he found something impossible. His brain—an organ fine-tuned for wakefulness, free of unnecessary functions—had begun producing theta waves. Dream waves. Primitive. Inefficient. Natural.
He ran the test again. Then a third time. But the data held.
His body had remembered how to dream.
Within a week, thousands of others reported the same symptoms—fragments of dreams slipping through the cracks of wakefulness. By the second week, the number was in the millions. Scientists scrambled for answers, governments issued statements of reassurance, but the truth was undeniable: humanity had spent a century suppressing an instinct, and now that instinct was clawing its way back.
Dr Elias Voss saw it in his colleagues, in the eyes of strangers. A subtle shift. People moving differently, pausing as if listening to something distant and unheard. Speech slowed, gazes lingered, hands would drift absently to their chests, as though trying to grasp something they couldn’t quite remember.
The dreams grew stronger.
Every night, Voss returned to the golden field beneath the impossible sky. And the figure—the one that was and wasn’t him—stood waiting.
“It’s time.”
The words were not spoken, yet he heard them.
“Time for what?” he asked.
The figure smiled. “To wake up.”
And just like that, Voss fell.
Not into wakefulness, but into something deeper, something beyond. The field peeled away, dissolving into light, and for the first time in his sleepless life, he felt it—the weight of something vast and forgotten.
Voss awoke gasping, covered in sweat—another sensation that shouldn’t exist. His body ached, his head throbbed, but beneath it all was something worse.
The presence was no longer confined to sleep.
It was here.
The monitors in his lab flickered erratically. Data streams scrolled with nonsense—letters rearranging into words, words into sentences.
WE REMEMBER YOU
The walls groaned, as though something enormous was shifting behind them.
Then, all at once, the world blinked.
The world didn’t end. Not in the way Voss expected.
It changed.
The first sign was the silence. A suffocating, unnatural stillness settled over the city. No hum of machines, no murmur of distant conversations, no rhythmic pulse of traffic. Even the air seemed heavier, as if something immense pressed down on reality itself.
Then came the distortions.
People reported déjà vu in cascading waves—entire hours repeating without explanation. Buildings flickered, their architecture twisting in ways that defied physics, as if their foundations had been forgotten and rewritten in real-time. A street Voss had walked every day, now ended in a sheer cliff, dropping into an expanse of shifting golden light.
The world was unravelling.
The message on his screen back at the lab had changed. The words pulsed with a slow, deliberate rhythm.
WE ARE DREAMING YOU
“Who?” he asked.
There was no reply, but he didn’t need one. He knew.
The presence in his dreams—the figure in the field—it was not a singular entity. It was an echo. A remnant of something vast and ancient, something that had been watching. Something that had been waiting.
And now, the dream was breaking back in.
Voss turned to the window, breath fogging the glass. Across the skyline, golden cracks split the fabric of the city, seeping light into the air. He watched as a skyscraper folded in on itself, becoming a spiral staircase winding up into a sky full of constellations that had never previously existed.
A man stood at the edge of a rooftop across the street. Voss tensed, fearing the inevitable, but the man did not fall. Instead, he stepped forward—and the air took him. He floated, weightless, moving as if pulled by unseen currents, disappearing into the sky.
Voss gripped the windowsill.
This wasn’t destruction.
Humanity was waking up from the long dreamless sleep.
And something was waiting on the other side.
The screen flickered again. The final message burned into his mind.
THE LOST DREAM IS OVER
NOW, YOU REMEMBER
And with that, Voss felt the ground dissolve beneath him—
—falling—
—rising—
—awakening—
Robert Walker 