# DON'T DREAM
## Chapter 2: Drowned in Dry Sheets
---
I have spent my entire life believing in one fundamental truth: everything has an explanation.
Ghosts are electromagnetic anomalies misinterpreted by pattern-seeking brains. UFOs are weather balloons, satellites, or military aircraft seen from unfamiliar angles. Haunted houses are old structures with poor ventilation and subsonic frequencies that trigger primal fear responses. Every mystery, every unexplained phenomenon, every whispered legend—they all dissolve under the harsh light of rational inquiry.
I am Jason Reeves. I host *Debunked*, Greystone High's most popular podcast. I have dismantled forty-seven supernatural claims in three years of broadcasting, and I have never—not once—encountered something I couldn't explain.
Until now.
Derek Holston's body lay twisted on the floor of the circular chamber, and for the first time in my life, I had no explanation at all.
---
The first hour after waking was chaos.
Students screamed. Students cried. Students pressed themselves against the now-open doors, fighting to escape the room where Derek's corpse still lay cooling against the marble floor. I stood apart from it all, forcing myself to observe rather than react, cataloging details with the desperate precision of someone trying to outrun terror with data.
*Observation one: Derek's body shows signs consistent with a fall from significant height. Estimated minimum: forty feet, based on the compound fractures visible in his limbs and the compression of his ribcage.*
*Observation two: The ceiling of the chamber is approximately thirty feet at its highest point. Even if he had somehow climbed to the apex, the fall distance is insufficient to cause this level of trauma.*
*Observation three: Security footage, if it exists, would show him lying motionless in the chair. Multiple witnesses confirm he never stood up after the gas rendered us unconscious.*
*Conclusion: Impossible.*
I don't believe in impossible. I *can't* believe in impossible. The moment you accept that something defies explanation, you open the door to superstition, to fear, to the kind of magical thinking that destroys lives and builds cults.
But Derek Holston was dead, and the laws of physics had apparently received a memo I hadn't.
"Everyone needs to calm down!" Mr. Henley's voice cracked as he tried to assert authority over a situation that had shattered his understanding of the world as thoroughly as it had mine. He stood near the console, hands shaking, face the color of old milk. "We need to—we should—the authorities will—"
"What authorities?" Tyler Morrison's voice cut through the chaos like a blade. The principal's son had recovered faster than most, and he stood near the sealed doors with the entitled posture of someone accustomed to having problems fixed for him. "Our phones were dead. They just came back with that—that *message*. You think anyone's coming to help us?"
The message. I'd seen it on my phone like everyone else—white text on black background, clinical and precise, explaining rules that shouldn't exist for a game that couldn't be real.
*RULE TWO: DREAMING IS NOT PERMITTED.*
My rational mind rejected it immediately. Dreams are neurological phenomena. They're the brain's way of processing information, consolidating memories, performing maintenance on the complex machinery of consciousness. You can't *ban* dreams any more than you can ban digestion or respiration.
And yet Derek Holston was dead, and the only explanation that fit the evidence was one I refused to accept.
"We need to leave," Kai Chen said, appearing at my side. His usual manic energy had crystallized into something harder, more focused. "Right now. Before anything else happens."
"The doors are open," I pointed out, gesturing toward the corridor beyond the circular chamber. "No one's stopping us."
"Exactly." His eyes narrowed. "Doesn't that seem wrong to you?"
It did. The sealed doors had opened after we regained consciousness, as if the facility *wanted* us to leave this room. As if this chamber had served its purpose and we were being herded toward whatever came next.
"We should reconvene in the lobby," Mira Santos said, her voice steadier than I expected given the tremor in her hands. "Take stock of who's here, who's... not here. Figure out our next steps."
It was a reasonable plan. Rational. Exactly the kind of methodical approach I would have suggested if my brain hadn't been stuck in an infinite loop of *this is impossible, this is impossible, this is impossible*.
The students who could still move began filtering toward the exit. Some supported classmates who remained too shaken to walk unaided. Others kept their distance from everyone, as if trauma might be contagious. I saw Ashley Chen helping Sophie Martinez to her feet—an unexpected kindness from someone I'd always written off as vapid and self-absorbed.
Crisis reveals character, I suppose. Or maybe it just scrambles the usual hierarchies beyond recognition.
"Someone should stay with the body," I heard myself say. "Preserve the scene for when—"
"When what?" Kai interrupted. "When the police arrive? You saw the message, Jason. You think this is a situation the police are equipped to handle?"
"I think this is a situation where we need to gather evidence before we—"
"Before we what? Write a podcast episode about it?"
The words hit harder than they should have. I saw Lily's face in my mind—her crayon drawings of monsters, her absolute certainty that something lurked in the dark. I'd dismissed her fears with logic and condescension, and she'd died alone in the night while I slept in the next room.
Maybe logic wasn't always the answer. Maybe sometimes the thing hiding in the dark was real.
"Let's just go," I said quietly. "We can come back for evidence later."
If there was a later.
---
The lobby was exactly as we'd left it hours ago—dusty, dim, that wave-shaped reception desk still coated in neglect. The main entrance doors, the ones we'd walked through with such naive excitement, were visible at the far end of the space.
Visible, but not accessible.
Marcus Webb discovered this first. The massive defensive lineman had been the first to reach the exit, driven by the same fight-or-flight response that probably made him such an effective blocker on the field. He slammed into the doors at full speed, expecting them to burst open under his considerable momentum.
They didn't move. Not an inch.
Marcus bounced off the reinforced steel like he'd hit a concrete wall, landing on his back with a grunt of pain and surprise. "What the—"
"Let me try." Derek's best friend, Connor Hayes, joined him at the door. Together, they pushed, pulled, kicked, and threw their combined weight against the barrier. Nothing.
"There has to be an emergency release," Mira said, scanning the walls for a control panel or lever. "Fire codes require—"
"Fire codes require a lot of things," I said, my voice flat. "I don't think whoever designed this place was particularly concerned with OSHA compliance."
The students who had gathered in the lobby—maybe forty of us, with more still filtering in from the circular chamber—began to spread out, searching for alternative exits. Side doors. Windows. Anything.
I joined a group heading toward the east wing, where the tour had first taken us through administrative offices and storage rooms. The corridor stretched ahead, fluorescent lights flickering in that particular way that always seemed designed to induce headaches, and I found myself walking beside Ayla Vance.
She moved like someone who'd been awake too long—careful, deliberate, each step placed with the precision of a person who no longer trusted their body to function automatically. I knew she had insomnia; everyone knew that. But seeing her now, in this context, I realized I'd underestimated how severe it must be.
"You haven't slept properly in years," I said. It wasn't a question.
She glanced at me, her dark eyes unreadable. "Is this the part where you tell me I should try melatonin and meditation?"
"This is the part where I wonder if you might be our best asset in a situation where sleeping seems to be fatal."
A ghost of a smile crossed her face. "Finally, my dysfunction has practical applications."
We reached the first office—or what had been an office. The door was locked, the window beside it reinforced with wire mesh that would require power tools to breach. Through the glass, I could see an ordinary room: desk, chairs, filing cabinets, the detritus of bureaucracy suspended in time.
"The windows are all like this," Ayla observed, running her hand along the mesh. "I noticed during the tour. I thought it was just old security measures."
"Maybe it was. Or maybe someone wanted to make sure the test subjects couldn't escape."
The words hung in the air between us. *Test subjects*. That's what we were now, wasn't it? Not students on a field trip, but data points in an experiment designed by people who had clearly never heard of informed consent.
"There has to be a way out," Ayla said, but her voice lacked conviction.
We kept moving.
---
The next hour taught us the full scope of our prison.
Every external door was sealed—not just locked, but reinforced with mechanisms that seemed to anticipate every method of breach. The windows, uniformly fitted with that wire mesh, looked out on grounds patrolled by shadows that might have been security guards or might have been something else entirely. The perimeter fence, visible through the occasional gap in the vegetation, was electrified; we discovered this when Tyler Morrison tried to climb it and came back with burns on his palms and a haunted look in his eyes.
The facility had been designed to keep people in. Whatever veneer of "educational heritage site" Vanessa had painted over it, the Noctis Facility was—and always had been—a cage.
By the time we regrouped in the lobby, the panic had given way to something more dangerous: resignation. Students slumped against walls, sprawled across the marble floor, their phones clutched in hands that no longer expected rescue. The messages that had announced the DREAMLESS PROTOCOL had been replaced by locked screens, as if the system had said what it needed to say and now was simply... watching.
"We need to organize," Mr. Henley insisted, though his authority had crumbled along with any illusion that adults might be in control. "There must be emergency supplies, communication equipment—"
"There must be explanations for why Derek is dead," Tyler shot back. "You're the teacher, Henley. Explain it. Explain how a guy falls forty feet in a room with thirty-foot ceilings. Explain how his body shows impact trauma when he never left his chair."
Mr. Henley opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
He had no explanation. None of us did.
"The message said something about dreams," Mira offered hesitantly. "That if we enter REM sleep, we... that the dream affects reality somehow."
"That's not possible." The words came out of me before I could stop them, automatic as breathing. "Dreams are neurological constructs. They don't interact with physical reality. Whatever killed Derek, it wasn't—"
"Then what was it, Jason?" Kai's voice was sharp. "What explanation do you have that fits the evidence? Because I'm all ears."
I had nothing. For the first time in my debunking career, I had absolutely nothing.
"We don't know what the gas was," I said finally. "Maybe it induced some kind of... seizure. A physical reaction that manifested in ways that mimic fall trauma. It's unlikely, but it's more plausible than—"
"Than dreams becoming real?" Ayla's quiet voice cut through my desperate theorizing. "Maybe. But the message specifically mentioned REM sleep. That's not random. Whoever set this up knows something about how sleep works, and they're using that knowledge against us."
She was right. The clinical precision of the message, the references to specific sleep stages—this wasn't the work of superstitious minds conjuring ghost stories. This was something designed by people who understood the architecture of the sleeping brain.
And if they understood it that well, maybe they knew how to weaponize it.
"We need more information," I said, trying to reassemble some framework of rational action. "The facility has archives, research logs, something that explains what experiments were actually conducted here. If we understand what we're dealing with—"
"If we understand it, we can debunk it?" Kai's smile was bitter. "This isn't one of your podcast episodes, Jason. This is real."
"Everything real has an explanation," I insisted, but the words felt hollow even as I said them.
The lights flickered—once, twice—and then the screens of every phone in the room activated simultaneously.
---
The message was different this time.
Not just text, but video. A figure in shadow, features obscured by deliberate darkness, speaking in a voice that had been digitally distorted beyond recognition. Male or female, young or old—impossible to tell. The voice was mechanical, stripped of humanity, terrifying in its neutrality.
"*Subjects have been activated*," the voice announced. "*The DREAMLESS PROTOCOL is now in effect. Phase One observation period has concluded. Phase Two testing will commence at 2200 hours.*"
I checked my phone's clock: 9:47 PM. We had just over two hours.
"*During Phase Two, all subjects will be required to sleep. Those who resist will be encouraged to comply through environmental adjustment. Those who comply and successfully avoid REM sleep will be permitted to continue to the next phase.*"
Environmental adjustment. The phrase was clinical, sanitized, the kind of language bureaucrats used to describe atrocities.
"*Those who enter REM sleep*," the voice continued, "*will experience consequences consistent with their dream content. This has been demonstrated through Subject One, Derek Holston, who dreamed of falling from a great height. His physical body was adjusted accordingly.*"
The lobby erupted in sound—screams, sobs, denials. I barely heard them. My mind was racing, trying to process the impossible claim being made.
*Dreamed of falling. Body adjusted accordingly.*
If this was true—if dreams could somehow manifest physical consequences—then the laws of physics as I understood them were fundamentally wrong. Everything I'd built my worldview on, every rational principle I'd used to comfort myself after Lily died, was crumbling.
"*Sleep is mandatory*," the voice concluded. "*Dreaming is fatal. You have been given the parameters. The experiment will determine which of you can transcend your biology.*
*Sweet dreams.*"
The screens went dark.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Then, chaos.
---
"We're not sleeping." Tyler Morrison had positioned himself at the center of a cluster of athletes—Marcus Webb, Connor Hayes, three others whose names I'd never bothered to learn. "Whatever that was, whatever's happening, we stay awake. Simple as that."
"You can't just *decide* not to sleep," Mira protested. "The human body—"
"The human body does what I tell it to do." Tyler's voice dripped with the confidence of someone who'd never encountered a problem money couldn't solve. "We power through. Take shifts. Keep each other awake. It's only—what, a few days? A week? Eventually someone will notice we're missing. Parents will call. Authorities will investigate."
"And until then?" Ayla asked. "What happens at 2200 hours when they try to *encourage* us to sleep? What happens when someone's body gives out? You can't fight biology with willpower, Tyler."
"Watch me."
The hierarchy was reforming, I realized. In the vacuum left by adult authority's collapse, the old power structures were reasserting themselves. Tyler had the athletes. Ashley Chen was already surrounded by her social circle, trading whispered strategies behind manicured hands. The various cliques and factions that had organized Greystone's social landscape were clustering together, seeking safety in familiar numbers.
And the Invisibles—Sophie Martinez, Felix Whitmore, the unnamed others who existed at the margins—were being pushed to the periphery once again.
"This is stupid," Kai muttered beside me. "Dividing into groups like this. We should be working together."
"Humans don't work together under stress," I said. "They retreat to tribalism. It's evolutionary—identifying in-group versus out-group increases survival odds in crisis situations."
"Very scientific. Very useless."
He wasn't wrong. Theories about human behavior didn't help when that behavior was actively fragmenting our collective survival chances.
"There might be something in the research archives," I said, returning to my earlier thought. "Documentation about what experiments were conducted here. If we can understand the mechanism—"
"You think they left a instruction manual? 'How to survive the murder dream protocol, step one—'"
"I think scientists document everything. It's compulsive. Whatever was done here, someone wrote it down."
Kai considered this, then nodded slowly. "Fine. Research mission. But we're going to need more people."
I looked around the lobby at the fragmented groups, the suspicious glances, the fortress-like clustering. "I don't think anyone's in a cooperative mood."
"Then we convince them. Or we go alone." He glanced at Ayla and Mira, who had drifted closer during our conversation. "You two in?"
Ayla nodded without hesitation. Mira took longer, her fingers doing that rhythmic tapping against her thigh—*one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four*—before she also agreed.
Four people. Not ideal for exploring an unfamiliar facility with potentially hostile elements, but better than going solo.
"The research wing," I said. "That's where Vanessa was taking us when—when everything happened. If there are archives, that's where they'll be."
We started moving toward the corridor that led away from the lobby, away from the fractured tribes and their territorial posturing. Behind us, I heard Tyler Morrison organizing his athletes into a patrol rotation, heard Ashley Chen assigning her followers to inventory what food and water could be found in the facility.
They were preparing for a siege. We were preparing for answers.
I wasn't sure which approach was more likely to keep us alive.
---
The research wing was darker than the rest of the facility.
Not completely—emergency lights still cast their pale glow at regular intervals—but darker, as if the shadows here were denser, more resistant to illumination. Our footsteps echoed off walls lined with closed doors, each one labeled with alphanumeric codes that meant nothing to me.
"RN-7. RN-8. RN-9." Mira read the labels aloud as we passed, her voice barely above a whisper. "Research Node, probably. Standardized lab numbering."
"Any of them look promising?" Kai asked.
"They all look identical. We'll have to check them one by one."
We started with RN-1, the first door we'd passed. The lock was electronic, controlled by a keypad that should have been inactive in a decommissioned facility. Kai tried the door handle anyway—and it opened.
"That's not ominous at all," he muttered.
The room beyond was... ordinary. A laboratory, clearly, but stripped of most equipment. Empty shelves lined the walls. A single desk remained, supporting a computer terminal that was dark and probably dead. Filing cabinets stood in the corner, their drawers slightly ajar.
"Documents," Mira said, moving toward the cabinets. "Maybe there's something—"
She pulled open the first drawer and stopped.
Empty. Completely empty.
So was the second drawer. And the third. And every drawer in every cabinet in the room.
"They cleaned the place out," Ayla said, stating the obvious. "Before they opened it to the public. Removed anything sensitive."
"Or anything useful." I moved to the computer terminal, pressing the power button more out of habit than hope. Nothing happened. "We need to go deeper. Whatever's still here, it won't be in the easily accessible areas."
We continued down the corridor, checking doors as we went. RN-2 through RN-15 yielded similar results: empty laboratories, stripped of documentation, their computers dead or missing entirely. Whatever research had been conducted here, the evidence had been thoroughly purged.
But not perfectly.
It was Ayla who found it—a door at the end of the corridor, unmarked, that didn't match the others. Heavier, reinforced, with a keypad that glowed faintly red.
"This one's still powered," she said, pressing her hand flat against the surface. "And warm. There's equipment running behind here."
"Locked, though," Kai observed, examining the keypad. "Six-digit code. That's a million possible combinations."
"Or one correct one," Mira said. She was staring at the keypad with an intensity that seemed out of proportion. "The tour guide—Vanessa—she punched in a code when we entered the circular chamber. I saw her do it."
"You remember the code?"
"I remember everything. It's... it's a thing I do. When I'm anxious. I memorize details. It helps me feel in control." Her fingers were tapping again, that rhythmic pattern, but now I recognized it for what it was: she was counting. Processing. Accessing information stored in a mind that never stopped cataloging.
"The code was 847291."
She entered it. The keypad flashed green. The door clicked open.
"That's genuinely terrifying," Kai said, impressed. "Your brain, I mean. Not the door."
"I know what you meant."
We pushed through into darkness.
---
The room beyond was nothing like the stripped laboratories we'd been finding.
This was a functioning space—maybe the only functioning space left in the facility. Computer terminals lined the walls, their screens dark but their indicator lights blinking slowly. Server racks hummed in the corner, generating the warmth Ayla had felt through the door. Filing cabinets here were sealed with physical locks, not merely ajar.
And on a central table, surrounded by scattered papers and half-empty coffee cups (cold, but not ancient), was what looked like a control console connected to a massive screen mounted on the wall.
"Someone was here recently," I said, touching one of the coffee cups. "Within the last few hours. Maybe while we were unconscious."
"Vanessa?" Mira suggested. "Or the security guards?"
"Or whoever's actually running this... experiment." The word still felt wrong in my mouth. Experiments had controls, ethics oversight, informed consent. Whatever was happening to us had none of those things.
Kai was already moving toward the filing cabinets, pulling at drawers. "Locked. But the locks look old. I might be able to—"
"Wait." Ayla's voice was sharp. She was staring at the papers scattered across the central table, her face gone pale. "Jason. Come look at this."
I crossed to her side and looked at the document she'd found.
It was a photograph. Not ancient—the image quality was too good—but clearly not recent either. Maybe ten, fifteen years old? It showed a row of the same chairs we'd seen in the circular chamber, each one occupied by a young person in hospital gowns, each one fitted with one of those sensor-laden helmets.
The subjects looked to be teenagers. Our age, more or less.
And written across the bottom of the photograph, in neat institutional handwriting:
**DREAMLESS PROJECT - COHORT 7 - INITIAL INTEGRATION**
**Test Phase: Oneiric Response Modulation**
**Status: FAILED - See attached incident report**
"Cohort 7," I repeated. "They've done this before. At least seven times before."
"Failed," Ayla added. "All of them failed. What does that mean? What happened to those subjects?"
Mira had joined us, scanning the scattered papers with her relentless attention to detail. "There are more photographs. Cohort 4, Cohort 5... they all say 'failed.' But this one—" She held up a different image. "Cohort 8. Status: SUSPENDED."
"Suspended, not failed," I said. "What's the difference?"
"I don't know. But look at the date." She pointed to the timestamp on the photograph. "This was taken sixteen years ago. The same year the facility officially closed."
Sixteen years. The DREAMLESS PROJECT had been suspended—not terminated, suspended—for sixteen years. And now, suddenly, it was active again.
With us as the new test subjects.
"They've been planning this," Kai said, his voice low and dangerous. "For years. Decades. They didn't randomly select our school—they chose us specifically. Brought us here. Set up this whole fake tour scenario—"
"But why?" The question burst out of me with more frustration than I intended. "What's the point? What are they trying to learn by killing teenagers in their sleep?"
"Maybe they're not trying to learn anything." Ayla's voice was quiet, thoughtful. She'd moved away from the photographs and was examining a thick binder labeled "PROTOCOL SPECIFICATIONS." "Maybe they're trying to create something. Or prevent something. Listen to this."
She read aloud from the binder:
*"The human dreaming mind represents the final frontier of neurological manipulation. While waking consciousness can be controlled through environmental factors, pharmaceutical intervention, and psychological conditioning, the dream state remains fundamentally anarchic—resistant to external direction.*
*"The DREAMLESS PROJECT aims to resolve this limitation by creating human subjects capable of entering restorative sleep without accessing REM-stage dreaming. Such subjects would be immune to the psychological vulnerabilities inherent in dream processing, including traumatic recall, creative insurgency, and pattern-recognition leaps that defy rational control.*
*"In short: the perfect soldier. The perfect worker. The perfect citizen.*
*"One who never dreams—and therefore, never questions."*
The words hung in the air between us.
"They want to create people who don't dream," I said slowly, processing. "People who can't... what? Think independently? Have emotions?"
"Dreams are where we process fear, trauma, desire—everything our conscious minds can't handle," Mira said. "Without dreams, we'd be... functional, I guess. But not really human."
"Perfect soldiers," Kai repeated. "Perfect workers. They wanted to make humans into machines."
"And the dying?" Ayla looked up from the binder. "The part where dreams become fatal? That's not the goal—that's the side effect. The system is supposed to prevent dreaming, but if it fails and the subject does dream..."
"The dream bleeds into reality," I finished. "The fall. The impact. Whatever the subject dreams becomes physically real."
It was impossible. It violated everything I knew about neuroscience, physics, the fundamental separation between mind and matter. But it explained Derek Holston. It explained the rules of the DREAMLESS PROTOCOL.
It explained why we were all going to die if we fell asleep.
"We need to tell the others," Mira said. "Everyone needs to know what we're dealing with."
"Will it help?" Kai asked. "Knowing that we're guinea pigs in an experiment to eliminate human dreaming? That we're going to be *encouraged* to sleep in—" he checked his phone "—less than an hour, and if we dream, we die?"
"Knowledge is always better than ignorance," I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I wondered if I still believed them.
Some knowledge is poison. Some truths are too heavy to carry.
And some explanations, I was learning, are worse than mystery.
---
We gathered what documents we could carry—photographs, protocol summaries, anything that might help us understand or counteract what was happening—and made our way back toward the lobby. The corridor seemed longer on the return journey, the shadows more animated, the emergency lights more unreliable.
Or maybe that was just exhaustion beginning to prey on my perception. I hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours, not counting the involuntary unconsciousness induced by the gas. My eyes burned. My thoughts moved like they were swimming through molasses.
*You can't stay awake forever*, some traitorous part of my brain whispered. *Eventually, you'll sleep. And when you do—*
I pushed the thought away. There had to be a way out of this. There always was.
We were halfway down the corridor when the screaming started.
Not from ahead of us—from behind. From somewhere deeper in the research wing, in an area we hadn't explored.
"That sounded like—" Mira began.
"Sophie Martinez," Ayla finished. "I know her voice. She used to sing in choir."
We exchanged glances. Sophie Martinez was one of the Invisibles, someone who'd been pushed to the margins by the scandal that had consumed her reputation. She shouldn't have been back here. She should have been in the lobby with the others.
Unless she'd come looking for answers too. Or looking for escape. Or looking for somewhere to be alone with her shame.
"We have to help her," Ayla said.
"We don't know what we're running toward," I protested. "It could be a trap. It could be—"
Another scream. Shorter this time. Cut off.
We ran.
---
We found her in one of the empty laboratories—RN-19, at the very end of the wing. The door was open, and through it we could see Sophie's body lying on the floor, motionless.
She was dead.
I knew it before I even entered the room, knew it from the impossible angle of her limbs and the wetness soaking her clothes and pooling around her on the floor. Water. Gallons of water, spreading across the tile, dripping from her hair and face and open mouth.
But the room was dry. The ceiling was intact. There were no pipes, no windows, nothing that could explain the flood of liquid that had somehow filled her lungs and drowned her in a waterless space.
Mira made a sound that might have been a sob and pressed herself against the corridor wall. Kai swore, loud and violent. Ayla stood frozen, staring at Sophie's body with an expression I couldn't read.
I forced myself to approach. Forced myself to observe.
Sophie's eyes were open, fixed on something none of us could see. Her expression was one of pure terror—the kind of terror you see in people who are dying and know it and can do nothing to stop it.
*She dreamed of drowning*, I realized. *Just like Derek dreamed of falling.*
But we hadn't reached 2200 hours yet. The enforced sleep period hadn't begun. Which meant—
"She fell asleep on her own," I said aloud. "She was exhausted. Traumatized. She came back here to be alone, maybe to rest for just a moment, and she... she drifted off."
"And dreamed of water," Kai said. "Because that's her fear, right? Sophie was on the swim team before... before everything. She almost drowned at a competition last year. Had to be pulled out of the pool. It was in the school paper."
Sophie Martinez, the girl who'd already been drowning in public humiliation, had died drowning alone in a dry room.
The cruelty of it made me want to vomit.
"We need to tell everyone," Ayla said, her voice steady despite the horror in her eyes. "Right now. About what we found. About what's happening. About why sleep isn't just dangerous—it's a weapon aimed directly at our worst fears."
This time, I didn't argue. Knowledge might be poison, but ignorance was clearly fatal.
We left Sophie's body where it lay—there was nothing we could do for her, and the clock was ticking toward 2200—and ran back toward the lobby, carrying the weight of two deaths and the certainty that more were coming.
---
The lobby had transformed in our absence.
Tyler Morrison's athlete coalition had established a perimeter near the main entrance, as if keeping watch on doors that wouldn't open might somehow protect them. Ashley Chen's social circle had claimed the reception area, their phones out despite the lack of signal, their whispered conversations laced with accusation. Other groups had scattered to various corners, their territorial boundaries marked by backpacks and body language.
And in the center of it all, Mr. Henley was having what appeared to be a complete psychological breakdown.
"—not supposed to happen!" he was shouting at no one in particular. "I signed the waiver! I read the *information packet*! There was nothing about—about *experiments* or *protocols* or—this can't be legal! This can't be *real*!"
"None of this is legal," I said, pushing through the crowd with the binder of documents clutched in my hands. "And we have proof."
All eyes turned to me. For someone who hosted a podcast, I'd never been comfortable with attention; I preferred to let my arguments speak for themselves. But there was no time for comfort now.
"We found research archives in the restricted wing," I announced, holding up the binder. "Documents from the original DREAMLESS PROJECT. They explain what's happening to us—and why Derek Holston and Sophie Martinez are dead."
The name landed like a bomb.
"Sophie's dead?" Ashley's perfectly composed face cracked. "But she was just—I saw her an hour ago, she—"
"She drowned," Ayla said flatly. "In a dry room. Just like Derek fell without falling. The facility—or whoever's running this experiment—has found a way to make our dreams manifest physically. If you dream, whatever happens to you in the dream happens to your body in reality."
"That's not possible," Tyler said, echoing my own initial denial. "That's literally not how reality works."
"Tell that to Derek's crushed ribcage," Kai shot back. "Tell that to Sophie's lungs full of water."
I opened the binder, reading aloud from the protocol specifications. The words sounded even more horrifying in this context—*perfect soldier, perfect worker, immune to psychological vulnerabilities*—and by the time I finished, the lobby was silent.
"They've done this before," I concluded. "At least eight times. Every previous cohort failed. We're the ninth. And unless we find a way to either escape this facility or avoid REM sleep entirely, we're going to fail too."
"Avoid REM sleep," Mr. Henley repeated, latching onto the phrase like a drowning man. "That's possible, right? You can—you can suppress REM with drugs, with—"
"Do you have those drugs?" Mira asked. "Because we've searched a significant portion of this facility, and we haven't found a pharmacy."
"The body can go days without REM sleep before requiring it," I said, trying to inject some semblance of hope into the nightmare. "The record for staying awake is over eleven days. It's dangerous—psychosis, hallucinations, organ failure—but it's survivable. If we can stay awake long enough for someone to realize we're missing—"
"Eleven days." Tyler laughed, a harsh and bitter sound. "You think anyone here can last eleven days without sleep? Look around, Jason. Half these people could barely stay awake through third-period calculus."
"Then we take shifts," Ayla said. "We watch each other. We set alarms. We do whatever it takes."
"Easy for you to say, insomniac." The sneer in Tyler's voice was obvious. "Some of us actually need sleep to function."
"And some of us will die if we get it," Kai snapped. "This isn't about comfort. It's about survival."
The room was fracturing again—or maybe it had never been whole to begin with. Tyler's athletes closed ranks around him, their suspicion palpable. Ashley's circle exchanged glances that spoke of private strategizing. The Invisibles huddled in their corner, leaderless and afraid.
This was what the experiment wanted, I realized. Division. Fear. The kind of primal tribalism that would make us easy to pick off one by one.
"We need to work together," I said, but the words felt like shouting into a hurricane. "If we split up, we're easier targets. If we—"
"Why should we trust you?" The question came from Connor Hayes, Derek's best friend, his eyes red with grief and rage. "You and your little group disappeared into the restricted wing while the rest of us were trying to find exits. How do we know you're not part of this? How do we know you didn't cut some deal?"
"Are you serious right now?"
"Derek is *dead*." Connor's voice cracked. "Sophie is dead. And you show up with a bunch of documents that conveniently explain everything? That feels a hell of a lot like you know more than you're telling."
The accusation was absurd—we were just as trapped as everyone else—but I could see it spreading through the crowd like a virus. Fear makes people irrational. Fear makes them look for enemies. And in the absence of visible enemies, they'll create them from whoever's nearby.
"Think about what you're saying," Mira pleaded. "We're all in this together. Fighting each other just—"
A sharp electronic tone cut through the argument.
Every phone in the room activated at once, their screens displaying the same clock face, the same countdown:
**22:00:00**
The enforced sleep period had begun.
---
The lights changed first.
Not dimmed exactly—shifted. The harsh fluorescent glare softened to something warmer, something designed to trigger the body's natural response to approaching night. The temperature dropped a few degrees. Somewhere in the ventilation system, I heard a subtle change in the air flow—something that might have been aerosol mist being dispersed.
"They're drugging the air again," Kai said, covering his mouth with his sleeve. "Like before. The sleep gas."
"It's not gas this time." Ayla was scanning the room with the hypervigilance of someone who'd spent years fighting her own biology. "Gas would knock us out immediately. This is slower. Environmental adjustment, like the message said. They're making it harder to stay awake."
She was right. Already I could feel it—a heaviness in my limbs, a softening at the edges of my thoughts. The adrenaline that had been keeping me alert was fading, replaced by a seductive drowsiness that whispered *rest, just for a moment, just close your eyes...*
"Cover your faces!" Mr. Henley was shouting. "Block the vents! We can—"
But there was nothing to block with, and the substance was already in our lungs, our bloodstreams, working its way toward the parts of our brains that controlled consciousness.
Around me, students were swaying. Some sat down heavily, unable to trust their legs. Others pinched themselves, slapped their own faces, tried to fight the overwhelming urge to sleep with increasingly desperate physical interventions.
"Stay awake," Ayla commanded, moving through the crowd like a general rallying troops. "Talk to each other. Keep moving. Don't sit down, don't close your eyes—"
"I can't—" Felix Whitmore's voice was slurred, his eyes half-closed. "I can't stay..."
He collapsed against the wall and slid to the floor. Within seconds, his breathing had deepened, evened out. He was asleep.
"Felix!" Someone shook him, but he didn't wake. The sedative—whatever it was—had done its job too well.
"Watch him," I ordered. "The moment you see REM—the moment his eyes start moving—wake him up. Whatever it takes."
But even as I gave the command, I knew it might not be enough. REM sleep came in cycles, growing longer as the night progressed. If Felix entered a dream—if he began experiencing whatever his subconscious conjured—would waking him be enough to stop the physical manifestation? Or would the damage already be done?
I looked at Ayla, the only person in the room who seemed genuinely unaffected by the environmental manipulation. Her insomnia—her curse—had become our only reliable defense.
"How do you do it?" I asked. "Stay awake when your body wants to sleep?"
"Fear, mostly." Her smile was thin, humorless. "I've been afraid to dream for years. I didn't understand why until now. But I always knew, somewhere deep, that closing my eyes meant... something bad."
"You've known about this place."
"Not consciously. But my body remembered. My body knew that sleep wasn't safe."
She was the key, I realized. Whatever had been done to her—whether she'd been a previous subject, a failed experiment, a survivor of an earlier cohort—her resistance to sleep wasn't random. It was adaptation.
If we could understand how she'd developed that adaptation, maybe we could replicate it. Maybe we could save ourselves.
But that required staying awake long enough to figure it out. And as I watched another student succumb to the sedative, watched their body go limp and their breathing slow, I knew we were running out of time.
The DREAMLESS PROTOCOL was in full effect.
And the dreams—the deadly, physically-manifested dreams—were coming for all of us.
---
By midnight, we'd lost five more.
Not dead—not yet—but asleep. The sedative had claimed them one by one despite our best efforts, dragging them into unconsciousness while the rest of us watched helplessly. We'd set up a monitoring station near the lobby's center, arranging the sleepers in a row so we could observe their eye movements, watch for the telltale flickering that meant REM had begun.
So far, none of them had dreamed deeply enough to trigger physical consequences. Their sleep was shallow, restless, their bodies cycling through the early stages without descending into the dangerous territory where nightmares became real.
But that couldn't last. The architecture of sleep demanded deeper stages eventually. The brain required REM to function.
"We need to wake them on a schedule," Mira suggested, her voice raspy from the hour of constant vigilance. "Before they can enter the REM cycle. Every ninety minutes—that's when the first REM period typically begins."
"And then what?" Tyler demanded. His bravado had crumbled along with his certainty. "We can't keep waking them forever. Eventually they'll be too exhausted to stay awake even for a few minutes."
"Then we buy time. Rotation. The ones who sleep wake the others. We leapfrog."
"Until we all collapse from exhaustion?"
"Until we find another way." Mira's eyes flashed. "You have a better plan?"
He didn't. None of us did.
I moved away from the argument, seeking a moment of solitude in which to think. My thoughts felt thick, contaminated by the sedative still working its way through my system. Every few seconds I had to blink hard, shake my head, remind my brain that consciousness was essential to survival.
*Lily*, I thought, and her face appeared unbidden—young and trusting, so certain that her big brother could protect her from the monsters. *I told you there was nothing to be afraid of. I told you the dark was just the dark.*
But the dark wasn't just the dark, was it? The dark was where dreams lived, where the subconscious processed fear and desire and everything else that rational minds tried to control. The dark was where the DREAMLESS PROJECT had learned to weaponize the human mind against itself.
If I'd taken Lily's fears seriously—if I'd stopped debunking and started *listening*—would I have understood something essential about the relationship between consciousness and reality? Would I have been prepared for this?
Would she still be alive?
"Jason." Ayla's voice pulled me back to the present. She'd appeared beside me without my noticing, moving with that careful silence of the perpetually sleep-deprived. "We need to talk."
"About what?"
"About the pattern." She gestured toward the sleeping students, toward the documents we'd recovered, toward the nightmare that had consumed our reality. "Derek fell because he dreamed of falling. Sophie drowned because she dreamed of drowning. Both deaths matched their pre-existing fears—Sophie's near-drowning, Derek's... what?"
"I don't know what Derek was afraid of," I admitted. "We weren't exactly close."
"But someone might." She looked toward the athletes' corner, where Connor Hayes sat with his head in his hands, grief still raw on his face. "Someone who knew him well enough to know what haunted him."
"You want to ask his best friend to catalog his dead friend's worst fears?"
"I want to understand the mechanism. If dreams manifest physically based on the dreamer's psychological profile, then understanding those profiles might let us... I don't know. Prepare. Intervene. Do *something* other than wait for people to die."
She was right. Data was power, even in a situation that seemed to defy all rational data collection.
"I'll talk to Connor," I said.
"Be careful. He already thinks we're conspirators."
"I'll be factual. That's what I do."
Ayla's expression suggested she didn't find this particularly reassuring, but she let me go anyway.
---
Connor Hayes looked up as I approached, his eyes red-rimmed and hostile. "Come to accuse us of something else?"
"I came to ask about Derek." I sat down across from him, keeping my voice low. "Not to accuse. To understand."
"Understand what? That he's dead? I understand that pretty clearly."
"How he died. Why he died the way he did." I hesitated, then plunged forward. "Derek's body showed signs consistent with a fall from extreme height. The message said his dream became reality. So I need to know—what was Derek afraid of? Specifically, what fear might manifest as falling?"
Connor stared at me for a long moment, something shifting behind his hostility. Grief, maybe. Or the beginning of desperate hope that understanding might offer some path toward meaning.
"He didn't tell most people," he said finally. "It wasn't the kind of thing that fit his image. But when we were kids—like, nine or ten—there was this construction site near his house. Big building going up. Derek and some other guys dared each other to climb the scaffolding."
"And he fell?"
"No. But he almost did. Missed a handhold, dangled forty feet up by one arm for what he said felt like an hour before someone pulled him back. After that..." Connor's voice cracked. "After that, he couldn't handle heights. Wouldn't go up stairs if he could see over the railing. Threw up at the top of the Ferris wheel at the county fair. He dealt with it by pretending it didn't exist. By being so loud and confident about everything else that no one would think to ask."
Derek Holston, the loud and confident quarterback, secretly terrified of heights. It fit. The bravado masking the vulnerability. The desperate need to prove strength hiding the places where he felt weak.
"Thank you," I said. "I know that wasn't easy."
"Will it help?" Connor's question was raw with need. "Knowing this—will it save anyone?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "But knowledge is the only weapon we have. If we understand how this works, maybe we can fight it."
Connor nodded slowly, something resolving in his expression. "Then let me help. Ask me anything about anyone. I pay attention to people. I know things. Maybe something I know matters."
It was the first real alliance to form outside our original group—the first crack in the tribal walls that had been building since Derek's death. Not much, but something.
"Tell me about Sophie Martinez," I said. "What else was she afraid of, besides water?"
And we talked, building a map of fears while the sedative worked its way through the survivors and the clock counted down toward whatever came next.
---
By 3 AM, the pattern was undeniable.
We'd compiled a list of known fears for everyone we could identify—phobias, traumas, recurring nightmares that people had mentioned in passing conversations or social media posts. The data was incomplete, but it painted a clear picture:
The DREAMLESS system targeted specific, deep-seated fears. Not random nightmares—*personal* nightmares. Things that lived in the architecture of individual psychologies, waiting to be weaponized.
Derek: heights.
Sophie: drowning.
Felix Whitmore, still sleeping but unharmed so far: claustrophobia.
Ashley Chen: being forgotten, invisible, unimportant.
Tyler Morrison: failure, inadequacy, the revelation that his confidence was a mask.
Mira Santos: losing control, public breakdown, everyone seeing how broken she really was.
Kai Chen: not dying, exactly, but never having *mattered*. Never having been important enough to save.
And me?
I knew my fear. I'd known it since the night Lily died, even if I'd spent years burying it under podcasts and rational explanations and the comforting fiction that nothing supernatural was real.
My fear was being *wrong*. Being lethally, catastrophically wrong about something important. Dismissing a real danger as fiction and watching someone I loved die because of my certainty.
If I dreamed, my nightmare would be exactly that: someone dying because I hadn't believed them. A loop of Lily calling for help while I ignored her, multiplied infinitely, made flesh.
"This is good," Ayla said, studying the list. "If we know what people are likely to dream about, we can—"
"Can what?" Kai's voice was harsh with exhaustion. "Pre-emptively cure their phobias? We're not therapists. We're teenagers trapped in a government death lab."
"We can warn them. Prepare them. If someone knows their fear is the trigger, maybe they can... I don't know. Redirect. Lucid dream."
"Lucid dreaming takes practice," Mira said. "Most people can't just decide to be aware that they're dreaming."
"But some can." Ayla's eyes were bright, feverish almost. "I can. I've been doing it for years—waking myself from nightmares before they pull me under. That's part of how I've survived the insomnia. When I do sleep, I stay in control."
"You think you can teach people? In the next few hours?"
"I think I can try. Because the alternative is watching them die."
She was right. It was desperate, unlikely, probably doomed—but it was also the only proactive strategy anyone had proposed.
"Do it," I said. "Take volunteers. Anyone who's still awake and wants to learn. Kai, you help her—you're good at keeping people focused."
"What about you?"
I looked at the documents spread across the floor, at the half-understood protocols and incident reports and technical specifications. "I keep researching. There's something here we're missing. Some way the previous cohorts failed that might tell us how not to."
"And if there isn't?"
"Then we've lost nothing by looking."
It was flimsy logic, and we both knew it. But flimsy logic was all we had.
---
The hours blurred together after that.
Ayla's lucid dreaming seminar drew a handful of desperate participants—those awake enough to learn, afraid enough to try anything. I heard fragments of her instruction drifting across the lobby: "*Your hands. Look at your hands in the dream. Count your fingers. If you have too many, you know you're dreaming...*"
Kai moved through the room like a caffeine-powered guardian angel, checking on sleepers, timing their REM cycles, waking them before their eyes flickered too long. The ninety-minute rotation was working, sort of—no one else had died—but the cumulative exhaustion was taking its toll. Each awakening was harder. Each period of consciousness shorter.
We were losing the war of attrition.
I buried myself in the documents, searching for something—anything—that might change the equation. Previous cohort reports. Incident analyses. Technical specifications for the system that was monitoring and manipulating our sleep.
And then, buried in a folder marked "INFRASTRUCTURE," I found it.
A schematic of the facility's environmental control system. The vents, the temperature regulators, the aerosol dispersal units—all centrally managed from a single location.
The central research chamber. The circular room where we'd first been gassed.
The same console where Vanessa and the security guards had been working when everything began.
"The sedative isn't automatic," I said aloud, not caring who heard. "It's being actively administered. Someone is controlling the environmental systems—someone still in the facility."
Heads turned. Exhausted, red-rimmed eyes focused on me with desperate hope.
"If we can reach that console," I continued, "we might be able to shut down the sedative. Buy ourselves more time. Maybe even find a way to disable the whole system."
"Or we might walk into a trap," Tyler said, ever the pessimist when it wasn't his idea. "That room is where this all started."
"Exactly. It's the heart of the operation. If there's a way to end this, it's there."
The debate was brief but intense. In the end, a small group volunteered: me, Ayla, Kai, and Connor Hayes, whose grief had transformed into something harder and more useful.
The rest would stay behind, continue the rotation, pray that we found answers before their bodies surrendered to sleep.
We moved toward the research wing, toward the circular chamber, toward whatever waited for us at the heart of the nightmare.
And as we walked, I thought about Lily. About the promises I'd made to protect her from monsters that didn't exist. About the new promise I was making now, to people who didn't know I was making it:
*I will not be wrong this time.*
*I will not let anyone else die because I refused to believe.*
The chamber doors loomed ahead, and beyond them—answers, or death, or both.
There was only one way to find out
*****