Dreamcatcher – Short Story Week 2021

“Subject is stable.”

It had started with Morphius – an experimental drug initially developed as part of MK-Ultra, perfected by Russians working with stolen samples, and leaked to the public by a scientist who recognized the nearly infinite potential of the product.

“Systems check is complete.”

The scientist hadn’t lasted long in the cutthroat underground pharmaceutical industry, but he had been right about the worth of his work. Morphius spread like wildfire, and little wonder – a drug with no side effects or risk of addiction? A drug even cheaper than weed or alcohol? A drug that was completely unregulated and undetectable? The perks made Morphius so convenient to use that the actual effects of the stuff could have been almost secondary – even a mild buzz would have been enough to ensure its popularity… and the effects of Morphius were anything but mild.

“Initializing equipment.”

The original name of the drug had been lost to history, and it had gone through many monikers and nicknames in the years since its introduction, but the term Morphius had persisted to the point where even technical documents referred to it as such.

“EKG online. EEG online. MRI… activating.”

Simply put, people who took Morphius gained the power of its namesake: complete control over dreams.

“MRI online.”

Though it took a little effort to maintain focus, those under the influence of the drug dreamt longer, more frequently, and – most importantly – were able to remain lucid throughout the entire experience. They remained perfectly aware that they were dreaming, were capable of controlling the dream however they liked and were able to recall what had happened when they woke up with perfect clarity.

“All systems operational.”

It was the ultimate VR – all senses active, immersive in a way no movie or video game could possibly hope to be. Dreams on demand. The holodeck in a pill. There were a few short-lived attempts at regulation and restriction early on, but support for Morphius was so widespread and enthusiastic that within a decade it had become as ubiquitous as caffeine or alcohol – something people needed a reason not to take.

“Initiating data capture…”

The ramifications of such technology were still unfolding – the entertainment industry had taken massive hits, as had tourism and virtually any other sector that relied on novelty, luxury, or exclusivity. What venue could compete with having any superpower, magic, or alien world your imagination could conjure? On the other hand, mattress sales had spiked, and entirely new industries were arising with shocking speed – sleep parlors, guided journeys, and specialized social media platforms were popping up like ads on a shady website.

“Are we ready to proceed, doctor?”

But the sudden surge in growth and acceptance only made Morphius’ shortcomings all the more obvious. People were desperate for ways to collaborate, to record, to share. They wanted to save, access, and edit their phantasmagorias as easily as computer files, to access worlds that their friends or idols had created, to experience scenarios they hadn’t concocted themselves.

Morphius had already had made significant changes to society, but that technology would doubtless alter the course of humankind for all time… and if everything here went according to plan, they would be taking their first steps into a radical new future.

“Doctor Oneiros. Are we ready to proceed?”

The doctor stirred from his musings, embarrassed. True, there was ample cause for distraction and reflection, waiting for the alignment of various ducks and filling of seemingly infinite forms, but to be daydreaming now, of all times!

Pinching himself more out of habit than practicality, he nodded. “Uh, yes, of course. We may proceed.”

His assistant nodded briskly, completing one last scan of the room to ensure everyone was in their places before flipping to the next page on their clipboard and reading the text aloud for the benefit of the cameras.

“This is experiment number zero-zero-zero-one,” they recited with equal parts anxiety and pride. “Testing the practical application and interaction of the prototype neural interface ‘Dreamcatcher’ in conjunction with the substance commonly known as Morphius. This initial test is made with the intent of suppressing involuntary somnambular hallucinations – AKA dreams – while maintaining conscious awareness and the standard sleep cycle. It is currently 18:32 on Thursday, February 29 of 2024.”

Huh. Leap day. He hadn’t noticed in all the rush. It was certainly fitting, given how far technology would leap forward once they had perfected this system… though it was a shame they would only be able to celebrate such a monumental discovery only once every four years.

God, he was nervous.

“Dr. Jason Oneiros” his assistant continued, shaking their head, “is the lead technician of this project, and has willingly volunteered to become its first quote-unquote ‘victim’. He is, so far as our current understanding of science can determine, in good health and of otherwise sound mind. So, since all other systems have been confirmed operational… we may begin whenever you’re ready, Doctor.”

Swallowing hard, Jason lay back and took a moment to gather his thoughts. This laboratory setting might have lacked the prestige and drama of a space shuttle launch or deep sea dive, but in many ways he was exploring territory just as dangerous and mysterious as the far reaches of physical space: the shrouded depths of the human mind.

Without the insistent stimulus of the real world or the constant and invisible interference of the subconscious, there was no saying what they might discover about the nature of humanity… but they hoped it would serve as a baseline for combining the best parts of hardware and headware. He was an explorer, an inventor, and if he managed to be the first to successfully map the human mind, his name would go down in history alongside those of Columbus, Einstein, and Da Vinci.

“Into eternity,” he murmured – just loud enough to be sure that the cameras would hear it – then shut his eyes.

Sleep overcame him almost instantly, thanks to the tiny pipeline tethered to his arm – a pharmacological cocktail precisely calibrated to overcome the inevitable surge of adrenaline and cortisol currently coursing through him.

Unconsciousness, though… that never came. With unadulterated Morphius, though dreams came more quickly and occupied a greater portion of the sleep cycle, there were still significant periods where a person slept more or less normally – lights out. There were multitudes of people pushing different schedules, products, and services to maximize or optimize the length of your sessions – and just as many opposed to such practices – but even the most dedicated winkles couldn’t avoid drifting through a few minutes of darksleep during the transition to dreaming.

Until now., apparently. It was an encouraging indication that the neural implants were working as intended, if a disorienting and distressing one – like the accounts he had studied of sleep paralysis and sensory deprivation. It was more than darkness, more than silence, more than disconnection. It was pure nothingness, utterly devoid of sensory experience, completely disembodied.

There was only his mind, his thoughts, totally untethered from the world. There were emotions, yes, but nothing to anchor them, no way to ground himself. He could not take a breath to steady himself, he had no lungs. He could not clench his fists, he had no hands. He could not walk away to seek a change of scenery, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to be.

Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. How much time had passed – a minute? An hour? It was impossible to tell, impossible to even express how impossible it was to get a grip when you had nothing to grip with.

Focus, Jason! he screamed inside his head. You can do this. Mind over… mind. Think. This will pass. Just… hold on.

The urge – and inability – to take a deep breath nearly sent him spiraling out of control again, but after a moment of floundering he managed to mentally grab hold of something: math. An abstraction, yes, but the closest thing to concrete he was likely to find here.

So for a time, he counted; first to one hundred, then to one thousand. He multiplied, and divided, and calculated primes and squares and polynomials.

And then, slowly – so slowly – he began to sense the presence of another entity in the void, looming up from the nothingness like the shadow some leviathan gradually rising from the depths of the abyss. It was shapeless, sizeless, formless – outside such things as euclidean geometry or topology. Such terms had no meaning here. But all the same, the presence was unmistakable, undeniable, alien and yet somehow intimately familiar.

It was… him.

Not an image of himself in the flesh, or some silhouette, or even a voice, but himself nonetheless. His memories, his personality, his psyche, all reflected in the mirror of the mind. He simply knew it, in the way things were once just known in the dreams of days past, but understood with the perfect clarity and lucidity of the waking mind.

He was… an ant suddenly seeing itself under the microscope. A man reaching out to touch his own clone in the same moment it reached out to touch him. The AI that could suddenly access and comprehend its own programming. It was all there in front of him, every nuance and subtlety of his being laid bare in a thousand thousand thousand shimmering connections of time and space and chemistry, and he could see the whole of it at once.

He marveled, in equal parts awe and terror… and then saw that marvel flashing through his thoughts as the sensation spread throughout his consciousness. And then he saw his reaction – and awareness of that reaction – flash through in precisely the same way, albeit a bit dimmer… and continuing to fade each time the cycle repeated as he grew accustomed to the sensation.

It was… fractal, almost, spiraling down to infinity, the essence of the experience dissolving into the ether of his subconscious.

Fascinating, he thought… and then watched as that thought echoed on and on, lasting far longer and spreading much further than the other had as it prompted memories and associations that triggered their own flashes in turn. Observing the operation of his own brain in real time.

Memories…

He could access his memories! All of his memories. Not sequentially, not photographically, but as a grand tapestry – beholding every thread of it laid out before him exactly as it was in his mind, including the awareness of which patches had become faded with time, frayed from stress, or reinforced by constant stitches of recollection. He was surrounded by the very constellation of his soul, every inch of it diagrammed and dissected like a diagram in a textbook… except that in this case the subject was fully alive and able to witness what was being done it.

Steady, he told himself. He wasn’t one for zen philosophy, despite his ex-wife’s best effort to drag him to meditation classes – a dozen, a hundred flashes flickering across the constellation at the thought of her – but it seemed the best way to cope at the moment. All he had to do was exist. No judgment, no fear, just observing things as they were. Be and let be.

Ironically, the very source of his distress made the process vastly easier than it might have been otherwise: the absolute absence of distractions made it easy to focus, while the hyper-awareness of his own state of being made it simple to find himself – as simple as painting by numbers.

Slowly, the panic faded as he settled into a sense of equilibrium. Good thing, too – he felt certain he could endure ages in this state, now that he had found it, but he felt equally certain that his emotions could have just as easily spiraled completely out of control. Fractals extended infinitely upward as well as down, and he could have very easily entered a sort of psychic feedback loop – his fear feeding on itself until it consumed his mind and left him utterly mad…

Calm, calm. Let the idea leave as easily as it had entered. There was no point in worrying about what might have happened, at least not right now. For now, all that mattered was that he was safe, passively and peacefully observing his own thoughts.

And for a measureless span of time, he did just that, consciousness existing in perfect equilibrium with himself.

And then, ever so slightly, the image began to warp.

The distortion vanished as soon as he noticed it, but even the smallest ripple can be seen on still water. Jason frowned – or would have, if he’d had a face. What the hell? His thoughts had been stable – likely more stable, in fact, than any mind in human history had ever been before, completely isolated from external and internal influence. So why…

No, he couldn’t allow himself to begin obsessing, not in this state. Paranoia was poisonous enough in the waking world – it would consume him even quicker here. Assuring himself there would be time – and data! – to consider the matter later, he eased himself back into meditation.

Again, he watched, and waited… and again, after what seemed like ages of equilibrium, the shape of his essence began to shift.

He was prepared for it this time, and tried to maintain his state of zen, letting the phenomenon occur – and hopefully abate – with as little interference as possible. It was difficult – the effect was subtle but unmistakable, always lurking in the corners of his consciousness but slipping away as soon as he tried to observe it directly.

The glimpses he did catch were… disturbing.

The sensation brought with it a flash of familiarity, memory flickering across the mind like lightning. He’d been ten years old, attending a sleepover at his cousin’s house. They’d been telling ghost stories and someone had dared him to stare into a mirror while the light was dimmed and chant the name of a person who had supposedly been murdered there. Not wanting to look like a coward, he had done it… and quickly lost any credibility he might have earned a few minutes later, when he had screamed upon seeing his reflection seem to twist into the visage of a monster.

Later on, studying neurology in college, he had learned the true cause of his terror: not possession by a vengeful spirit, but a trick of his own biology – a combination of mental and visual fatigue exacerbated by the low lighting and the mind’s natural tendency to find patterns in randomness.

That knowledge, once a comfort, now frightened him far more than any phantom, for the reflection now before him was no mere illusion of silvered glass, but a form of the thing itself – his inner essence made manifest. He sensed how malleable that essence was in this state, how easily it could become distorted beyond all recognition. How quickly he could devolved into utter insanity.

But if meditation was the only way to escape madness, and meditation led to this, this, this deformation… what else could he possibly do? He was damned either way.

No, no, he couldn’t give in that easily. He was a pioneer, dammit, a man of discovery and ingenuity! All he had to do was hold on until he could wake up. It felt as though he had been here for hours already – surely he didn’t have much longer. Maybe… maybe if he tried to alternate, walking the wire between the two states…

Unless, of course, that became a destructive cycle in itself.

But he had to try, didn’t he?

So he tried, forcing himself back into a state of meditation and jolting out of it in terror, again and again and again… and sure enough, just as he had feared, each repetition only served to amplify and accelerate the process.

Each time, as he stared, the twisted image of his ego came more swiftly, more sharply – certain aspects of his personality dwindling while others surged in strength, different memories waxing stronger or waning away, his self-image growing progressively polarized, twisted into something he didn’t recognize… but was afraid he knew all too well.

He was crystallizing into a caricature of his true self – all nuance and depth stripped away, reduced to a cartoonish collection of stereotypes: like a picture run through the same filters over and over, an old monitor left sitting on the same screen until the image was irreversibly burned into the equipment…

By god! That was it!

The revelation was enough to snap him out of his decaying orbit around the black hole of insanity, revelations and implications erupting like fireworks across his psyche. If he could have laughed, he would have been in hysterics; of course that was the answer – how could he, of all people, have failed to see it?

In much the same way that engineers could send shuttles into space without really knowing exactly how gravity worked at the most fundamental level, so too had he and his team been able to manipulate and navigate the realm of dreams without truly understanding the nature of consciousness, sleep, or exactly why humans dreamed in the first place.

Think, Jason, think.

There were plenty of theories, of course: processing information, filing memories, practicing for potential scenarios, unlocking creativity…

Fire up the other hemisphere for a change.

He didn’t subscribe to any one idea, and suspected there was some truth to all of them. But he did believe dreams served a valuable purpose – even if they weren’t strictly essential. The phenomenon was too elaborate and energy-intensive to have developed to such a degree without serving some beneficial function.

You used to read books for fun, remember? You used to write poetry.

So what if there was another reason that dreams had evolved and persisted in multiple species? What if dreams, with all their chaos and creativity, were more than the brain simply sorting itself out at the end of the day? What if all that random, seemingly meaningless noise actually had a very specific purpose?

Forget the formulas and petty politics. Just think of something weird. Something that used to capture your imagination.

What if… dreams served the same function as screensavers had, once upon a time?

Ah, there it is.

Jason seized upon the old memory, breathing new life into the image that had once so enraptured him as a child, the incandescent lightning of his thoughts pouring into the nearly-forgotten oddity like doctor Frankenstein channeling the fury of the heavens into new life. Into dreams… and all the protection they provided from seeing himself too clearly.

From the aperture of his mind’s eye there came a mighty rumble that shook the void, and from the resulting rift there erupted a sudden forest of pipes with great flocks of toasters taking wing from their technicolor branches…

And so Doctor Oneiros made his way back to the waking world, holding the key to all the fame and fortune he had dreamed of for so long.

At his insistence, the Dreamcatcher project was promptly cancelled shortly afterward.