Three months ago, I got a job offer from a company I’d never heard of. No interview. No background check. Just an email. “Dream research assistant needed. Quiet night work. High pay. Must be discreet.”
I thought it was a scam, but I clicked anyway. I was two months behind on rent and tired of grinding delivery apps and night shifts at a gas station. Two days later, I was standing in a windowless room at the back of a warehouse on the edge of town, reading a non-disclosure agreement that might as well have been written in blood.
“You will not share any details about the work, equipment, or subjects. Any breach will be met with legal and… appropriate consequences.”
I signed it. I shouldn’t have.
The room I worked in had two chairs, two monitors, and one machine — a dome-shaped thing about the size of a watermelon, covered in metallic wires and nodes. The label read: MIMIR NEURAL SYNC UNIT. They said it could "interface with REM wave activity" to let us observe and catalog dream visuals in real time. I didn't ask how it worked. I just did what they told me.
Every night from 11 PM to 5 AM, I came in, put on the headset, and watched people’s dreams play out like grainy, half-finished films. My job was to log what I saw: Tags. Colors. Symbols. Emotions. Distortions. Most of them were forgettable — bizarre, disconnected messes. Like the mind dumping its trash into the subconscious.
I watched a woman relive her wedding as a loop where her groom’s face kept changing into her dead dog. A man had a recurring dream about drowning in cereal. One guy just sat in a red chair in an endless desert for six hours. I didn’t care. I just tagged and logged. The pay was good. The work was quiet.
Until shift #27.
That night, the dream opened with a man walking through a long white hallway. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. He wore a dark hoodie. I couldn’t see his face. His steps echoed. The hallway had doors — each with numbers.
Room 11. Room 12. Room 13…
He stopped at Room 16. He opened the door and stepped inside. And I felt cold.
I wasn’t just watching anymore. It felt like… I was in it. Like my thoughts had shifted into his. The room inside was familiar. Too familiar. Cracked white walls. A humming mini-fridge. A ceiling fan with a broken blade. A desk with an old laptop and a blue chair. My room. Down to the scratch on the window frame and the photo of me and my sister at the carnival. This was my apartment. The one I lived in right now. On the desk was my journal — the one I kept locked. In the dream, the man opened it. One line was written over and over in shaky block letters:
“They are watching you too.”
I ripped off the headset. Hit the emergency alert button. First time I ever used it. No one came.
The next day, I demanded answers. I found Dr. Kalder, the lead researcher.
“What the hell was that last dream?” I asked. “That was my apartment. That journal— I’ve never shown anyone that.”
She didn’t blink. “ID# 616-T,” I said. “Who is that?”
She stared at me for a long time. Then said, calmly: “You were told not to ask questions.”
“But that’s me, isn’t it? I’m the subject. You’ve been watching me.”
A pause. A smile.
“No,” she said. “You’re just the receiver.”
Then she walked away.
After that, things got worse.
The dreams weren’t random anymore. They all started in that hallway. The same man. The same doors. Room 17. Room 18. Room 19...
Every night, he’d open the next door. And each time, it was another place from my past. The classroom where I wet my pants in first grade. The church basement where I found my uncle passed out drunk. My sister’s old bedroom, the night after the accident.
Sometimes he just stood there and stared. Other times, he’d whisper things. Once, he looked directly into the dream feed and said: “Why did you lie?”
I stopped sleeping. I’d go home, lie in bed, and feel like I was still being watched. The black van across the street. The flicker of the hallway camera even though no one passed.
I started having dreams outside of the lab — dreams that felt like the ones I saw at work. Same angle. Same man. Except now, I wasn’t sure who was dreaming whom.
Then came shift #42.
The hallway ended. No more doors. The man stood at the last one: Room 23. Inside, it was pitch black. For a long time, he just stood there. Then he stepped in. And the feed went dead. A message appeared on the screen: “MIMIR SYNC TERMINATED: ACCESSING DEEPCORE FILES.”
Another screen popped up. A split feed. On the left: a live camera view — the break room, where I sat on lunch 20 minutes ago. On the right: an old video, grainy black-and-white footage.
I watched myself… sleeping.
Years younger. Electrodes on my head. Someone whispering to me off camera: “You’re going to forget this. It’s better if you forget.” I threw off the headset. Ran down the hallway. The door I thought led outside… was gone. In its place: a white hallway. With numbered doors.
Room 1. Room 2. Room 3…
I don’t know how long I’ve been here now. Some nights I think I’ve escaped. I wake up in my bed. The world looks normal. Until I spot the man in the hoodie across the street. Until I turn on my phone and see a recording of my dream from the night before. I think the job was never real. I think I never left the lab. Or maybe I never applied in the first place.
I just wanted a paycheck. What I got was a front-row seat to my own breakdown. And if anyone’s reading this — if this shows up on your feed — ask yourself: When was the last time you really woke up?
Because I’m starting to think some of us are still dreaming.
No comments:
Post a Comment