The Dream Thieves

The Somnus Corporation's slogan was everywhere: "Why waste a third of your life sleeping?" Their miracle drug, Vigil, had eliminated humanity's need for sleep a decade ago. The world became more productive, more efficient—and utterly miserable.

Dr. Aris Thorne discovered the side effects first. "They're not dreams," he'd tried to warn his superiors at Somnus. "They're fundamental neurological processes. Without them, we're losing our creativity, our empathy, our ability to process emotions."

They fired him, of course. Then they stole his research.

Now Aris worked in the Undercity, running a clandestine clinic for those suffering from what he called "Wakeful Soul Syndrome." His patients were the successful ones—CEOs, artists, politicians—who had taken Vigil religiously and now found themselves emotionally barren, creatively sterile, and desperately unhappy.

"They're not just selling dreams," his assistant Lena whispered one night in the clinic. "They're selling them back to us."

She showed him the black market advertisements: "Experience genuine REM sleep! Authentic dreams, harvested from natural sleepers." The wealthy were paying fortunes to feel what they'd voluntarily given up.

Aris felt sick. The few remaining natural sleepers—mostly those too poor to afford Vigil—were being exploited. Their dreams were harvested in clandestine labs, their most intimate mental experiences packaged and sold like vintage wine.

His breaking point came when he recognized a patient's dream. It was his own—a memory of teaching his daughter to ride a bicycle, something that had happened years before the Vigil mandate. Someone had stolen it from him during one of his rare, drug-resistant sleep episodes.

"They're not just harvesting current dreams," Lena discovered, her face pale in the clinic's blue light. "They're mining memories. Turning people's pasts into entertainment for the rich."

Aris knew what he had to do. Using his old credentials, he infiltrated the main Somnus harvesting facility. What he found was worse than he'd imagined.

Hundreds of "Dreamers"—mostly children from poor families who still slept naturally—were kept in glass capsules, their minds stimulated to produce specific types of dreams. Happy dreams for the depressed. Creative dreams for artists. Love dreams for the lonely.

In the control room, he found the master database. Not just dreams, but memories, emotions, even personality traits were being cataloged and sold. The ultimate commodification of human experience.

He activated the emergency release protocol.

Chaos erupted. Alarms blared as capsules opened. The Dreamers awoke, confused and disoriented. Aris uploaded the entire database to the public net before security teams descended.

The scandal destroyed Somnus. In the aftermath, Aris stood before the World Health Council, the same organization that had mandated Vigil a decade earlier.

"You wanted efficiency," he told them. "But you sacrificed what makes us human. Dreams aren't a biological waste product—they're the conversation between our conscious and unconscious selves. Without them, we're just machines made of meat."

The Vigil mandate was repealed, but the damage was done. Generations had grown up never knowing natural sleep. Many couldn't handle the return of dreams—the nightmares, the strange symbols, the emotional turbulence.

Aris reopened his clinic, this time to teach people how to sleep again. How to dream. How to be human.

He kept one file from the Somnus database—the recording of his daughter's laughter from that long-ago bicycle lesson. Some memories, he believed, were worth preserving. Some dreams were worth keeping alive.

In a world learning to sleep again, he became the keeper of dreams, fighting to restore what had been so carelessly thrown away in the name of progress.

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