I was a kid, when my dad told me for the first time, that if only he had remembered the most important part of his dream, we would have been rich! Now, as I write, that might lead to my death.
According to my dad, once, when he was younger, he had a dream where his dead grandpa came to him and told him he was there to help and that he was about to tell him all the numbers to bet on, to win the lottery.
My dad is a scientist of profession, and at heart, so he tends to be quite sceptical about anything that can’t be proved, but that one time, as soon as he woke up and the shops were open, he rushed to the nearest one with the tickets his grandpa told him in his dream, bought one and filled it out with the numbers his grandpa told him to. Almost all the numbers…
As he was filling the ticket, he was absolutely sure about the first 4 numbers to bet on, but for some reason, all of a sudden, he couldn’t remember the other 3. He tried and tried to remember, but they were gone from his memory, somehow.
The week after, the official numbers came out, and he swears for his life to this day that all the numbers he remembered from his dream were correct, and all the ones he forgot were wrong. According to him, that was the reason why we didn’t become rich.
This story always fascinated me, and even though I’ve never been a massive believer, I had a huge bond with my dad, and so I focused my career in studying sleep and dreaming. Later, when this memory came back to mind, I started thinking about why he would have dreamt about the correct numbers and then why he would have forgotten them. At first, this thought eventually slipped my mind, but it was when I was reading the results of the Russian Sleep Experiment, that I started thinking more and more obsessively about that. The Russian Sleep Experiment’s results show why one can’t spend too long without sleep, but what about the dreaming? Why couldn’t one remember all the dreams? And if there could be the answer for a lottery number in your dreams, why not something else much bigger? If we have drinks to keep you awake for a little longer, and drugs to put you to sleep faster and easier, why not something that can keep enough brain activity throughout sleep to retain the memories of the dreams?
At that point, I had a whole lab available to me, provided by the USA government, and my experiments on sleep and depression treatment on soldiers had been a huge success, so anything I wanted to study, I would have been granted access to.
I told them that I would be treating soldiers with war trauma and that there might be repressed memories with enemy secrets hiding away as self-preservation, so I was allowed to proceed with the programme, but was never allowed an actual soldier to treat.
At first I didn’t think about using myself as a test subject. We found animals from other projects and tried the drugs on them. I hate doing tests on animals, but observation had suggested that they dream just like us, so I wanted to give it a try.
After months of trying without success but no lethality, though, I made a mistake.
I was ready to give up on the project and on understanding what happened to my father that night. The government funding was coming to an end, and the last thing that occurred to me was to try it myself. We could run the tests for about a week and see what would change, and if there was no effect, I would have tried everything I could. Remembering Norman Osbone and many other scientists from movies that brought their own demise upon themselves for trying the exact same thing, I almost stopped myself, but there had been no side effects in animals, so why would anything happen to me?
I informed my team of my decision, and that night we had a room ready for me to be observed in, while the drugs ran their effects. The basic idea was to combine drugs used by students during exam periods to improve memory retention as well as a sedative in combination with caffeine. It took me a while to fall asleep, but when I finally did, I dreamed of the most wonderful things. I was back with my father, and we spoke about all the topics possible in the house that I remembered as being my childhood home. I was sitting in the armchair to the right of the fireplace and him on the one to the left. The room was decorated for Christmas, my favourite season, and it was the middle of the afternoon. I could tell you every single detail, which meant my experiment was a success!
When I woke up in the morning, the only side effect I felt was some difficulty in seeing for a little longer than you would think. The sensation of pain when you’ve been sleeping all night, just woke up and there’s a light in your face lasted longer than I was used to, but I was able to tell all my colleagues about every little detail in the dream.
Out of excitement, I would have said I had the best results and the ones I needed, but I wanted to go back and be with my parents more than anything else in the world, so I came up with a whole week of tests to be able to go back.
Each night I went under and came back with a full new set of dream details to prove once more the drugs were working perfectly. I would come back only to find that it would take me a little longer to get used to the light, the whole room shining too bright for my eyes with a dark patch in the middle. It was like I was going blind.
On the fifth day, things changed slightly. Once again, I went to sleep and dreamt about my parents and having conversations I never had the chance to have with them, only this time, someone rang the doorbell. My mom smiled and went to the door while my curiosity was getting the best of me.
She came in with a guest, but never told me its name and it never spoke, the entire time. In fact, it made me a little uncomfortable. It would look at everyone in the room like it was trying to decipher the scene, smiling slightly or nodding in confirmation any time someone spoke to me, and eventually landing its gaze on me and keeping it there. All the while it never said a word.
I found it strange, and was asked by my colleagues if we should stop the experiment and just present the results to ask for further funding with different people. I understood their concern, but I wanted to talk to my parents and maybe dream about some memories and no one really argued further.
For the next two nights, I dreamt about other things, amongst which, memories from my childhood with details that I would never have remembered, like what colour was everything and if it was cloudy or clear skies that day. The only twist was this guest would come to the house and stay around, observing me closer, each time, its facial features would change quite a bit and I didn’t know why or even how. It had an intense stare, like a member of your family might show you when you do something wrong and the more it was around, the more I realised that all I could remember was its face. Even that memory was starting to get foggier with time and I was starting to feel scared.
On the 7th night, the last one we were meant to have, I went to sleep as usual, this time feeling nervous, because the previous night, this thing had been the closest ever, and I thought I saw its lips were sealed shut.
When I faded into my own dreams, there were no parents around. Only the house, and for some reason I couldn’t find any details in it. I knew they were there, but the only thing I could see and focus on was that thing. Better yet, its upper body and how it was devouring a bloodless corpse. It was devouring my dad, but there was no blood anywhere. It was almost like all he was, was my memory, and I was forgetting as this thing swallowed every bit.
Its eyes were deep and dark every time it looked at me, its mouth was now completely missing, every bit just disappearing into its mass, and its hair was gone as its skin started turning void black and I knew, somehow, that it was smiling at me with each look. We stood there for a while, me wanting to ask what was going on, but not able to speak, and this thing crouched with its back turned to me, throwing glances at me between every two bites until it was done. My heart rate was going up by the second, my breath escaping me.
In a panic, I jolted awake and as usual, it took me longer than any other person, to get rid of the black middle and bright surrounding area. This time, when I finally managed to see everything right, there was no one around me. No colleagues, no noise, no checking up on me. I was in a white room with white furniture and everything else so white that it might as well just not exist. The dark in the middle of my vision had now become a dark corner in the white room, and somehow it felt like it was watching me.
When the dark corner moved, I realised I was still asleep, but had lost complete control of my dream. This thing was the same as in my dreams. My dreams… where I was… somewhere… with my parents… my dad?
As it came closer to me, my memories became more and more vague. With each step, I started seeing its lips again, now in a shade of absolute void. Its mouth was slowly opening up into more void, a memory erased away with each gasp of this thing until it was right in my face and everything in the room was gone. There was only white emptiness, me and this thing.
In case you are wondering, I did wake up in the end, but I don’t think I have long. As I sit here, writing this, I can see it in the corner of my room, waiting for me to fall back asleep. I’m not sure if I will return and if you’ll hear more of me, but if you don’t, I’ve researched as much as I can into this thing and it doesn’t seem like anyone knows what this is or why this exists. I don’t even remember why it’s here… what have I done for it to come for me? I don’t know what it is or why… wait…