Paradoxical

Here's a public service announcement: if you and your significant other want to get kinky, dreamcatching is probably not a good idea, but if you're going to do it anyway, black market dreamcatchers are definitely not a good idea.

Not that Sydney is complaining. After all, extricating would-be dream catchers from the prison of their dreams helps her pay the bills. It is a job that comes with its own risks, but as they say, you'll never catch a good wave if you don't go for the big ones.

Are some waves too big though? she wonders as she walks along the virtual beach.

"I'm online," she says, informing the crew back in the real world, back in the dreamlab where her body lies on a bed next to the two patients. The crew is monitoring their key vitals including EEGs, EOGs, and EMGs among several other acronyms, so they already know her sleep status, but guide confirmation upon lucidity is still an essential part of the procedure.

The patients' names are Mary S. and Frank H. Stein according to the records. A happily married couple who decided to spice up their life by sharing their dreams. Literally. Neurally hooked to each other with dreamcatcher tech, the couple merged and synchronized their sleep cycles for a night of randy REM fun.

"I see some footprints on the sand," Sydney relays back to the crew. "Two people. I think. Oh, wait. The tide is high, but it looks like there's a third set of footprints. I'll follow them."

People just don't like to read the fine print, she thinks. Who could blame them? The topic of dreamcatching could make your eyes go cross.

Every person enters different physiological and mental states during sleep. Generally speaking, we cycle through four stages of sleep throughout the night as measured with various tools. The particular sleep stage that adventurous fetishists are interested in is called paradoxical sleep- the stage when the onset of rapid-eye-movement (REM) occurs. In other words, dreaming. Imagine being able to synchronize your dreams with another person OR persons simultaneously. Sounds like jolly good fun, don't it?

Sydney thinks so.

"The footsteps veer into the jungle," she reports. "How much longer before transition? Five minutes? Not enough time. I'll have to wait for the next cycle."

Here's where the complications arise. In order to synchronize dreams in real time, the neural patterns of the participants need to be manipulated until a sort of average has been arrived at. It is much easier to do it if the participants share similar sleep profiles, and much more difficult, even dangerous, if the profiles do not match. Unfortunately for Mary and Frank, they drew the short end of the stick. Sydney has never seen such a disparate set of profiles. Their sleep cycles are almost opposite. Uncanny. The system is supposed to shut down the session in such cases, so the question is, why didn't it do so in this case?

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"Please help us!"

When she catches the next dream cycle, Sydney sees a man and a woman waving their arms in the distance.

"It's them," Sydney reports. "I'm opening a live stream now."

The couple is completely naked, and they both fall on the sand in front of her.

"Please help us," says the man out of breath. "There's a crazy girl out there. She's after us and says she won't let us leave! It feels like it's been years."

Sydney introduces herself and lets them know everything is going to be fine.

The problem with synchronizing sleep patterns is that sometimes small deviations can lead to big trouble. Each sleep cycle lasts for about 90 minutes, but they're not truly a carbon copy of each other. As the night goes on, small differences lead to larger errors in synchronization. In other words, it becomes harder to catch dreams, which like butterflies, scatter in all directions. When sleep profiles are a poor match, the nervous system works harder to enter alignment, and a night of dream-catching fun can turn into days of sleep-induced coma and eventual death if the body is not well regulated.

Sydney's job is to make sure that doesn't happen and guide the dream catchers back home.

"Where is this girl?" she asks the scared couple.

They point towards a cliff overlooking the sea.

"Okay, here's what I want you to do," Sydney says in her best school-teacher voice. "I want you to go sit over there and argue with each other."

"Argue?" says Mary. "About what exactly?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe you can argue about who's turn it is to do the dishes, or who's idea was it to use a black market dreamcatcher. Anything. This is your chance to air out your grievances. Argue like your life depends on it."

Sydney turns and begins to walk up the cliff.

She's being mean on purpose. REM sleep is emotionally charged. This is how Kleitman's laboratory discovered the correlation between rapid eye movements and dreaming back in the 50s. It is easier to wake up when emotional arousal reaches a certain threshold, specially when that emotion is negative. If love and lust synchronize the dreams and aspirations of two lovers, conflict is a sure way to put an end to it.

"I see a girl sitting on the edge of the cliff," Sydney says to her team. "I will approach and talk to her. Yes, yes. I'll be careful."

The girl is singing a song that is carried in the wind.

"Hi there. I'm-" Sydney begins.

"I know who you are," the girl says. "I know why you're here."

"I mean you no harm," Sydney tells her.

"You will take them away."

"They don't belong here. They've been asleep for nearly a week in the outside world, and if they don't wake up, then they're going to die."

"But if they wake up, then I will disappear. I will not exist anymore. Don't I have the right to exist?"

Sydney has never encountered a dreamfae before. She actually thought it was just an urban legend that guides came up with to spook each other.

She is silent for a moment.

"What is your name?" she asks the girl.

"Amy."

"Amy, why don't you let Mary and Frank go?"

"Because they are my parents! They made me, and now you want to take them away. I will not let you!"

The girl's hair floats up and her eyes glow purple.

"Amy. Listen to me. You're an old memory that has gained awareness because of a technology called dreamcatcher."

"I exist! I am real!" Amy insists, raising her hands. "I can feel the wind."

On the blue horizon, a large wave that looks like a Japanese-style painting begins to grow and make its way towards the shore.

"Amy! Don't do it! You are real, yes, and you will continue to be real in a different form, but only if they remain alive. If they die, then you will cease to exist. Access my library core, and you will see that I'm telling you the truth."

The tsunami wave stopped in mid-air just as it was about to crash upon the beach. Then pixel by pixel, it disintegrated.

"I want to be singular!" the girl cries. "I want to exist, just like you do!"

---

On the way home from the dreamlab, Sydney feels drained. It is one thing to work with neural parameters, it is another to deal with the dreamcatcher itself. Its advanced intelligence is necessary to manipulate dream states, but the space where its machine logic meets human logic is still terra incognita. Rumours of dreamfae and other emergent entities abound in the dreamcatcher community. Now she knows they are true.

"This is gonna shake things up," she murmurs.

For their part, Mary and Frank will need some time to recover, but they will be fine. As it turns out, Mary had a miscarriage fifteen years ago. It was a girl whom they had planned on calling Amy. The dreamcatcher must've picked up on it, through medical records perhaps and old residual memories, then created Amy as an avatar.

Sydney wants to paint it all with the cut and dry brush of technical and scientific jargon, but she can still hear the echo of the girl's last words.

"Tell my parents that I love them."

That's the thing about dream catching, Sydney believes, sometimes the dream catches you.

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Thank you for reading my tale. It was based on the prompt dreamcatcher for the The Ink Well Fiction Prompt #165, but because I am past the deadline, I am not formally submitting the story to the challenge.

Images generated by @litguru using Stable Diffusion software

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