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Author's Notes

# The Dreaming

Story
Elen woke before dawn, heart racing.
The dream clung to her like fog, the taste of salt, the slow pull of water, a whisper behind her left ear saying her name again and again. She sat up, gasping, and for a moment could not tell if the sound still echoed in the room or only in her mind.
Her chamber was cold. The shutters had come loose in the night, tapping against the wall with each breath of wind. Beyond them, the sea was black glass, still as a held breath.
She pressed her palms to her face. Just a dream, she told herself. The same dream again. The one where she walked beneath the surface, where pale shapes drifted through the deep, where something vast and unseen moved in the dark below.
She went to the basin to wash and stopped. The water was trembling, as if something beneath it was breathing.
For a long moment she stood still, watching. Then it stilled. When she touched it, it was icy, perfectly ordinary. She laughed once, thin, too loud, and poured it away.
Downstairs, the house was quiet. The fire had died in the night, and a faint scent of brine hung in the air, as if the sea itself had come visiting. She opened the door to let the wind clear it out and froze.
On the threshold, pressed into the damp wood, were footprints. Bare, narrow, the size of her own. They led from the direction of the shore.
She followed them to the edge of the dunes. There they ended, fading into sand stirred by the tide. The horizon was pale with coming light. The sea looked calm and harmless.
Elen stayed there a long time, listening.
Somewhere far out, just beneath the sigh of the waves, she thought she heard her name again. Not loud, not urgent, just a soft reminder, as though something below the surface was patient, and certain, and waiting for her to sleep once more.

Sometimes, there is a monster under the bed, keep hands and toes out of reach

## Description

At first, it was only whispers, a few strange stories, the kind people laugh about over wine. A woman who dreamed her hair white and woke to find it so. A farmer who dreamed of his dead brother, then saw him walking the fields at dawn. A child who dreamed of drowning, and whose lungs filled with salt the next morning.

Now, the laughter has stopped.

Something has changed in the fabric of the world. The boundary between waking and dreaming, once firm as iron, has begun to blur. The Dreaming is no longer a private place. It bleeds.

Dreams now leak into daylight, staining the edges of the real. Shadows move without light. Faces half-remembered flicker in crowds. Words muttered in sleep echo hours later in waking air. The veil that kept imagination safe has grown thin, and the world is beginning to show the cracks.

The gods of sleep and madness are ascendant. Dream cults spread like mold. Scholars argue whether the change is magic, sickness, or punishment. But all agree on one thing, if the veil collapses entirely, reality will drown in what humanity has imagined.

And most dreams are nightmares.

### The Signs of the Dreaming

It began subtly. Artists painted visions they could not remember creating. Lovers shared the same dreams. Entire villages reported the same nightmare on the same night. Then, the changes became physical.

- Dream-born Flesh: Scars appear where none existed. Limbs change shape to match dreamt selves, beauty or horror. Some changes fade with daylight; others remain.
- Living Phantoms: The dreamed dead walk again, half-real and fading, unaware that they do not belong. Some beg to return to sleep; others cling to life, growing monstrous in their desperation. The monsters we once feared as children have begun to leave their closets.
- Shifting Places: Streets rearrange overnight. Buildings rise where none were. Maps lose meaning, for even the land seems to dream of new shapes.
- The Dreamt Sky: Moons appear where there should be none. Stars move like living things. Night itself seems to watch.

Those most sensitive to dreams, prophets, children, and the mad, are the first to feel it. They wake screaming, claiming the sky is cracking like glass, that something vast stirs behind the world.

### The Fear of Sleep

Sleep has become a terror.

Families take turns staying awake, terrified of what might emerge if they all dream at once. Nobles hire mages to guard their minds. Soldiers drug themselves to stay conscious for days, dying of exhaustion before daring to rest.

Taverns advertise “waking rooms”, places where the desperate gather to stay conscious together under constant light. Priests of the new gods of sleep promise “safe dreaming” for coin or devotion, selling lullabies like prayers.

But all such comfort is temporary. Sooner or later, everyone must sleep. And every night, the boundary weakens a little more.

### The Gods Awaken

For centuries, the gods of sleep were minor spirits, patrons of poets and madmen. Now, their temples overflow.

The Nameless Host, a whispering cult that claims to speak for the dreams themselves, not the dreamers, but the dreams that have grown tired of being caged.

Even the old gods have begun to stir, as if the prayers of sleeping minds are reshaping them anew. Some appear in waking visions, changed, unrecognizable, wearing the faces mortals have imagined for them.

No one knows if the gods are saving the world or dreaming it to death.

### The Scholars’ Despair

The scholars and magi call it Oneiric Convergence, a thinning of the veil between mind and matter. But for all their theories, none can stop it.

Some say it began with a broken prophecy, an ancient spell, or the death of the god who once ruled dreams. Others whisper that it is the world itself growing weary of reality, that existence is falling asleep.

Dream laboratories now dot the cities, filled with exhausted academics recording nightmares as if documenting an apocalypse in slow motion. But their reports grow stranger each day, written in symbols that shift on the page.

Many who study the phenomenon too deeply never wake again. Their bodies remain alive, their minds lost to the expanding Dream.

### The Collapse of Reason

The Dreaming infects more than flesh, it poisons thought.

People lose the ability to distinguish between memory and imagination. Entire histories change overnight, rewritten by collective dreams. Nations forget wars that never happened; monuments appear to heroes no one remembers.

Dream-born creatures prowl the roads: men of glass, wolves with human hands, rivers that whisper secrets in voices of the drowned. Some are harmless, others hunt. The world grows crowded with the unreal.

And in some places, the Dream thickens into mist, a shimmering haze where waking minds lose themselves. Travelers step into it and vanish, or return weeks later, speaking of worlds built entirely of nightmare logic: cities that breathe, oceans of faces, suns that bleed.

The Dream is no longer a place one enters, it is spreading.

### The Coming Night

Each night lasts a little longer. Each dawn feels weaker.

Astronomers claim the stars themselves are dimming, as though sleep is reaching even the heavens. The tides falter, as if the world’s heartbeat has slowed.

Prophets say that when the final dreamer closes their eyes, the veil will vanish altogether, and the world will not wake again.

In the cities, people gather to sing lullabies to the dying sun. Some take comfort in the idea that perhaps this was always how it was meant to end, not with fire or flood, but with the quiet collapse of waking into one endless dream.

Others still fight it, building towers of light and noise to hold back the dark. But even they know the truth: no one can stay awake forever.

## Tone and Themes

Dreamlike horror, slow, surreal, and apocalyptic. A calm descent into unreality where fear comes not from death, but from doubt. The world doesn’t burn, it unravels.

### Themes

- Reality as Fragile: The line between dream and waking is an illusion that was never meant to hold forever.
- The Fear of Sleep: Rest becomes surrender; the most human act becomes the most dangerous.
- Faith and Madness: The gods are changing because belief itself is dreaming.
- The End as Transformation: Perhaps the world isn’t dying, merely shifting into a new form of existence, one without waking, or one where dreaming is the new truth.
- The Horror of the Familiar: Every nightmare is born from the mind, and now the mind writes the laws of reality.

When the last light fades and the last dreamer exhales, the world will not end. It will simply close its eyes.

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