randomeer: Random_Guy
It’s the silence you notice first.
Not the normal kind — this is deeper, heavier, like the world has been wrapped in cotton. Everything is quiet now. Eerily quiet. Only the brief, confused bark of a distant dog breaks the stillness, and even that sounds out of place, like it wandered in from another reality.
Everyone’s asleep.
That’s what they call it, anyway. Asleep.
But it doesn’t feel like sleep when half the street is lying in bed with those Amazon dream caps glowing faintly through the curtains, each one connected to the Somnus network, each mind drifting somewhere else entirely.
They say it’s harmless.
They say it’s restful.
But when an entire neighbourhood is unconscious at five in the afternoon, you start to wonder if “asleep” is really the right word.
If I could see the future, I’d be rich. I mean, I would’ve invested in Amazon a long time ago. They were already enormous, but when they released the Dream Sharer, the company went stratospheric. The late Jeff Bezos — who once said he wanted Amazon to “deliver everything except sleep” — finally found a way to deliver that too.
The Dream Sharer was a daft‑looking cap you pulled over your head at night, all soft mesh and blinking LEDs. It connected you to the Somnus network, syncing your REM cycles with anyone else wearing one. You could slip into a lucid dream and find other users waiting there, wandering through shared landscapes, swapping fantasies, stitching their subconsciouses together like it was the most natural thing in the world.
It was a wonderful device, a marvel of modern technology. A little cap that let you slip into someone else’s subconscious and wander through their dreams as if they were your own. It was addictive — legally addictive — and nobody seemed bothered by that. People with vivid imaginations became dream‑messiahs, famous in the Somnus network and, increasingly, irrelevant in the shrinking real world. Entire communities formed around them. People paid obscene amounts of money just to join their lucid dreamscapes for a night.
Old people could mirror‑dream the lives of the young, feeling youth return to them in soft, impossible waves. Disabled people walked again. Blind people saw again, even if only in that shimmering, half‑real way dreams allow. It felt like the perfect invention, a device that connected humanity more intimately than anything before it.
But like smoking, leaded petrol, social media, and those ridiculous Lububu dolls, unregulated addiction never ends well. It didn’t take long for extra‑strength sleep enhancers to appear — pills designed to keep you under longer, deeper, further. People started taking them without hesitation, eager to stretch their nights into something closer to a second life.
People started to sleep longer, for two or three days at a time. Then more exotic drugs arrived, promising a week or two of uninterrupted dreaming, pushing the body to its very limit. Other pills enhanced the lucid state itself, sharpening colours, stabilising landscapes, making the dream feel sturdier than waking life.
Amazon, sensing the societal shift — or maybe trying to obscure the lawsuits gathering like storm clouds — kept raising the DreamScape subscription price. But that didn’t stop anyone. People sold their houses, emptied their savings, and curled up in doorways and stairwells with their dream caps still glowing faintly on their heads. Anything to get their dream fix.
I’m one of the few still awake now.
Not because I’m strong.
Just because I’m stubborn.
The streets are full of sleepers — curled in doorways, slumped on benches, like crack and meth addicts of the noughties, dream caps glowing like tiny blue fireflies. The world feels like a museum after closing time.
Sometimes I shake people, just to see if they’re alive.
Sometimes they’re not, but somehow that little cap with its flashing lights is still blinking away, transmitting something to somewhere.
