If you can dream it…
When Angus woke up that morning, he was covered with sweat. This had been the case every morning with the exception of Sundays and Mondays for the past 3 weeks. He always woke up with a start. He must be dreaming during the night, he thought, but he couldn’t remember what any of his dreams had been about. Each morning when he woke up, it was pretty cool in his room. So, why was he all sweaty?
Angus was a teacher at a local elementary school. He’d been there for over 30 years. This year, in particular, he had a very good 5th-grade class. They were easy to teach and were enthusiastic about everything he did. They especially liked his daily storytelling sessions. Each session would start with his students giving him a three-word prompt. He then had to make up a story using all three words. He was very good at creating and telling stories.
Angus decided to seek help from his family doctor. The doctor had no clue, having never seen this night sweat symptom before. She recommended Angus go to the special Sleep Clinic at Stony Brook Hospital, which Angus did.
Angus explained to the specialist his problem, his teaching position, and what he did in class. As a result of a consultation with one of their sleep specialists, he became part of a new Sleep/Dream experimental group. He was sedated and had newly designed dream nanobots surgically implanted into his brain stem.
These nanobots could both receive external stimuli and information, as well as take any dream images the participant created and convert them into a digital format that could be transmitted back to the researchers. These transmissions could be played as movies on an HDTV in their lab.
Since this was during Spring break from school, no school days were to be missed.
For the first 3 days of this experiment, nothing was created out of the ordinary. Dreams consisted of only mundane everyday life things like driving in a car, teaching mathematics to his class, a day at the beach, a shopping trip, etc.
On the 4th day, the researchers decided to input information into the nanobots and see if there would be any reaction.
That first day, they inputed the words She, Commands, and Fireflies.
That night as the movie of his dream played, they saw an incredible story develop; and Angus was directly involved in it. There were attacks on a woodsman who had cut down a tree and freed an evil tree sprite who was imprisoned there. Angus, in full magical gear, fought with all the evil fireflies released by the sprite’s commands and worked with the woodsman to trick the sprite back to its tree to be imprisoned again.
When Angus woke up. He remembered nothing, though he was covered in sweat.
The next night the researchers inputed the words Easter Bunny, Poison, and Truth.
Again that night, Angus was involved with an evil Easter Bunny whose anti-truth potion poisoned all of the chocolate Easter eggs that are found. Any child or adult that ate one of those eggs got deathly sick whenever they told the truth. Angus again was running all around the world seeking to find all these eggs, vanquish this evil Bunny, and attempted to reverse the effects of these eggs. It turns out that a lot of politicians enjoy eating chocolate Easter eggs.
When Angus woke up, as before, he was covered in sweat and remembered nothing.
On the last day, the researchers inputed the words, Campfire, Smell, and Doctor.
Angus’s dream that night concerned the very doctors doing research on his dreams. They were sitting by a campfire, discussing their next experiment involving the sense of smell and the idea of being able to read emotions and impart emotions to others. They confessed their plan to implant these nanobots onto CEOs of Social Media platforms and certain News outlets. Angus was the lone opponent to these experiments, and seeing the dangers of emotional blackmail, he ran from place to place to rally others against the scientists, eventually preventing them from succeeding and getting them imprisoned for life.
This is when the doctors decided to stop their experiment. They removed the nanobots from Angus’s brain. Angus was only shown the first 2 videos. The doctors explained to Angus that the third video had some glitches in it and never got recorded. He was told that he had a rare disease known as Fantafairyslumbervision and that there was no known cure for it yet. They explained to him that though there was no cure for the night sweats, they were preventably. All he had to do was stop writing and creating stories in his class.
Though Angus was disappointed, that’s exactly what he did. He continued to read a lot of fairy and folktales to his class but never asked for 3-word input again. His night sweats never returned.
On a side note, the doctors and researchers involved in the dream nanobots experiment left Stony Brook Hospital right after working with Angus. Rumor has it that they are doing some other nanobot experiments somewhere outside of the United States. Their exact whereabouts are unknown.
