DᏒᛊᚣᛗᛢ

Everything started with the dreams. They weren’t just your average flickers of the subconscious, no. These dreams were lucid, painfully real, and laced with terror. Every night, Aaron was plunged into a different scene: blood-spattered walls, echoes of screams, and the stench of death thick in the air. What made them unbearable wasn’t just the gore—it was the way they felt. He could taste the iron tang of blood, feel the cold metal of a knife in his hand, hear the wet crunch of bone under pressure.

At first, Aaron thought he was going mad. He kept waking up in sweat-drenched sheets, trembling, sometimes screaming. His girlfriend, Lily, tried to soothe him, but even her gentle hands couldn’t reach the fear rooted in his bones.

The dreams got worse. Now they were more like hallucinations. He saw flashes of them during the day: a woman falling onto subway tracks, a child choking on air as if being strangled by an invisible hand, an old man coughing blood into his cereal. They looked at him. Always at him.

He began to avoid people. Isolate. But isolation made the visions louder.

Then it happened.

The first death.

He recognized her immediately: the woman from the subway. She fell exactly like in his dream, her skull cracking like porcelain under the weight of the train. Aaron watched the news report in mute horror. He screamed, shattered his TV screen, and collapsed to the floor. It wasn’t just a dream. It was a vision.

He tried to stop the next one.

A boy, maybe ten, with curly hair and a red hoodie. Aaron ran six blocks to the playground he saw in his dream. He screamed the boy’s name. The boy turned. Aaron reached out, but the swing set chain snapped, and the metal seat crushed the child’s throat before Aaron could get close.

He failed again.

And again.

Every night, he watched people die. Brutally. Horribly. Dismembered, gutted, burned alive. And every day, he tried to change fate. But the result was always the same: his interference changed nothing. It almost seemed to help the deaths happen.

He stopped sleeping. But when he did, the dreams became worse.

One night, he saw Lily die.

She was tied to a chair in their apartment, crying, gagged. A man in a lab coat stood over her, scalpel in hand. He peeled back her skin with methodical calm. She looked at Aaron in her final moments, eyes screaming for help. And then she went still.

Aaron woke up choking on his own vomit.

He went mad.

Desperate, Aaron searched for answers. His hands trembled as he typed keywords into every search engine: "premonition dreams," "lucid hallucinations," "dreams come true deaths." It took days before he found a clue. A forum hidden in the dark web: Project EchoMind.

The posts were cryptic. A few mentioned dreams predicting death. One user, “NullVein,” wrote about being watched. Another hinted at being part of a secret experiment. Aaron followed every breadcrumb, hacking into sites, bribing an ex-hacker friend. He traced something back to a facility outside the city. A name: Erebus Division.

The closer he got, the more the dreams shifted. They began to feel like memories.

He saw himself in a white room. No windows. Electrodes attached to his temples. Voices from speakers: "Subject 019 is showing signs of neural adaptation."

Another dream: him killing someone. Not in horror. With pleasure.

Aaron didn’t know what was real anymore.

Then Lily was taken.

He came home to a broken door. Blood smeared on the handle. A message carved into the wall: "Stop dreaming."

He snapped.

With the address of Erebus in hand, he drove all night. The facility was underground, hidden beneath a fake industrial warehouse. Getting in wasn’t as hard as it should’ve been. It was almost like they wanted him to come.

Inside, he found hallways lit in sterile blue, security cameras that turned to follow him, and rooms filled with surgical tools, memory maps, brain scans.

And files. So many files.

One folder changed everything: **"Subject 019: Aaron Vale."

Aaron learned the truth. He had never lived a normal life. He had been grown—engineered in Erebus as part of an experiment to create predictive minds. Using neural simulations, Erebus crafted dreams that mapped out real events before they happened. The deaths? They were orchestrated. Monitored. Tested. And Aaron? He was their perfect subject.

Each time he saw a death and failed to stop it, they recorded his emotional response. His suffering was part of the data. Lily had been placed in his life deliberately, her role designed to trigger the strongest emotional climax.

She wasn’t just taken.

She was sacrificed.

He found her in the lab.

Strapped to a chair, barely breathing. Eyes swollen shut. She whimpered his name.

Aaron held her face. Promised to get her out. Promised they’d be free.

But he was too late.

A voice rang through the speakers: "Final phase: execute resolution."

Gas hissed from the vents. Aaron screamed and broke the glass. Tried to drag her out. But she convulsed in his arms, blood pouring from her mouth. She died clutching his shirt.

He didn't feel pain.

He felt fury.

He stormed the control room. Killed two guards with a crowbar. His hands dripped with blood. In the final room, he found the lead scientist.

"You were perfect," the man whispered. "You showed us that dreams are the mind's way of scripting the future. And pain? Pain is just a byproduct of creation."

Aaron crushed his skull with a monitor.

He walked through Erebus, killing every white coat he found. He set the place on fire, watching flames consume the hallways.

As he stumbled outside, bleeding, coughing smoke, he collapsed.

Then he opened his eyes.

A white room.

No windows.

Electrodes on his temples.

A voice over the speaker: "Subject 019 simulation complete. Neural response optimal. Preparing for next trial."

Aaron screamed as the world around him faded, and the dream began again.

"They said dreams were harmless echoes of the mind—but mine were the screams of futures I could never change."

~The End~