In Your Dreams

It had been years of seemingly random, inexplicable death, with no symptoms or patterns. All they knew was that when you fell asleep, you might not wake up.

This paradigm of bedtime fatalities gradually progressed from a few perplexing deaths to a global pandemic. People became terrified even to rest their eyes, and parents feared tucking in their children at night. Passing in your sleep became the most dreaded kind of death.

The worst part was that it seemed to target children. Some of the victims were adults, but most were under the age of 20. The population was decreasing dramatically, and people resorted to desperate measures in an effort to sleep as little as possible. Energy drinks and coffee flew from the shelves, and soon, dangerous stimulants became a commodity to the general public. Tired people with haunted eyes stumbled around like zombies. Car accidents, plane crashes, and house fires escalated, adding to the chaos and the death. The world was going up in smoke.



Rosa was swimming, her arms gliding rhythmically against the waves. It was her favorite dream. Even though it wasn’t real, she always enjoyed it.

She dove underwater and let the current sway her back and forth. Suddenly, the waves stopped. Jets of water shot all around her, swirling and twisting, pushing her with sporadic streams of iridescent fluid.

Her heart began to beat irregularly. It thudded and paused and sped up and throbbed. Rosa could feel the blood in her veins halting, accelerating, reversing. But she could breathe. Sort of. One gulp of water, the next of air; she gasped, inhaling and exhaling erratically, and right before it ended she realized that it was, at least partially, real.



Vincent stared at Rosa’s coffin. Just two days ago they had been walking through the park, and she was laughing and smiling and alive. She couldn’t be dead. It didn’t make sense. Rosa was only 18, just a year younger than himself, athletic and lively. And now, she was gone.

All the doctors could tell him was that Rosa had died in her sleep. She wasn’t the only the one. Millions of people around the globe were dying randomly, at all ages, and all in their sleep.

Every doctor in the nation, including Vincent’s father, was racking his brain for an answer. But there wasn’t any pattern. Some witnesses claimed that, before a person died, they were sort of panting in their sleep, and couldn’t be woken up.

Vincent wiped the tears from his eyes and put on his sunglasses so no one could see. He had planned to marry Rosa, and if couldn’t share his future with her, he wasn’t sure he wanted one at all.

He fondled the heart-shaped locket she used to wear. Inside was a picture of the two of them at a concert when they were kids.

“Everything needs a rhythm,” she had said suddenly, turning to face him. He had laughed at her abrupt conclusion. “What do you mean?”

“That’s what separates music from sounds. It has to have rhythm, and patterns, and it has to work perfectly. And we need rhythm too.”

Vincent put the necklace back in his pocket. The metal felt cold and dead. Rosa was gone.



That night Vincent lay in bed, concentrating so hard on falling asleep that it was impossible. His father was away at yet another medical meeting, trying to solve the sleeping-death puzzle. Just as well. His father didn’t sleep easily anyway, not since Vincent’s mother died of cancer three years before. Vincent knew that, as a doctor, his father grappled with the guilt that he couldn’t save her.

“Vinny?” A pair of lips appeared through the crack in the door.

“Come in, Lilah.” Vincent made room on the bed for his little sister. She climbed onto the bed and sat beside him. Her wide blue eyes examined him for a moment.

“I miss Rosa too,” she whispered after a moment. Vincent bit his lip to keep from crying and nodded. Then he scooped her up and held her close, wishing with all his might that they could fall asleep and wake up in a world everyone else woke up with them.



Around two-o’clock that night, Vincent’s eyes flashed open. “Must’ve fallen asleep,” he thought groggily. He glanced down at his 4-year-old sister, and was struck with horror. She was gasping for air, and when he shook her, she wouldn’t wake up.

Vincent knew he had to do something. His father still wasn’t home. He placed his hand on Lilah’s chest, and to his surprise, her heartbeat was completely random. He’d feel a hard thump, then a pause, then rapid thumping, then slow thumping. There was no pattern. Same with her breathing. She’d exhale twice, inhale once, and was choking on nothing.

“Everything needs a rhythm,” he could hear Rosa saying. “And we need rhythm too.”

Vincent, fully aware that what he was doing was crazy, began to hit Lilah’s chest, over and over, like the beat of a drum. He remembered hearing that a heartbeat should keep time to the song “Staying Alive”, so he kept that tempo, and to his amazement, her heart began to regulate itself. Then, slowly, her breathing did too.

Vincent shook her, and she woke up, startled. “What happened?” he asked anxiously. Her eyes were wide.

“It was a dream,” she sputtered. “First, it was normal, then everything, even I, went crazy, and I couldn’t find it.”

“Find what?”

“The beat. I couldn’t make a beat,” she said fervently. “Then I felt you tap me, and it had a beat; it wasn’t crazy. So I listened and listened until…until I could find it.” She placed her little hand on her heart. “My head helped me put it back to normal,” she said and smiled.

Then Vincent suddenly understood. It was a bad dream, and it became real. All because it disrupted the rhythm.

He heard a door close downstairs, and perceived that his father had come home. He rushed to tell him what had happened.



His father nodded, apparently interested in Vincent’s theory.

“So, you think that people are having dreams that disrupt normal cardiovascular, respiratory, and cerebral functions?” he asked pensively.

“Sort of. You know how, when a CD has a scratch, it skips and ruins the rhythm of the entire song? I think that, in the dream, it sort of skips in a person’s mind, and messes up their rhythm. You know, like a heartbeat, or breathing. It all has rhythm that we can’t function without.”

“But why are people having these dreams, and why is it so widespread?” mused his father. He looked straight at Vincent. “This is worth looking into. We haven’t been able to come up with anything, and people are dying every day. Well, every night."



The next day, Vincent went with his father to present their theory at a medical meeting. The desperate doctors listened with interest, though many were skeptical. But, having nothing else to go on, they eventually agreed to do some testing.

First, they performed autopsies on several of the most recent victims of the pandemic, which was being referred to as BDS (Bad Dream Syndrome). This time, they focused specifically on the portion of the brain involving dreams, and what they found was astonishing.

Every victim was missing a gene, causing a slight abnormality in that portion of the brain. After a while, the dream could affect the victim physically and, given that the pattern of the genes was off, it could set off other patterns, simply because the dream was enabled to control both the mind and the body. The missing gene, the scratch, was making the CD skip, and the rhythm of the dream and the person was destroyed.

“So, what do we do?” Vincent inquired of one of the researchers. “And why is this gene missing?”

“I believe that the human mind has been deteriorating slowly for decades. We reached a peak in human accomplishments, and have been on a downward slope ever since. It can’t be fixed. But the rhythm can. Just as you were able to interrupt your sister’s dream by making her conscious of rhythm, allowing her body and mind to restore itself, we should sleep with some kind of rhythm going in our mind.”

“So, sleep with music playing, so that we don’t lose our rhythm?”

“It’s worth a shot.”

In the end, this was tested by providing every person in that region with a device that not only played a steady beat, but pulsed with the tempo.

The results were rewarding. Not a single person in that region died from the BDS. The devices were issued globally, and the world began to recover from the damage it suffered. But the tragedy of so many deaths still haunted the survivors.



Vincent sank into the couch in his living room. After months of researching, studying, trial and error, there was a solution. Not a cure, but a solution. But with Rosa still dead, what did it matter?

Shut up, he told himself. Of course it mattered. So may lives would be saved, so many people would have a future. But not Rosa.

He buried his face in his hands. First he lost his mother, a fixture in his past. Then Rosa, his future. Both were gone.

Vincent raised his head at the sound of footsteps. His father entered the room and sat down. There was silence as both of them stared at the wall, as if it contained an answer. Then Vincent blurted, “How do you go on, when you’ve lost so much?”

After a pause, his father spoke. “Your mother was a part of me. When she died, it left a hole. I didn’t want to go on. But I did. You can get through it.”

“But how, when she’s not here to help me?”

“Because the world goes on. Focus on the rhythm of life, outside of yourself. The only way to move on is to live outside of yourself, to mimic others. Think about how you functioned before, and force it until you swing back into the rhythm. Because you won’t find it all in yourself. You get scratched, and skip, and need to refocus on living for others, and for Rosa, because if you live for yourself, you will self-destruct.”

Vincent ran his hands through his hair and sat up. His father left the room, and he sat alone, fingering the heart-shaped locket. He thought back to their childhood, remembering Rosa’s smile and her laugh, knowing that her rhythm would continue to play inside of him, over and over, forever. And he knew that he could go on. In his dreams.