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The Archive of Forgotten Dreams

Some dreams are better left forgotten—others come looking for you.

By TheSilentPenPublished 8 months ago 3 min read

Section 1: The Vault

In the year 2137, dreams were no longer sacred. They were currency, therapy, evidence—and sometimes, trash. The government-run facility called DreamVault offered a simple service: upload the dreams you didn’t want anymore.

Nightmares. Guilt-trips. Longings too painful to revisit.

For a modest fee, you could delete them from your subconscious permanently.

They called it mental sanitation.

Felix Grant was a sanitation worker—official title: Vault Custodian Level B. That meant he mopped floors, checked cryo-storage units, and emptied digital bins of corrupted dream files. He never questioned the contents. It was illegal to view them.

But curiosity, like dreams, was hard to suppress.


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Section 2: The Labeled One

One Thursday night, the vaults were unusually quiet. The neon hum of memory stabilizers pulsed through the air as Felix walked his routine route through Section 7-G—Unretrievable Archives.

These were dreams people had asked to erase permanently. Once uploaded, they couldn’t be recovered. Only the name and a timestamp remained on the tag.

And that’s when he saw it.

One capsule blinked yellow—a warning light.

Felix approached, expecting a leak or file glitch. But then his eyes froze on the label:

GRANT, FELIX – 7:42 AM, AUG 12, 2121

His breath caught. That was his name. His ID number. A date 16 years ago.

He was only 9 then.

He checked the logs. He had no record of ever submitting a dream.


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Section 3: Breaking the Seal

For a long minute, Felix stood paralyzed. Then, he did something illegal.

He entered his override code.

The system asked for confirmation.
He hesitated.
Then pressed: YES.

The capsule hissed. The chamber cooled.

A projection flared in front of him—blue mist swirled into a visual stream.
He was watching a dream. His dream.


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Section 4: The Dream

It began in a forest—red-leafed, glowing with strange light. A younger Felix walked barefoot, chasing after something.

A whisper echoed: “Come find me...”

He stopped at a clearing. In the center stood a woman with violet eyes, silver hair braided like a crown. She looked at him with sadness.

> “You must forget,” she whispered. “Or they’ll find us both.”



Then came the flash. Bright. Terrifying.

The dream cut out.

Felix staggered back, trembling.

He didn’t remember this. Not a single second of it.

But his body did. He felt the fear. The urgency.

And the unshakable truth: This wasn’t just a dream.


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Section 5: The Hidden File

Digging deeper, Felix accessed restricted metadata attached to the dream. Encryption was heavy, but he bypassed it with old maintenance access codes.

A hidden note popped up:

> “Subject Grant, F. - Dream forcibly submitted by Department of Memory Regulation. Witness to unauthorized dimension breach. Evidence purged per Protocol 12.”



His heart dropped.

This wasn’t a dream someone forgot.

This was a memory someone erased.

From him.


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Section 6: The Breach

The forest. The woman. The silver braid.

It all came back in flashes as he walked home that night.

He remembered the strange door he found behind his grandmother’s barn. The humming sound. The forest on the other side.

He remembered the woman’s warning.
And he remembered the agents in black who came the next morning.

He had told them everything.

They must’ve wiped it afterward.

But now the memory was back—and it didn’t want to be forgotten again.


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Section 7: The Return

Felix took two days off.

He drove six hours to the ruins of his grandmother’s property, now government-owned and fenced off.

At midnight, he climbed over the gate.

The barn was gone. But he followed the rhythm in his chest—the pull of memory.

Behind a stone wall, overgrown with vines, he found it: a hatch, humming faintly, glowing red at the edges.

He placed his hand on it.

A voice echoed in his mind: “Welcome back, Felix.”

The door opened.

And the forest returned.


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Section 8: The Forgotten Ones

She was waiting—unchanged. The silver-haired woman.
Violet eyes shining.

“You remembered,” she said.

“I had help,” Felix replied. “Why did they erase it?”

“Because what you saw wasn’t meant for your world yet.”

“And now?”

She smiled softly.

“Now you choose. Stay and learn who you were before the forgetting—or return, and never remember again.”

Felix looked at his hands, still trembling.

This was no dream.

This was his truth.

He stepped forward.


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Author's Note

Some dreams aren’t just illusions. Some are warnings. Some are stolen pieces of who we are. If you found a forgotten dream labeled with your name… would you dare open it?

fact or fictionfuturescience fictiontech

About the Creator

TheSilentPen

Storyteller with a love for mystery and meaning. Writing to share ideas and explore imagination.

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