Dream shift

Every time Elara closed her eyes, she traveled.

Not like ordinary dreamers — floating through fractured memories or surreal landscapes. No. When Elara dreamed, she arrived in another time.

She didn’t know when it started. Maybe the night her mother died, or the night she stopped dreaming like everyone else.

The first time was unforgettable. She woke barefoot in a golden wheat field, under twin moons that hung low in a violet sky. The air smelled sweet but foreign. The wind whispered songs she didn’t recognize. She ran through stalks taller than buildings, heart pounding, searching for something familiar. Suddenly, she stumbled upon a mirror nailed to a gnarled oak tree.

When she looked in it, her reflection blinked after her.

She gasped, but the dream shifted. The wheat swayed, the moons faded, and she awoke in her own bed — feet dusty with red dirt that didn’t exist anywhere on Earth.

That was only the beginning.

Over months, Elara learned to control the shifts. If she fell asleep holding a date in her mind — carved on paper, whispered like a prayer — she could slip to that moment in history.

She visited the bustling streets of Paris in 1889 during the Eiffel Tower’s unveiling, crowds cheering and steamships drifting lazily along the Seine. On another night, she found herself wandering the ruins of Tokyo after the collapse of the Pacific AI Grid in 2142, the air thick with silence and ozone. Each dream was vivid, solid, terrifyingly real.

The world never believed her. Dream travel was folklore—reddit threads, conspiracy podcasts, fringe science blogs. But Elara knew the truth. And so did others.

They found her.

One night, in a dream set in 1976, a man with eyes flickering like static appeared. His voice was calm, urgent.

“We’re called Chrono-sleepers,” he said. “There are hundreds of us now—drifting through time, scattered across centuries, some lost, some broken.”

He called himself Marek. He warned her, “Every shift pulls a thread. Pull too many, and the whole tapestry unravels.”

Elara didn’t listen.

She thought she was saving people. Preventing disasters. Whispering warnings. Each change felt small. Kind. Harmless.

But history isn’t a machine. It’s a heartbeat.

And now, it was stuttering.

Cities flickered in and out of existence. People aged backward. Children spoke languages long extinct. Headlines changed every morning. Even in waking life, the world was glitching.

The dreams became unstable. She’d fall asleep in one century and wake in another. Sometimes she inhabited the wrong body. Sometimes she didn’t wake at all.

In her most terrifying dream, she stood at the edge of time itself. A white void stretched endlessly, centuries melting into vapor.

Marek was beside her, older now, face worn like cracked porcelain.

“You’ve gone too far,” he said. “There’s only one way to fix this.”

Elara knew what he meant.

No more sleep. No more shifts. No more her.

To save time, she had to vanish from it.

With trembling hands, she carved a date on her palm—the night it all began—and fell asleep, knowing she would never wake.

But somewhere, sometime, a child opened her eyes from a dream. She saw golden wheat fields, twin moons, and a mirror nailed to a tree.

Time had chosen its next traveler.