Dreams for Rent

Dreams for Rent

By Hasnain Shah

The first time Nora rented a dream, she thought it would be harmless. A little mental vacation — that’s what the therapist called it.

“It’s like a spa day,” Dr. Patel said, smiling too easily. “Except it happens in your head.”

They strapped her into the recliner, attached the neural nodes, and dimmed the lights. “Just breathe,” they said. And then she was walking barefoot across a field that hummed with color — a place that wasn’t real but felt more real than anything had in years.

There were lavender skies. Rivers that glowed like veins of mercury. And a sound in the distance — laughter, maybe — from someone who felt like home, though she could never quite reach them.

When she woke up, she cried. Not from fear or confusion, but from relief.

For the first time since Mark died, she hadn’t dreamed about the hospital.

The service was called DreamShare, and it was all the rage among the upper-middle burned-out class. People with money but no meaning. Clients could scroll through the catalogue like it was Netflix for the subconscious. There were categories: Tranquility, Romance, Adventure, Closure, Letting Go.

Each dream was harvested from donors — people who volunteered their subconscious experiences in exchange for a small fee or, more often, for validation.

“The best ones,” Dr. Patel had said, “come from artists. They dream in color.”

Nora rented three more sessions that week. Then five.

Soon she had a favorite. Dream #4937: The Ocean Garden.

It belonged to a man named Elias, though DreamShare didn’t disclose surnames. His dream was an underwater cathedral of glass and coral. When she swam through its aisles, schools of silver fish brushed against her arms like old friends. Sometimes she’d hear Elias humming in the distance — a melody she didn’t know, but one that lived somewhere in her bones.

She started requesting his dream exclusively.

Weeks passed. Nora’s life became a blur between her rented dreams and the hollow hours in between. She still went to work, still answered emails, but it was all surface. Her real life waited for her at night, beneath the humming light of the DreamShare recliner.

Elias’s dream evolved with each session, as if responding to her presence. At first, she thought it was coincidence. Then, one night, she saw it — her reflection in the glass dome ceiling of his underwater cathedral. Except it wasn’t her body. It was his — or some merging of the two.

“Elias?” she whispered into the blue.

A shadow moved through the coral columns.

“You shouldn’t be here,” it said. The voice came not from the water, but from everywhere.

Nora woke gasping, the taste of salt and fear on her tongue.

She confronted Dr. Patel the next day.

“Are these dreams… interactive?”

He frowned. “Not really. They’re recorded neural sequences. Think of them like music — your brain just listens.”

“Then how did he know I was there?”

Dr. Patel looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes donors and clients form… resonances. Temporary links.”

“Links?”

“Your minds might recognize each other across the interface.”

“That sounds a lot like possession,” Nora said.

“That sounds a lot like dependency,” he corrected gently. “You’ve been renting this one dream too often. I’d recommend a detox period.”

But she didn’t stop.

The final session came after three weeks without sleep. She bypassed the clinic’s security firewall, bought black-market access through a DreamShare forum, and downloaded the private neural file of Elias’s dream. She knew it was illegal. She didn’t care.

When the lights dimmed, she expected peace. Instead, she found chaos.

The ocean was dark. The glass cathedral had shattered. The fish were gone.

And Elias was waiting.

“You’ve been stealing,” he said.

Nora floated backward, heart pounding. “I just wanted to see you again.”

“You were never supposed to stay.”

“I feel alive here,” she whispered. “Out there, I’m nothing.”

He studied her, eyes like liquid light. “Then stay.”

For a heartbeat, she thought he meant it. She reached for him, and the water closed over her.

When Dr. Patel found her two days later, Nora’s body was still in the recliner, neural cords humming faintly. Her pulse was slow, but steady. Her brain waves — active, vivid, dreaming.

No one could wake her.

Some said she was in a coma. Others whispered she’d crossed over — become part of the DreamShare network itself.

And in the data logs of Dream #4937, a new voice began to hum alongside Elias’s.

Two melodies, intertwined.