The Last Dreamcatcher

In a dim-lit room cluttered with dream journals and incense, Dr. Kael Mora prepared his mind for another descent into someone else’s hell.

“Next,” he called, voice flat but practiced.

His assistant ushered in a trembling teenager with hollowed eyes and a sketchpad clutched to her chest. Her name was Miri, and for the last three weeks, she hadn’t slept longer than an hour. Her nightmares weren't just vivid; they were aggressive. Monsters with her father’s voice. Floods with her mother’s face. Unrelenting guilt in symbolic, surreal terror.

Kael gestured to the dreambed. “You understand the rules?”

Miri nodded silently. Her mother, waiting by the door, pleaded with her eyes. Everyone who came to Kael’s dream practice had tried everything else: meds, meditations, shamans, science. All had failed. Kael was their final gamble, their last dreamcatcher.

Once she was settled in, Kael attached the neural web to her temples and slipped on his own. Inhaling the minty-vinegar scent of lucid root—a substance banned in most countries—he activated the DreamSync. The world around him evaporated.


---

He landed in Miri’s nightmare like stepping into a storm mid-howl. The walls bled ink. The sky burned paper. She was already there, age-shifted to a child, cornered by a giant marionette version of her father.

“You never said sorry!” the puppet boomed, arms flailing. “You let it happen! You watched her die!”

Kael whispered a command. A shield materialized in his hand—a relic from his own trauma, forged over years of nightmare-trading. He ran between Miri and the puppet.

“I’m taking this,” he said, pushing her behind him. “You don’t need it anymore.”

The marionette shrieked as Kael absorbed its essence through the neural link, storing it inside a mental vault built brick by agonizing brick from other people’s pain.

As the puppet crumbled to dust, Miri's dreamscape softened. The ink turned to rain. The flames gave way to dawn. She opened her mouth to thank him, but the dream evaporated before she could.


---

Back in the waking world, Miri sobbed into her mother’s arms, and Kael stumbled to his chair, ashen and sweating. His assistant offered water. He waved it away.

“How much longer can you keep doing this?” she asked.

Kael stared at the ceiling. “As long as they need me.”

What he didn’t say: each nightmare he stole became a whisper in his own mind. Some, he could lock away. Others... not so much.


---

Kael lived alone in a fourth-story apartment above an abandoned bookstore. His walls were lined with dreamcatchers—not traditional ones, but digital memory drives designed to trap synthetic dream code. Each one hummed faintly, like bees in glass jars.

That night, one of them burst.

Kael bolted upright in bed, drenched in sweat, lungs clawing for air. The room spun. He heard Miri’s father’s voice again—louder, angrier, inside his head now.

You think you’re saving them? You’re just borrowing their demons.

Kael hurled the broken drive against the wall. It shattered. The room fell silent. But inside, the noise grew.


---

The next day, a woman came in clutching a worn photo of her son. “He hanged himself after three weeks of night terrors,” she said. “I’ve been having his dreams ever since. Please. Take them.”

Kael agreed.

Her dream was a mosaic of unbearable sorrow. The boy’s silhouette leaped from a thousand cliffs. In one loop, he tried to climb out of a coffin. In another, he simply dissolved into ash. Kael couldn’t even find the source—just echoes, metaphors, recursive loops. After an hour inside, he surfaced weeping.

“You didn’t just lose your son,” he whispered. “He lost himself.”

The mother sobbed with gratitude.

Kael added another nightmare to his collection. Another voice in his head. Another crack in the dam.


---

A week later, Kael collapsed mid-session.

He awoke in a hospital bed, the nurse calling him a miracle. “You flatlined,” she said. “But your brain never stopped... dreaming.”

He didn’t respond. He could still hear them—every voice, every monster, every tear-soaked scream. His mind had become a museum of horrors.

A psychiatrist visited later, suggesting a break. Maybe even retirement.

Kael asked, “And when the next Miri walks in? What happens to her?”

“You’re not God, Dr. Mora.”

Kael smiled sadly. “Tell that to the parents.”


---

That night, Kael returned to his office, alone. He stared at the remaining dreamcatchers, half of them blinking erratically.

He chose one. Then another. Then five.

Plugging in, he did what he swore he never would: he entered his own vault.

It was worse than he imagined.

Hundreds of nightmares swirled like a psychic storm. He saw Miri again, older now, thanking him. He saw the boy who hanged himself—this time sitting by Kael’s side, whispering, You carry us so we don’t fall again. He saw a mirror—and in it, himself, eyes red, hands shaking, asking why.

“I’m not your savior,” Kael said aloud. “I’m just tired.”

But the ghosts inside whispered, You’re more than tired. You’re proof that empathy isn’t weakness. It’s the only power left.

He stood for hours in that dreamscape, one final time, confronting every voice, naming every fear.

Then he let go.


---

Kael’s office never reopened.

But months later, people began reporting strange dreams—dreams of a quiet man with tired eyes, walking calmly through their nightmares, touching monsters and turning them to mist.

They woke lighter, freer.

None of them ever met Kael. But they spoke of him like legend.

The Last Dreamcatcher.