A dream is a magical thing, an illusory experience, and an incredible sensation.
Since the last century, industry experts have conducted various tests on the brain during sleep, confirming that the activity frequency of brainwave activity becomes more frequent while dreaming. This phenomenon appears not only in humans but also in other mammals, birds, and fish. In the past two years, experts have even detected similar fluctuations from the neurons of certain insects, prompting researchers to write emotionally in their reports that dreaming is not solely the privilege of higher animals.
Throughout the long years, although dreams occasionally caused trouble for certain individuals, the vast majority of the time they were merely a romantic bonus, a fleeting shadow of Nanke, a pillow of millet. Even in divination and fortune-telling, the answers sought from dreams were nothing more than vague and unsubstantiated conjectures.
What if one day, however, dreams were to come true?
When those images that flash across your cerebral cortex spontaneously and actively while you sleep unknowingly actually manifest in reality, what they bring is nothing less than endless disaster.
In official records, the first dream that impacted reality occurred twenty-two years ago on April 17, involving a middle-aged man living alone in a certain county town.
According to his neighbors, during his morning exercise, he was seen running, jumping, and bounding across several rows of rooftops with agile steps and a graceful posture, even suspending himself in mid-air and hanging upside down as if there were invisible stairs beneath his feet. Yet just a dozen seconds later, he stepped into thin air and plummeted, dying on the spot.
At the time, this case did not attract much attention, and it was closed as an accidental death caused by a mistake made by an extreme sports enthusiast. Although numerous suspicious points remained: the man had never participated in extreme sports and was a homebody who rarely even left his house; it was a winter morning, yet he went out wearing only pajamas; and most importantly, in the short video captured by a bystander, his eyes were initially closed, and right until the moment he fell and opened them, his face still retained a blank expression.
Years later, after conducting in-depth research into fused dreams, officials began tracing back their causes. Through exhaustive screening, this case was identified as the earliest currently known dream, even though its scope of impact was only E-class.
Following the birth of countless fantastical dreams and the painstaking explorations of numerous dream-travelers, the Dream Decoding Base compiled and summarized five major dream rules.
First, the dream world and the real world exist in different dimensions. Their intersection requires the aid of a fusion point that connects the two worlds. These fusion points expand and transfer, and the method of their formation remains a mystery to this day.
Second, every dream possesses at least one creator, who is considered the dream’s master and is also termed by dream-travelers as the dream’s base liquor. However, the individuals capable of controlling the dream are not unique, sometimes giving rise to the possibility of multi-person dreams. At the same time, the dream-traveling abilities of dream-travelers are also referred to as bartending, which essentially constitutes various ways of altering the dream.
Third, anything is possible within a dream, but dreams that impact reality through a fusion point possess certain limitations. Dreams concerning hyperspatial scopes such as the universe, the sun, and the starry sky are uniformly deemed impossible to manifest. However, super-disasters on a terrestrial scale such as earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, although difficult to realize, belong to the category requiring extreme vigilance.
Additionally, supernatural phenomena are similarly permitted to occur within the range of a dream fusion point. For instance, humans walking through the void, the deceased returning to life, and bodies transforming into other shells.
Yet as long as the dream awakens, or one leaves the range of the fusion point, phenomena violating natural laws will disappear, while those that comply have the possibility of remaining.
For example, the ability to fly through thin air ceases to exist once outside the fused dream.
However, if the dream content involves a human transforming into a deformed monster with three heads and six arms, it will not instantly vanish; it is merely that the organs will struggle to bear such a deformed body, and the individual will likely die extremely quickly. Consequently, prehistoric dinosaurs and the fictional monster Godzilla could potentially appear. Although their destructive power would be greatly reduced due to the current oxygen concentration of the Earth being insufficient to sustain such behemoths, they would easily grow weak and die even if left unattended.
Those who return from the dead must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Different types of death and different definitions of resurrection yield distinct answers.
Fourth, dreams can alter human cognitive consciousness and directly influence actions and deeds. The projection of a fused dream sometimes generates catastrophic ethical fallacies.
Within dreams, a common type is the wet dream. It does not necessarily occur solely between two individuals in a proper relationship; rather, more often than not, it cannot be spoken aloud. If certain secret dreams that were not actively fantasized manifest in reality, the relationships of the participants, including but not limited to brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, fathers and sons-in-law, aunts and nephews, will bring unmentionable yet indelible shame and pain to countless families.
Dream fusion generates behavior, while consciousness may even be resistant, yet this process is impossible to resist.
Furthermore, conjuring people who do not exist in the world is also commonplace. If they are merely two-dimensional paper cutouts or vague imagery without a specific target, these basically will not come true. However, human creation modeled after a specific existence has many precedents.
In a certain case, the mother of the dream master was far away in another province, and he had flashed images of his mother busy in the kitchen during his dream. Awakening, he paid no mind, only to turn around and truly see mother appear in the kitchen. The dream master was pleasantly surprised, but attempting to converse with mother yielded no response, and in the process of leading her away from the kitchen, the mother, who belonged to the fused dream’s illusion, suddenly vanished.
In another case, a woman experienced a ten-month pregnancy and gave birth to a daughter, yet deep down she had wished for a son. This intense desire was similarly reflected in her dream. After waking up, her daughter truly transformed into a male in terms of primary sexual characteristics. Even after leaving the fused dream range, the child’s overt sexual characteristics failed to recover. However, medical testing revealed that the child’s sex chromosomes remained XX. As time passed, her secondary sex characteristics as she grew up, including appearance, posture, and personality, remained feminine in the public impression, while the sole reproductive organ failing to match the gender concept was rendered practically useless.
Dream researchers therefore deduced that the elements influencing real-world fusion are related to the degree of specificity of the dream. The dream master in Case 1 merely dreamed of a single scene of mother bustling in the kitchen, which was insufficient to sustain her continued vitality after leaving the fusion point range. Conversely, the mother in Case 2 merely fantasized about the child’s most fitting symbolic expression of gender, while the deeper underlying tone remained unaltered.
Dreams will not help you perfect logic, nor can they sustain long-term influence; instead, they possess greater short-term destructive power.
Fifth, and most importantly, the influence of dreams on time can only be delayed, not reversed, and the delayable time is approximately within one minute, at most not exceeding three minutes.
This period constitutes the golden memory window of a dream. Exceeding three minutes, unless one has undergone special training or possesses naturally exceptional memory, even a dream with explosive content will leave only key nodes while blurring the details.
Over 97 percent of dreams are forgotten while being experienced, with fewer than 3 percent retaining impressions after waking. This phenomenon further confirms that the survival and demise of a fused dream are inextricably linked to the details within memory.
Through numerous tests, the Dream Decoding Base has achieved more precise control over the dream delay effect.
Taking an examination as an example: dreaming that you scored a full score is impossible, because answering the test is already a thing of the past, and grading is likewise a thing of the past.
Dreaming that you will answer everything correctly on tomorrow’s test is impossible, as dreams cannot delay until the next day.
However, dreaming that the test paper transforms into a full score before the scores are released, and the grader’s memory transforms into grading a full score paper, that is possible. What is altered is not the process as the past, but the result as the present.
Dreaming that in the next instant, within one minute, at most not exceeding three minutes into the future, you answer all the questions as if guided by divine inspiration is possible; this serves as the process of the future. But answering does not equate to answering correctly, and grading encompasses a far more distant timeframe.
In other words, a fused dream can alter present results and the short-term process of the future.
Yet aside from the extremely scarce number of dream-travelers, dreams cannot actually be controlled by the autonomous will of ordinary people. Fundamentally, people cannot dream of details so specific and seamless, so the proportion of dreams satisfying fusion requirements is not high. Nevertheless, both the population and the frequency of dreams constitute astronomical figures.
In the twenty-plus years since dream-reality contact began, a total of 2,133 fusion cases have occurred, possessing 416 fusion points. The past five years have absorbed 1,095 of them, an increase of 278. Against the backdrop of a clearly expanding base personnel and a gradually standardized dream-traveling force, the number of fusion points has been expanding at a speed far exceeding imagination. This March even witnessed the first case occurring outside national borders, forcing the Northern Peninsula to seek assistance.
One can imagine that within the unfathomable and unmonitored waters of the Pacific Ocean, there may well lurk dream-reality fusion points harbouring hidden reefs beneath treacherous conditions.
Fortunately, among current cases, the majority are merely localized disasters and catastrophes rescuable under emergency handling, still capable of supporting the heavily patched giant vessel of the real world to continue sailing. Yet the future situation remains a race against time.
Although the Dream Decoding Base was not established very long ago, it has already developed a systematic handling method for related dreams. Furthermore, the Huaxu satellite radiates across the country, capable of probing dream fluctuations everywhere except deep underground and excessively small ranges. Data is monitored and reported in real time, recording all address coordinates generating fusion phenomena. Once anomalies arise, standby dream-travelers and real-world base personnel will be dispatched immediately.
There are also satellites hanging in the dream world that act as preventative measures, probing the fluctuations of white holes and black holes, paying attention to dreams that have not yet impacted reality but approach fusion points, thereby arranging the work sequence of dream-travelers and attempting to nip fused dreams in the bud.
Yet the material composing this satellite is human consciousness.
At this very moment, however, the Eastern District Dream Decoding Base was exceptionally restless; the preventative satellite of the dream world seemed to have failed to issue prior warnings.
“Woo, woo, woo.”
“Orange alert! Without any precursors, a black hole with a radius of at least thirty kilometers has appeared near fusion point number 22. The two have now made contact, impacting reality!”
“The center coordinates of the fused dream are detected to be approximately 120 degrees 07 minutes East longitude and 30 degrees 23 minutes North latitude. Satellite imagery has been projected onto the screen!”
“This, this is the continuous dream from last time!” the monitor exclaimed in shock, rapidly establishing a connection with superiors. “Contact the main team immediately! Also, which dream-traveler squads are on duty today?”
Saying which squads, the answer he actually wanted to hear was only:
“Dream Decoding Squad Nine.”
“There is also Squad One, the newly formed Squad Ten, and Squads Three, Five, Six, and Eight, which are preparing for shift changes, will also arrive shortly.”
The monitor breathed a slight sigh of relief. Before he could continue speaking, the wailing siren frequency abruptly flashed more urgently, and the warning light jumped from orange to red.
The complexions of everyone staring at the monitors instantly turned pale as paper.
“…A-class dream…”
An A-class dream refers to a dream affecting a population scale numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions. The consequences caused by such a fusion would undoubtedly be fatal and impossible to cover up. In fact, the highest grade among current fused dreams was only B-class; A-class dreams had only ever been brushed against during dream-world preventative checks.
“How could it be A-class! With a thirty-kilometer radius, according to Xing City’s population density, it shouldn’t even reach a million yet!”
“There is an airplane within the fused dream range,” the monitor said, covered in sweat. “Once an accident happens, it will attract global attention.”
Passengers, airports, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, it even entangles international cooperation.
“Notify all dream-travelers to return to their posts immediately and ensure the complete resolution of the continuous dream,” Pu Xinluo, head of the Eastern District Dream Decoding Base, connected to the line and issued swift instructions after understanding the situation. “In addition, protect flight LA1718 with all possible strength.”
This directive was transmitted through the tadpole-like creature East to Dream Decoding Squad Nine, who were currently inside the dream world.
“Understood.”
Jiuying closed his eyes, his thoughts shifting instantly as he sped rapidly across the dream world. When he opened them once more, he had arrived at the center coordinates of the fused dream.
There stood an airplane with its fuselage tilted sideways, plummeting diagonally downward, alongside a familiar crawling worm, and unexpectedly, a familiar person.
A passerby with a blank face.