O wasn’t kidding about the business. There are 1,732 new messages on my ASMR channel, and even after I run my spam-checker I still net over 400 that look legit. I have 3,778 new subscribers (up from 718) and there’s money in my Donation Hat. Video greetings from my new supporters appear in my field of vision, their icons physically poking me to get my attention.
What’s going on? My Spacetime is set to block anyone I don’t know, but the overflow of contact requests goes to mail. I start to sift through these.
CHARLIE!!!! Are you OK? How is everything going? I love the name Dreamhacker! So cool! Hope it’s all good, drop me a line sometime. Love, Alayna xx
Alayna’s a fellow ASMRtist, but we don’t know each other that well. How does she know I’m using the name Dreamhacker?
There are other messages from people in the ASMR community.
Hope you’re OK honey, sending love – Natasha
And even more like this:
We know you didn’t kill her, don’t worry. We support you. Love, Carlos
Aha. So the news has broken that I was there when Mel died.
And finally, in my e-mail:
Hi, Charlie, my name’s Surya and I’m a journalist with Troof Bomb. Hoping to speak with you about your ordeal last night. Can we meet for coffee?
There are variations on that last one from several different news outlets. As I’m reading, more messages are coming in. Chat requests. Subscriptions to my channel. The Hat is going Ker-ching every so often as credit rolls in. What the hell? Am I . . . famous?
I flop back on the pillows. If only this had happened before I took on Melodie, then I wouldn’t have been there when she walked off the building. I wouldn’t even have known about it, probably, because I’d have deleted Antonio’s message without ever reading it. But no – here’s my big break, right here, right now. And it has nothing to do with me or my work.
Melodie Tan is dead.
I’m under investigation by the Dream Police.
And for the first time in my life, I’m making money.
I want to hide under the bed. I want to pull out my earring, take down my shingle, get enough caffeine patches to keep me awake for ever, and never do dreamwork again ever ever ever ever.
Ever.
I haven’t listened to any ASMR since I got sick. When you’re desperately trying to stay awake more than four hours a day, the last thing you need is somebody making soothing noises and doing everything they can to get you to relax. For a while, I tried to keep up my friendships in the online community, but eventually I had to cut everything off. It was ironic, because just as I’d been establishing a subscriber base for my channel, I had to stop. I even sold my microphones. That was heartbreaking.
At first, I got messages from people: Where are you? We miss you. Could you do that thing with the hourglasses again? Could you do a jungle sounds video? Could you do that cooking one?
I felt like a strung-out superhero who had to stop rescuing people. I wanted to say, No, I can’t save you from your anxiety and sleeplessness, I would but I’ve lost my powers. But I didn’t say anything. I just let the channel lie fallow. And now here it is reviving itself thanks to the lightning speed of rumours across Spacetime. Again I consider calling Shandy, if only because she’ll be offended if she wakes up and finds me trending and she’s the last to know.
But if I tell her, she’ll want to come over and hear all the details, and I really need to quiet my mind now. I’m a wreck. I’m so messed up that even my narcolepsy seems to be malfunctioning, because usually stress puts me right to sleep but apparently I’ve gone straight through stress, past panic and out of the other side. I’m wired.
I find myself sitting cross-legged on my futon-bed, which is covered with a fine layer of Edgar’s fur. I start to take out my earring to go to sleep and then change my mind. I rearrange my field of vision so the connection is completely private. No one can message me. I leave open my favourite channel on Sweet Dreams. It belongs to Shveta X, an ASMRtist from New Delhi who used to be one of my go-tos. She even encouraged me by linking to my channel after I put up my ‘Sounds of Rainy London’ video, and sometimes she messaged me even after I got sick. I like Shveta more than anyone. She has an inherently calming vibe. The way she talks, the way she moves, her big, compassionate eyes and the deliberate way she does everything.
Tonight I put on one of Shveta’s henna-painting Spacetime recordings, where she does her little niece’s hands. It’s had nearly a hundred thousand more hits since I last watched, and I can see that she has recorded several dozen new environments.
I prop up lots of pillows. I turn on the Spacetime recording and hope it will work. Shveta feels right here with me. She looks into my eyes and smiles slowly.
‘We are all artists,’ she says in her beautifully modulated low voice, with her accent that is so much nicer than any English accent from actual England. ‘We are all works of art, too.’
If anyone else said it, this would sound pretentious. Shveta is so genuine that I believe her. All of us works of art.
‘For me, art is a part of daily life,’ she says, delicately drawing ink on her niece’s wrists. ‘Does that tickle, Meeta?’
They both giggle a little. So cute. She says, ‘Sometimes it’s nice to just lose yourself in what your hands are doing. It’s like breathing. You don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to think about anything. You don’t have to try. Sometimes we are all trying so hard we forget how to just be. There. Still tickling?’
I breathe deeply. Just the sound of her voice goes into my skin like smoke or mist. The top of my head begins to tingle as if it’s covered in tiny electric sparks. I could listen to Shveta recite stock exchange numbers and get tingles. Her voice sounds like warm, rumbling darkness full of stars. My eyelids droop.
I should take my earring out now. I don’t want to fall asleep. Sleep isn’t safe. I want to stay here, with Shveta and Meeta and the tendrils of henna spreading across Meeta’s skin. But it’s like watching a sunset: even when the colours seem optimal, the most beautiful combination of light and darkness imaginable, you can’t freeze-frame it. Slowly, imperceptibly, the sky changes to darkness. And slowly, imperceptibly, I’m sinking into sleep.
Creeper
I don’t remember dreaming anything at all. Next thing that happens, I startle awake in my bed. Many hours must have passed, because I’m still propped on pillows and the room is dark except for an orange line of street light that shows the gap between the edge of the curtain and the wall. There’s a tiny notification in one corner of my vision letting me know the ASMR playlist has ended, but that’s not what woke me up.
Someone’s in the room. The door is shut. But someone’s here. There’s a shadowy person-shaped presence in the darkness. Its edges are indistinct, and its arms and head appear to be moving as though a current of water is going through it. The arms wobble and detach, then reattach, like it’s a dark and scary version of Morph the claymation dude – but Morph is friendly and this thing is most definitely not friendly. The longer I look at it, the more alarmed I feel. There’s a deep sense of the unnatural about it – like I’ve opened a crack to a place that no person was meant to see. And here it is in my room. There’s a shrivelling inside me, followed by the full-on slap of panic. I want to crawl out of my own skin, run up the wall, back myself into the corner. Get far away.
Run, run, scream, open the window, bang on the wall, get help!
But I can’t move. I can’t even move my eyes. I can’t not look at it. I can’t open windows in my AR – which would enable me to awaken O or to call someone – I’m completely frozen.
It has control.
I can hear my own squeaking breath. Why can’t I move? I try to raise a hand, move a foot – anything – but I feel like I weigh a thousand kilos and none of my muscles work. I can hear my heart in my ears. Sounds like that time Shandy made me run a 5k Race for Life with her and I had no idea how far 5k actually is, but it turned out to be a lot farthe
r than just running for a bus, which was all the training I had ever done. Now I will never see Shandy again and I will never run again and when they find my body I don’t know what they’ll say, but—
Roman. Roman needs to know about this. I’ve seen the Creeper. It’s in my room. It wants me.
That means this is a dream. I am in my room and I’m awake but I’m not awake, this is still a dream, and I’m a dreamhacker. I have to fight back. If it’s a dream I can make things happen.
Levitate, I tell myself. Flying’s one of my favourite things to do in dreams, and it’s easy if you’re lucid.
But I weigh six hundred kilos, I can’t fly, and the Creeper’s face is beginning to resolve. It’s mask-like, white, but no longer covered with chemical symbols. No, it has eyes and mouth that twist and stretch just like that painting and the derivative horror movie it spawned. The Creeper has a long, fat tongue like a frog or Jabba the Hutt, and as this comes licking out towards me, moving the air above my bed, I pick up a vivid smell of sulphur.
So I can’t move. Maybe I can change something else.
Turn on the lights.
Nothing.
Make it smell like roses.
Nothing. Wait—
Again the tongue comes out, but now rose petals fall from it. Aha! I can affect this dream. There’s no more sulphur smell now, just roses. I try again.
Show me where you live. Show me who you are. You can’t hide from me.
I can’t breathe. I want to wake up. I want to wake up.
Show me where you live.
With all my will, I manage to move my hands, then my arms. I reach up, through the Creeper’s body. Though it’s still very heavy, somehow it isn’t solid and my hands go right through. I can move now. I struggle up to sitting, shoving off the duvet, and the Creeper falls away from me, curling into a dark ball like a tumbleweed. It bounces around my room. I’m winning. I’m winning.
I’ve got my legs over the edge of the bed. I’m up. I’m staggering across the carpet. I’m at the door. I open the door. I know this is a dream because the sitting room is dark and there’s a night light on just outside the bathroom. A sliver of orange street light comes around the edges of the curtains.
This is where I live. Show me where you live.
I feel the presence behind me. Looming over me. A coldness, a solid shadow curling around me like a CGI cloak. A feeling of weight. Darkness in my peripheral vision. I’m going to be swallowed. I stumble forwards again, I make it to the French doors and shrug aside the curtain, I unlock and open the doors and step out onto the roof, which is made of glass. The Dream City uncoils below me, and across the roof I can see the doorway to the Sideways Building. The tulip concierge grows out of the glass, right about where O’s pigeon cages would be if this were the real roof.
Thinking about the real roof makes me notice how cold it is out here, how loud with wind. Rain is falling and the drops should wake me up but they don’t.
You can’t just walk in, says the tulip. If you want to get up there, you’ll have to fly. Like a bird.
Of course. Well, I can fly. I always could fly in dreams. I’m lucid. I could just fly away anywhere I want.
Well, whose idea is that? Mine, or the Creeper’s? Is this how it got Mel?
The Creeper’s shadow is behind me, nudging me forward whether I want to go or not. Its voice is laughing in my ears.
She walked of her own free will. Maybe she was going to Paradise. Maybe you should go there, too.
I’m not going near the edge of the roof.
Of course not, Charlie. You’re not that stupid. You’re a dreamhacker.
So fucking condescending. I turn and go back inside, even as the Creeper wraps arms around me, curls itself round my shoulders all shadowy and foul. I make my way to the kitchen. Kitchens are sane places, kitchens are where the nice things are. But the knife block is there. I see it. My hand goes towards it.
You want to hurt me, don’t you? You’re not as nice as you pretend. Do you think you can kill me with a knife? Do you think you can kill your own shadow?
Darkness licks around me. Next thing I know, I’m holding the big knife. I spin to face the Creeper but it’s always behind me, crawling up my back and around my body like a vine. I angle it, trying to use its tip to get under the edge of the darkness where the Creeper surrounds me like a garment. I don’t think I can do it without cutting myself.
I don’t care.
I have to get it off.
Wait.
Charlie.
That fucking knife is sharp. This is a dream. What if the knife is real?
What a muppet I’m being.
I drop the knife in the sink, grope around myself half-dreaming, half-awake. I can hear my breath coming in little frightened gasps. My hand closes on O’s cast-iron skillet. I grab the handle and bring the pan down on my own left hand.
I feel the blow all the way in my teeth. I find myself on my knees, gasping and whimpering.
I’m conscious. I’m alive. Edgar has come padding in and he’s sniffing at me. The Creeper is gone.
Oh, great. And I’ve peed on the kitchen floor, just like a puppy.
Sleepwalkers Anonymous
Coffee. Coffee. And Coffee. The three greatest words I know.
I’ve slept all day and most of the night, but I’m struggling to rouse myself properly. I have a dream hangover. It’s as if the dream hasn’t ended but remains, invisible, rolling along just under the surface of ordinary life like a movie I’ve walked out of. I’m on a glass-bottomed boat and the things in the water beneath are bumping against the glass, trying to get at me.
I’m not safe, but it’s good enough for now. After I cleaned my pee off the floor, I took out the earring. Now, two cups of espresso later, I feel awake enough to slice potatoes and put on some onions to make a Spanish omelette. At dawn I bring O her Ada Lovelace mug in bed. She’s already awake, as usual.
‘Stay,’ she says. ‘Sit down.’
I perch on the end of the bed. Grey light is floating into O’s bedroom through a bank of windows that look out the park across the road. There are bookshelves on two of the three other walls; the wall above the bed has a single small painting by Préfète Duffaut. Pink roads lead over bridges and into mountain landscapes that cut across one another in a way that defies three dimensions. It’s as if someone chopped up an archipelago and sewed the bits back together skew-whiff. The landscape is bright and happy, not bothered by its own confusion.
I used to be like that. Lately, not so much.
‘You had a bad night?’
I tell her a little about it. Not every detail. It’s too whacky, and it’s hard to talk about without sounding unhinged. Besides, we have more important things to discuss.
‘This Dream City that figures in recent matters,’ O says finally. ‘Melodie wandered into it, and you’ve mentioned that it’s never happened with a client before. What do you think the Dream City really is?’
The question is typical O. She’s always looking for the big picture.
‘Well, at first I thought it was a part of me. It’s been the setting for my dreams for months now. I’d see these people in greyscale with masks, and I thought they represented my anxieties about trying to help clients. Because I never seem to be able to help anyone.’
‘And it’s been going on since you fell ill.’
‘Yes . . . well, the odd thing is that when you’re there, you feel as if you’ve always been there and always will be. I can’t say with any certainty when I became aware that I was returning to the same city night after night.’
‘But Mel did tell you that she’d been in the Dream City on her own?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘So the Dream City isn’t necessarily exclusive to you.’
‘No, I don’t see how it can be. I’m starting to think the sleepers are other people using Sweet Dreams. You know, I can see them but I don’t think they can see me. They act like they don’t know where they are.�
��
‘And you believe that Mel was tricked into walking off the rooftop.’
I’m shivering as I nod. ‘It nearly happened to me, last night. The dreams are so real, so vivid.’
‘We know that R.E.M. atonia is supposed to protect you from acting out your dreams. It fails in sleepwalkers. What if someone had a way of making it fail?’
‘Bernard Zborowski messed with my brain.’
‘And his study was pulled. I don’t believe in the collective unconscious,’ O says. ‘But I do believe that the connectivity of technology is more than the sum of its parts. For example, it’s been my observation that the collective can behave in ways that no individual member would behave.’
I yawn. I’m not sure if I’m stressed by what she’s saying or just genuinely tired.
‘That’s why you won’t see me networked to anything to do with BigSky or any of the other giants.’
‘I thought it was because BigSky has crime connections.’
‘It’s more that they have too many vulnerabilities. I worry less about other hackers now and more about . . . how can I put this? Malicious entities acting opportunistically in the system.’
Yawn. ‘Entities. Check.’
‘Of course, people can become paranoid with age. Maybe I’m getting like Stephen Hawking and his constant harping-on about the Machine Uprising.’
‘I don’t argue with clever people,’ I say. ‘That’s why everything he said must be true, same with everything you say.’
‘Except that I never agreed with him,’ O retorts, smiling. ‘Just because someone is clever doesn’t mean they are always right, especially late in their career. Look at Einstein. He kept trying to wriggle out of accepting quantum entanglement, and now we have quantum teleportation. It’s hard to change your mind when you get older. The corpuscles get creaky. One must work at it, constantly.’
‘So . . . malicious entities, yes, Machine Uprising, no?’ I say, eyelids drooping.
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