The Dreaming World

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The mundane life of Madison Roarke was a masterpiece of precision. Each morning at 6:47 AM, her phone's alarm would pierce the silence of her studio apartment with the efficiency of a surgical instrument. By 6:50, she was vertical. By 7:15, she had consumed exactly one cup of coffee—black, no sugar—and reviewed her daily schedule. By 8:30, she was seated at her desk in the climate-controlled offices of Meridian Analytics, ready to transform chaos into order through the alchemy of data.

Her job as a data analyst suited her precise, logical mind perfectly. Numbers didn't lie, patterns didn't deceive, and spreadsheets never asked uncomfortable questions about the meaning of existence. In a world that seemed increasingly unpredictable, Madison had carved out a small empire of certainty, one statistical model at a time.

But empires, even small ones, have their rebellious provinces.

Her dreams were the one untamed variable in Madison's carefully calibrated existence. While her waking hours moved with the rhythmic precision of a metronome, her sleeping mind wandered through landscapes that defied every law of physics she'd ever learned. There was a towering tree with crystalline leaves that sang in harmonious chimes when the wind touched them. Creatures that moved like liquid light danced between floating islands that hung in perpetual sunset skies. Cities built from living coral grew and shifted with each breath of their inhabitants.

These dreams were so vivid they bled into her waking life in subtle, disorienting ways. Sometimes she would taste colors—the sharp tang of purple, the warm sweetness of golden yellow. Other times, she would hear music in the hum of fluorescent lights or see geometric patterns in the random scatter of fallen leaves that seemed to pulse with meaning just beyond her comprehension.

Most disturbing of all was the longing. Each morning as the dream world faded, Madison felt a homesickness so profound it physically ached, a yearning for a place she had never been, for people she had never met, for a version of herself she had never been allowed to become.

She had consulted doctors, of course. Sleep specialists who prescribed medications that dulled the dreams but never eliminated them entirely. Therapists who spoke of stress and repressed creativity with the confidence of people who had never tasted purple or heard crystal leaves singing in languages that had no words.

Madison had learned to manage the dreams the same way she managed everything else in her life—through routine and compartmentalization. She kept a dream journal, though she told no one about it. She sketched the symbols and faces that appeared most frequently, filing them away in a locked drawer like evidence of crimes she couldn't quite name.

She had built a life of quiet routine precisely because the alternative—the wild, impossible beauty of her sleeping mind—felt too dangerous to trust. Dreams, after all, were just random neural firing, the brain's way of processing daily information and filing it away. They meant nothing.

At least, that's what she told herself every morning at 6:47 AM, when the alarm pulled her back from worlds that shouldn't exist into a reality that made perfect, terrible sense.

But on a Tuesday evening in October, as autumn painted the city in shades of amber and rust, Madison's carefully ordered world would encounter a variable she had never accounted for: the possibility that her dreams might not be dreams at all.

The possibility that somewhere, in the spaces between sleeping and waking, a forgotten world was calling her home.