The Thief of Sleep
I found it in the rain-slicked mud of Whisper Creek, nestled between roots like a discarded tooth. Not shiny. Not gleaming. Just a river stone, obsidian-black but dull, the size of a walnut, cool to the touch even on the hottest day. It hummed. Not audibly, but in the bone of my hand, a low thrum that vibrated up my arm and settled behind my eyes like a held breath. The creek gurgled its secrets, indifferent. I pocketed it.
That first night, sleep wasn’t sleep. It was a slide. One moment, my pillow; the next, air. Thick, warm, smelling of burnt sugar and ozone. I stood on a beach under a violet sky, waves crashing ashore in slow motion, each droplet hanging like suspended glass. A little girl in a polka-dot swimsuit was building a sandcastle that shimmered, grew wings, and took flight. She turned, saw me, and her eyes widened not with fear, but with recognition. As if I’d always been part of her dream. Then, the stone in my pocket pulsed hot, and I was back in my own bed, heart hammering, the taste of salt on my tongue.
It wasn’t magic. It was trespassing.
The stone wasn’t a key to some grand collective unconscious. It was a lock pick for the most intimate vaults in the world: individual minds while they slept. Held it close while drifting off? Pick a lock. Focused on a specific person? Slide right in. I learned fast. Rules emerged:
Rule 1: You don’t control the dream. You’re a ghost, a silent film playing only for you. Try to speak? Your voice is the wind. Try to touch? Your hand passes through like smoke. You’re a witness, raw and uninvited.
Rule 2: The stone feeds. Every dream left me drained, hungrier than after a marathon. The richer the dream, the deeper the fatigue. And the stone… it felt warmer afterward. Satisfied.
Rule 3: You see what they feel, not just what they see. The world bends to raw emotion. Fear turns hallways into Escher nightmares. Joy makes gravity optional. Love paints the sky in colors that don’t exist.
I started small, cautiously. Mrs. Gable next door, the gentle widow who baked lavender scones. Her dream was a sun-drenched garden, endless rows of her late husband’s roses, him singing off-key as he pruned. The sheer, quiet ache of missing him hit me like a physical blow. I wept in her dream-garden, silent tears lost in the scent of blooms, feeling like the vilest voyeur. I hadn’t known she still grieved so tenderly.
Then came the baker, old Mr. Henderson. His dream wasn’t flour-dusted counters, but a vast, silent library made of ice. He ran through frozen aisles, breath pluming, desperately searching for a single, warming candle. The cold wasn’t physical; it was the absence of his daughter, who hadn’t visited in years. The stone pulsed against my thigh, greedy. I left, shivering, the smell of cinnamon now laced with despair.
I told myself I was learning. Understanding humanity. Then I targeted him. Mark, my ex, the one who’d walked away with a shrug and “It’s not you, it’s me.” Arrogance whispered: See? He’s miserable without you. See his regret.
His dream was a corporate conference room, sterile and blindingly lit. But the floor was made of cracked mirrors reflecting fragmented, distorted versions of me – angry, weeping, triumphant. Mark paced, tie askew, trying to step only on the pieces where I looked small, insignificant. Where I wasn’t. The air crackled with his effort, his need to erase me. There was no sadness, no longing. Just… relief. A clean slate. The stone burned in my hand. I’d gone hunting for pain to soothe my own, and found indifference. The ultimate violation wasn’t seeing his pain; it was seeing how utterly unburdened he was without me. I stumbled out, retching into my own pillow, the taste of bile mixing with the echo of fluorescent light.
The stone grew heavier. Its hum became a throb, a constant pressure behind my eyes. I caught myself eyeing strangers on the bus, wondering what symphonies of fear or joy played behind their closed lids. Just one more, the stone seemed to whisper through my fatigue. The barista who’s always so cheerful. What’s her nightmare?
That night, I held the stone. Not gently. Her. The one with the sunshine smile and the tiny tattoo of a hummingbird on her wrist. Show me.
I didn’t slide into lavender fields or frozen libraries. I fell through.
Darkness. The smell of damp earth and something metallic. The ground was hard, cold concrete. Chains rattled, not on me, but around me, biting deep. Panic, thick and suffocating, choked the air. A figure loomed in the shifting shadows – indistinct, monstrous, radiating pure, predatory malice. The hummingbird girl was curled tight, silent tears cutting tracks through grime on her face, radiating a terror so profound it vibrated in my teeth. This wasn’t a metaphor. This was a memory. A prison. Her prison.
I wanted to scream. To shield her. To do something. But I was a ghost. Powerless. The stone in my dream-pocket pulsed like a malevolent heart, drinking it in. Her terror was its vintage, and it was savoring every drop.
I wrenched myself awake. Not with the usual jolt, but with a gasp that felt like tearing my own soul loose. I hurled the stone across my room. It hit the wall with a soft thud and landed in the corner, inert, dark.
I didn’t pick it up.
The dreams don’t stop. The memory of them does. Mrs. Gable’s garden, Mr. Henderson’s ice library, Mark’s shattered reflections… they haunt me. But the hummingbird girl’s concrete cell? That’s a wound. An unforgivable theft.
The stone sits in the corner. It doesn’t hum anymore. Or maybe I’ve just stopped hearing it. The creek gave it to me, but it never belonged to me. It belongs to the silent, sacred dark behind closed eyelids – a darkness I poisoned with my curiosity.
I used to think it was a key to wonder. Now I know. It’s not a key at all.
It’s a lock pick for the soul. And I was the thief who forgot to check if the door was supposed to stay locked. The wonder wasn’t in the dreams. It was in the not knowing, the respect for the un-shared night. The stone showed me the most beautiful, terrifying landscapes imaginable. But the real horror? Realizing I’d rather live in the mystery. I swept the stone into the trash this morning. It felt heavier than ever. The creek can have it back. Some doors, once opened, can never truly be closed. Especially when you’ve seen what’s behind them. Especially when the thing you stole was someone else’s peace.
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