– Early DreamTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng

It took me almost forty minutes to tell my story, and throughout that time Foulnap and Dr Gwynne stared at me, nodding quietly. When I’d finished they paused for a while, gathering their thoughts.

‘Tell us what happened when you played the cylinder again?’ asked Dr Gwynne.

I repeated how I had seen the gathered nightwalkers’ partial retrieval in the Cambrensis. The doctor was fascinated by the notion that retrieval could be accomplished by a collection of well-chosen words.

‘Did they rhyme?’ he asked.

‘They sort of rhymed,’ I said.

‘Then I think chosen not for their actual meaning,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘but for their rhythm, cadence and associative function – a subconscious therapy. It explains the partial recovery you observed.’

‘We might need a Somnagraph to effect a full retrieval,’ said Foulnap.

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ I said, now realising that Shamanic Bob and his wild conspiracy theories didn’t actually go far enough. ‘Why were my dreams identical each time?’

‘The Somnagraph is a device that records dreams on a wax cylinder,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘and was originally devised by Thomas Edison in an odd collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Edison famously recorded a woman dreaming of a cat in 1904 and then played it back to a drowsy audience of politicians and the military, who were astounded. As you saw, it’s not just the pictures and sounds but an entire sense of being. You take on their character, remember their memories, feel their passion, their hate, their fears, their frustration.’

‘I felt the love Webster felt for Birgitta,’ I said slowly, ‘and through him, the love that she felt back.’

‘Do you still feel it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s the problem with continued overexposure to Somnagraph-induced dreams: the emotional memories have a way of flooding into your waking hours, causing reality confusion until you have no idea what’s real and what isn’t.’

‘Moody, Roscoe and Suzy Watson,’ I murmured. ‘They had it night after night. And then nearly me.’

‘Bingo. People go insane in the Winter, and yelling about hands and Mrs Nesbit is random enough to not raise any suspicions. HiberTech recorded Don Hector’s dreams and then used the residents of the ninth floor of the Siddons as disposable assets to try and figure out what he did with the cylinder. And by using Dream Avatar technology in the form of Mrs Nesbit to communicate, there was no risk to HiberTech, and every risk to the subject.’

‘But all without much luck, right?’

‘Right,’ said Foulnap, ‘because Don Hector trained himself to dream only the one dream – and spiked it with a nightmare to dissuade anyone from poking around.’

‘The hands.’

‘Yes, the hands.’