Three months ago I got a job offer from a company I'd never heard of.

No interview, no background check, just an email.

Dream research assistant needed.

Quiet night work.

High pay. Must be discreet.

I thought it was a scam.

But I clicked it anyway. I was two months behind on rent and tired of grinding delivery apps and night shifts at a gas station.

Two days later I was standing in a windowless room at the back of a warehouse on the edge of town,

reading a non-disclosure agreement that might as well have been written in blood.

You will not share any details about the work equipment or subjects.

Any breach will be met with legal and appropriate consequences.

They signed it.

They shouldn't have.

The room I worked in had two chairs, two monitors, and one machine, a dome-shaped thing about the size of a watermelon, covered in metallic wires and nodes, the label read

Mimir neural sync unit.

They said that it could interface with ram wave activity to let us observe and cataloged dream

visuals in real time. I didn't ask how it worked.

I just did what they told me.

Every night from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. I came in,

put on the headset, and watched people's dreams play out like grainy,

half-finished films.

My job was to log what I saw. Tags, collage. half-finished films.

...