Detective Arun Singh didn’t sleep like other people. He slept like a case file—open, active, restless. Doctors called it parasomnia. Therapists called it unresolved trauma. Arun called it inconvenient until he learned to use it. In dreams, he wandered places he had never been yet recognized from blurry surveillance footage. He walked through crime scenes like a ghost while his body lay in bed, heart monitor beeping steadily. Upon waking, he scribbled notes that solved cases days later. His captain didn’t ask questions as long as his leads panned out.
One case stuck. A series of break-ins left no fingerprints, only mud from a riverbank and a faint smell of eucalyptus. Victims reported waking to a figure standing at the foot of their beds, then falling back asleep. Arun reviewed footage: a tall shadow slipping through windows, moving like someone half-awake. He went home, drank bitter tea, and fell asleep in his chair to force a dream.
In the dream, he stood in his own bedroom. The air tasted of eucalyptus. A figure entered—not menacing, just tired. The figure looked like him, or rather, like anyone unmoored. It moved to the nightstand, fingers hovering over his phone. Arun stepped closer, dream rules bending. “Why?” he asked. The figure blinked slowly. “I don’t want to take. I want to remember what I lost,” it whispered. Its voice sounded like several voices layered.
He woke with a start, heart pounding. Notes: river, sleepwalker, theft as seeking. He traced eucalyptus to a sleep clinic near the river that used the scent to calm patients. He pulled records. Several patients suffered from severe sleepwalking. One, Lenora Gates, had disappeared weeks prior. Her brother reported she had begun walking toward the river at night. Arun visited the clinic. The director, Dr. Haynes, insisted protocols were followed. Arun noticed mud on the threshold.
He staked out the clinic overnight. At 3 a.m., figures emerged—patients in hospital gowns, eyes closed, moving in eerie unison toward the river. Dr. Haynes followed, guiding them like sheep. Arun intervened, startling the group awake. Chaos. Patients stumbled. Haynes grabbed a flashlight. “You don’t understand,” he hissed. “They crave completion. Their dreams reach for what their waking life lost.” He confessed: he’d been leading them to houses that matched their dream fragments, letting them “borrow” objects to soothe their subconscious. No one was supposed to notice. He considered it therapy.
Arun arrested him anyway. Consent mattered. The city prosecutor rolled eyes at the weirdness until victims testified to their lingering dread. The clinic shut down. Patients were moved to a new facility with ethical supervision. But the case wouldn’t rest. Arun still dreamed of the figure at his bed. It whispered new things: “You lost something too.”
He hated how right it was. He had lost nights to work, relationships to obsession, parts of himself to the job. He consulted a sleep therapist. He began journaling before bed, deliberately setting intentions: “Stay in my body tonight. Solve cases while awake.” It helped. His sleepwalking diminished. His dream landscapes shifted from crime scenes to mundane joys: cooking with his mother, walking in a park.
Months later, a string of new break-ins occurred, similar mud, similar scent. Arun feared a copycat or a relapse. He set a trap. Instead of staking out, he slept in the targeted house, surrounded by officers. He dreamed of water. He woke to an officer shaking him. “We got her.” Lenora Gates stood in the living room, barefoot, eyes open but unfocused. She held a photo frame. Arun approached gently. “What are you looking for?” he asked. She blinked. “The feeling of waking up next to someone,” she said, tears streaming though she did not seem fully aware.
He realized punishment wouldn’t fix sleep. He advocated for a program: dream therapy with consent, communal sleep spaces where lonely sleepwalkers could be accompanied safely. The city balked until he framed it as public safety. It worked. Lenora improved. Arun slept better. He still woke some nights with notes he couldn’t explain, but they were recipes or poems, not crime tips. He took that as a sign he was healing.
When he finally took a vacation, he slept in a tent by a calm lake. He dreamt of nothing, which felt like everything. In the morning, he returned a borrowed canoe to the rental hut without being asked. It felt like closing a loop. He smiled, thinking maybe the pact between sleeping and waking was simply returning what you took, even if all you took was time.