A veritable snorgasboard.

The Chamber of Sleepers.

No-one stirred, not even the cat. The room was a burr, a low murmuration of dreams of invisible bicycles sinking into the stairs.

If we woke them up today, we might miss something vital, but if we wait til tomorrow, they might be even crazier than before. This was the dilemma. Every night they slept, another day of the future was lived, but the shock of the present was that much greater on awakening.

The sleep only affected a few people when it arrived. I’d say afflicted, but they were just fine so long as they didn’t wake up. When the first cases came in, we really didn’t know what to do. They slumbered on, and didn’t seem to need any sustenance. It was nothing like the books- everyone had seen or read Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, and were aware of the risks of short-lived lease on consciousness  that the drugs gave.

We had plenty of volunteers from friends and family to sit at the  bedsides and read aloud, or even play act or perform music, in the belief that in there, somewhere, was the person still able to perceive some aspect of the outside world going on around them. Little did we realise that  this was entirely  true, but that the world they perceived was not the one we were in. At least not at that time.

How was the first return made possible? I can say that it was  entirely an accident, and entirely my own fault.You know how they say you shouldn’t wake up sleepwalkers, as it might be dangerous for them? No-one ever told me why. And these people weren’t walking in space. They were walking through time. In their sleep.

So as an oneirologist, I was specifically tasked  to try to infer what the sleepers were dreaming, and the only way I know to do that is to wake them up, and get them to write down or record on audio media — immediately, as if you leave it even moments the  real world  intrudes too quickly and erases all memory of the  dream. Given that, the aforesaid risks of waking a sleepwalker was not on my  radar.  I adopted the main way that I use to gently wake a slumberer when  they are in REM sleep. This is quite simple, as the stage that people generally dream is normally when they are also quite close to wakening. And this is when it is relatively easy  to accelerate them into waking up, typically, with some minor shock, like a sudden loud sound or even cold water. Of course, this will get incorporated in the dream (just as falling out of bed and waking up results in  dreams of flying or falling and even things people say or sing nearby may be retrospectively and seamlessly written into the memory of the dream without the awakening subject even realising).

So I decided on loud music. And harsh, arrhythmic, dissonant sounds. I bought in my collection of 1970s English progressive jazz rock. Henry Cow, Isotope, Soft Machine, that sort of thing. And it worked. My first patient awoke, and I prepared  to get them to record their dreams right away. However, I was not prepared for what they said. It was quite astonishing,  and went  on for hours and hours.

When he was done, I grabbed a transcript and rushed over the the directors cube, where for once, she wasn’t on the phone or typing at her laptop.

“The future is already here, it’s just in their dreams” I exclaimed. Bonny walked calmly over to the door and backed it closed and turned back to me and said “yes, we know - show me what you have. Some of  the other centers are saying the same. How long was he under? how far ahead did he get” - she went over to a whiteboard with a straight-line graph on it - along the bottom was time, and up the y-axis was time. “So you can see here”, she ran her finger up and down the gradient “we’re looking at a dt/dt of about 4000. It would be too weird if it was 3650 (or 3653.5) doncha think?”

I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. “How long has thing thing been going on”, I asked, somewhat lamely. “I mean how do you know that these are the actual future, and not just wildly plausible predictive dreams or visions?”.

“So it turns out” Bonny replied “there was an outbreak like this back in Bletchley in 1940 - they didn’t really break the code, you know, people just bought back what was going to happen. All those crossword puzzle solvers were really people that had fallen asleep despite the blitz, and on being woken up by a bomb, were deeply puzzled by their strange memories of what was yet to come to pass. In fact we think there may have been many such in the past - might explain Delphi, and many other past such myths of reliable news from the future!”

So it was that I joined the dream team. Since many of my patients in the past in the Institute of the Night were there for therapeutic reasons, basically, a lot of them were barking. And when my new patients awoke, many of them were suffering from extreme inverse Toffler Syndrome by prophecy; but there was always pressure on us to let people slumber longer, so we’d learn more about the far future-scape. We were, of course, under military control, and the information war had been extended into augury.

What no-one could really tell was how things changed when we acted on the knowledge. In Station X, they had been very careful to avoid visible effects from their information about what was going to happen. But when many competing countries had access to these views, and had competing goals to achieve by acting on their ill-gotten forecasts, them of course, the future became a shifting sands. We started to enlist more and more sleepers and arrange them in serried ranks and wake them up in close succession  to get a view of what future one, and future two and future three could be…eventually, I rebelled against this. It became clear that in the presence of mutable world timelines and many incurably informed manipulators, in the end, we were no better off than before we had this whole menagerie. The future was not just another country, it became one that no-one had visited before, once more. Once more, we made our own fate, despite the government’s frustration that if only they were the only ones to know what would happen, they could change it. Instead, they just had to go back to doing their job properly.