Moonlight Mist: A Limited Edition Collection of Fantasy & Paranormal)

by Nicole Morgan

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  Books by Sharon Coady

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  Waking Dream

  Kat Parrish

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WAKING DREAM

  Copyright © 2018 by Kat Parrish

  Published by Dark Valentine Press

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  email: natasja.hellenthal@gmail.com

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems — except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews — without permission in writing from its publisher.

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  Created with Vellum

  Prologue

  “For in that sleep…what dreams may come?”—William Shakespeare

  If you have a sleep disorder and you google “treatment” or “cure,” chances are one of the first links that comes up is the website of the Alviva Sleep Clinic (ASC), the revolutionary sleep medicine center run by Dr. Lauren Alviva and her two oldest daughters, Dr. Kitta Alviva-Fujiwara and Mira Alviva, Ph.D. It’s kind of a boring website—a homepage illustrated with stock photos, a contact page, a “who we are” page. Having a small digital footprint hasn’t hurt business, though.

  The clinic’s unorthodox treatments for insomnia, sleep apnea, REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, narcolepsy, and sleepwalking are controversial but effective, and there’s a sixteen-month waiting list for the thirty-bed clinic tucked away in a picturesque valley in upstate New York.

  The results ASC achieves are noteworthy and consistent. Former patients have left glowing testimonials on the website and rapturous reviews on Yelp. The local papers and lifestyle magazines regularly feature one—or all—of the Alvivas in articles that are as much gushing personality profiles as they are business stories. The various doctors Alviva have been featured in national print media as well while Lauren’s expertise makes her a sought-after guest on cable and broadcast television. Everybody wishes they could sleep better.

  The doctors are all extremely photogenic, all of them tall and Nordic blonde, like a group of Valkyries who decided to come to earth for a spa day and then stayed to open a sleep clinic. So that plays a factor in the marketing as well, although Lauren Alviva discourages what she calls “the cult of personality” surrounding herself and her daughters and makes every effort to frame the clinic’s narrative as being a team effort.

  It’s a big team. The ASC employs a fleet of psychologists and board-certified sleep specialists as well as nutritionists and personal trainers who work together in a holistic fashion, using everything from massage to sleep restriction therapy to tackle deep-seated sleep issues. The clinic offers seminars on stress management—open to the public as well as the in-patients—and provides customized vitamin and supplement regimens to combat insomnia and restless leg syndrome.

  Successful as those therapies are, they are not the only source of the clinic’s reputation and the impassioned devotion the doctors Alviva inspire. The most enthusiastic praise for the clinic is a result of the program the founder calls “Deep Dreaming.”

  Thanks to the technologies and techniques she’s developed, Lauren and her oldest daughters can access their patients’ subconsciousness and participate in their dreams. This tandem dreaming makes it possible to access the deeper roots of sleep issues and other psychological problems. The procedure is less invasive than it sounds, and often when the patient wakes, he or she has no memory of what happened while they were sleeping.

  When the Alviva Clinic first introduced “Deep Dreaming,” it seemed like science fiction. To say the sleep science community was less than enthusiastic was an understatement. Most were deeply suspicious—suspicious to the point of paranoia.

  North America’s premiere sleep specialist, Dr. G. Taylor Wells of the University of Toronto, was particularly vociferous in his opposition to the tech-assisted therapy, calling it “downright dangerous” and “criminally irresponsible.”

  The patients disagreed.

  Each of the Alviva doctors have a different area of specialization.

  Lauren’s area of expertise is sleep-walking, sleep-talking, and night terrors; parasomnias all her daughters suffered in childhood.

  Kitta, whose wife Mai Fujiwara was killed while working with Doctors Without Borders, specializes in helping people deal with PTSD and other conditions brought on by trauma. The Deep Dream treatments take a lot out of her and she can’t schedule more than two or three a month without suffering from PTSD herself.

  Mika’s practice is almost entirely limited to those who want to change behaviors, whether it’s an addiction to drugs or overeating. The clinic offers a “money-back” guarantee for patients who relapse and most of them use the money to go through treatment again. The Clinic rarely has to refund a client more than once.

  If that’s all the clinic did, it would be enough to keep it in business for decades but there’s another treatment option that’s “off the menu,” so to speak, an option you won’t find mentioned on the website or in the brochures or on our YouTube channel. The clients seeking this unnamed remedy usually arrive at night, often by helicopter and nearly always in disguise.

  They’re not here to be treated by the famous Dr. Lauren Alviva or her equally famous daughters Kitta and Mira.

  They’re here to see me.

  Chapter One

  “Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”—Zhuanzi

  Most people don’t know there’s a third Alviva daughter. At the time I came along, the clinic was just in the planning stages and once it became a reality, there were non-disclosure documents and confidentiality agreements and mother had seized the narrative around the place and shaped it to her liking. As far as the public was concerned, there were only three Alvivas who mattered.

  My sisters used to tease me about that, but when they saw how much their teasing upset me, they stopped.

  In truth, the low profile is for my own protection.

  Even patients who’ve been treated by me never remember my name. That’s not an accident. One of the protocols of what I do is that I must cover my tracks. I’m what’s known as a Dreamwalker, and no matter how careful I am, my footprints can sometimes leave traces behind. That happened a few times in the early days when I was figuring out what I wa
s doing. The original issue would be gone but patients were sometimes left with what mother calls “artifacts” and those could cause new problems.

  So now I always go in and “tweak” the patient’s subconscious after the fact. It’s done with the permission of whoever’s being treated, although they may not realize it as they go through their multi-page consent form. You’d be amazed by how many people don’t bother to read the fine print before they sign on the dotted line.

  Those who do read the fine print sometimes object but it’s a deal breaker if they don’t sign it. Most do. When it comes right down to it, there aren’t that many people who’d choose the red pill over the blue pill. Most of us need our delusions.

  I don’t have that luxury. As a dreamwalker, I’m not separated from a dreamer’s dream by technology, I’m actually there and I see and experience it. My job is to make the adjustments that will make the dreamer’s life better. If I wanted to, I could just as easily wreak havoc on someone’s psyche and they’d never even know it. My skill is a very powerful one and it came to me very young.

  That’s why my mother thought it was safer for me to stay invisible, to fly under the radar.

  And she wasn’t wrong about that.

  When I was four, already aware I was different, but not yet aware of how…special…my talents were, the man who financed the clinic, an old friend of my mother’s, discovered what I was capable of doing and decided that he needed me more than my family did.

  He took me away and hid me in a lab he’d constructed inside a mountain, just like some sort of wannabe supervillain.

  It wasn’t a real lab, of course, but I didn’t know then it was just a dream construct he’d created inside the abandoned building in Idaho that housed our physical bodies.

  Trapped inside his dream, the lab felt real to me and in the lab, my captor experimented on me.

  Some of those experiments were painful. Some of those experiments left scars, not all of them in places where you could see them.

  I was in his hands for nearly a year.

  Outside of the experiments, he didn’t mistreat me. The room where he kept me prisoner was comfortable and filled with toys and books and dvds.

  He made sure I was well-fed and offered treats along with the almost clinically nutritious meals I was given. He’d been watching me for months before he took me and knew that I hated beets and loved cinnamon toast.

  He made sure that I slept ten to thirteen hours a night with a two-hour nap in the daytime; the amount of sleep he deemed optimal for a four-year-old.

  In the year I was with him, I learned to sleep while hooked up to machines. I learned to sleep while he and his mechanical assistants counted each of my breaths, recorded every eye movement, logged my heartbeat and respiration and dream cycles.

  I didn’t really understand what he wanted from me and he had no experience relating to children, and could not clearly articulate his needs either.

  So I stayed in my room-within-a-dream and played the computer games and read the books and watched the dvds and endured all the tests because there wasn’t anything else I could do.

  I was very, very lonely. He had told me that my family had given me to him because they didn’t love me. He told me that they thought I was ugly and stupid and clumsy. I was four, I believed him.

  I was particularly close to my oldest sister Kitta who, at sixteen, seemed like the most wonderful person in the world. The thought that she’d thrown me away absolutely broke my heart.

  If my kidnapper had been kind to me at all instead of treating me as a valuable test subject, I might have tried harder to please him. But he never held out the promise that he would take me home; he never teased me with the possibility that my situation was temporary. And so I hated him and resolved that somehow—I didn’t know how—I would save myself. And in the meantime, I would find companionship in my own way.

  I decided I needed a pet.

  So I dreamed up a cat.

  Because I could.

  From the time I was little, I could dream awake and anything I saw in my dreams, I could make tangible in the waking world. That was the power my captor had heard about and then witnessed, and that’s why he’d taken me.

  He had many ideas for exploiting that ability, ideas and plans that I’d continually thwarted, first out of ignorance and later out of stubborn defiance.

  He’d been patient with me in the first months after he’d brought me to his lab, but I could tell—in that way that children can read the emotional temperature of adults—that his patience was wearing thin. And when he saw me playing with the sweet-faced ragdoll kitten I’d dreamed up after seeing one on an Animal Planet video, he exploded.

  He’d taken the kitten away and then he’d taken all the toys and books and crayons and drawing pads out of the room where he was keeping me.

  “You stupid girl,” he’d yelled at me. “I do everything for you and you can’t do anything for me.”

  “I just want to go home,” I said.

  He slapped me then, and didn’t apologize or explain or make excuses.

  After that there was no more cinnamon toast from him.

  To prove I wasn’t cowed, I dreamed up my own cinnamon toast and it was way better than what he’d had cooked for me.

  That made him mad.

  And then he introduced a new tactic to get me to perform what he called my “dream magic”—sleep deprivation.

  He kept me up for days at a time until I started seeing things. He fed me hard-core energy drinks with enough caffeine to animate an entire classroom of high school seniors. He lowered the temperature in my room until it was so cold I had to keep moving just to keep from freezing. Every time I tried to warm it up, he overrode my efforts. When I still managed to fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion, he injected me with drugs.

  I never cried when I saw the needles. I was a big girl and I didn’t want to be a stupid baby.

  I don’t know how long this went on. It felt like years.

  And the worse of it was that all the time I was kept in that artificial awareness, I was unable to go into my own dreamworld.

  Which infuriated my tormentor, who kept telling me that no one was coming for me, that my family didn’t care that I was sleepy and cold.

  Again, I believed him.

  Until the night my father came for me.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to come for you,” he said when he arrived, not bothering to switch into his human form as he gathered me in his arms and whisked me away. He kept me safe in his home in the dream realm until my body could be rescued and then returned my dream self to my little tower room where mother and my sisters were waiting for me.

  As soon as he knew I was safe, my father left, but returned hours later with the sleeping body of the man who had held me prisoner. Dr. Dov Elbaz had vanished from the waking world so thoroughly that he might never have been born at all.

  He’d been mother’s mentor at Stanford, a brilliant, mercurial professor who’d made a fortune working with a pharmaceutical company developing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s and Lewy’s Body Dementia. But his real fortune had come from working on secret government programs that harkened back to the CIA’s notorious MK-Ultra experiments. He’d become an investor in the Alviva Sleep Clinic under the guise of pure research but he was really interested in finding ways to use dreams to control people.

  Dr. Elbaz had vanished from the clinic at the same time I had, so no one wasted time looking for other suspects.

  When mother began tracking the doctor, she was horrified to learn of his secret life. One frustrated FBI agent had dubbed him “Dr. Faustus” but to the family he became known as “the Dark Dreamer.”

  I later found out my mother had been frantically trying to locate me for months, with police on three continents looking for me and private detectives and mercenaries all over the world trying to track me down. They’d all had to admit defeat. One woman, a well-regarded psychic, had come close to finding me, but had lo
st our trail when we literally went underground into a doomsday prepper’s bunker that was shielded against a nuclear attack and located beneath an empty house in Boise.

  My kidnapper had shielded his dream world just as carefully, so carefully that even my father had not been able to find me until one night when Dr. Elbaz made the crucial mistake of getting drunk and falling into a sleep-like stupor that wasn’t warded.

  Kitta and Mira and our mother had spent every free moment searching the dream world for me with no success. They could find no trace of either me or the man who’d taken me.

  And then Mother finally managed to contact my father.

  Which was not as easy as it sounds. Because my father is Morpheus, the god of sleep, and he rarely visits the mortal plane.

  Yes, I know that’s a conversation stopper.

  So as you can imagine, I don’t mention my father very often.

  And while my parentage might be a selling point for some potential clients, it really isn’t anything you could put on a website and still expect to be taken seriously. Kitta and Mira’s father—a physicist who works at CERN—wasn’t around much, so most people assumed whoever had sired me had parted ways with my mother too and she’d moved on and never looked back.

  It’s true, things hadn’t ended well between my parents and that estrangement meant that she hadn’t seen him in almost four years.

  She hadn’t seen him but I had.

  While I would not call him a fond father, Morpheus was (and is) not an absent one. Ever since I was little, I’d felt his presence. And he showed up often in my dreams.

  In my dreams, he appeared perfectly human, a handsome man with pale skin, dark hair, and eyes such a deep and midnight blue they nearly appear black.