Lucid

Brandon Cole counts everything. Steps to his desk. Cracks in the ceiling. The seconds between his wife's breaths as she sleeps beside him. His mind is a machine of pattern and order, and for thirty-six years it has kept his world from shifting.

Then the dreams begin.

A hallway lined with wrong flowers. A city of dark glass where the buildings are numbered in primes. A woman who knows his name before he speaks it, who knows things about his mind that no stranger should. Each night the dreams grow more coherent, more architectural, more real. Each morning, something follows him back. A crack in the bathroom mirror that wasn't there yesterday. Warmth on his skin from a hand that doesn't exist in waking life. A coworker whose questions sound less like curiosity and more like surveillance.

Brandon is a systems analyst. He trusts data. He trusts patterns. And the pattern forming between his waking life and his dreams is pointing toward something impossible: the boundary between the two worlds isn't breaking down. It was never there to begin with.