The city that hired dreams

 


Experimental Short Story Series #51
Title: The City That Hired Dreams
By Faraz Parvez (Pen name of Professor Dr. Arshad Afzal, Former Faculty, Umm Al Qura University, Makkah, KSA)

In Neo-Lyra, a city glittering with chrome spires and insomnia, dreams weren’t private anymore. They were professions. Syndicates paid citizens for their subconscious stories, harvested them nightly, and sold the fragments to studios, advertisers, and war strategists.

You didn’t dream for yourself in Neo-Lyra. You dreamed for the market.

Kian was just a boy—twelve, maybe thirteen. A nobody in a crowded block tower. His parents had already signed their dreams away. But Kian hadn’t registered. He couldn’t. Because every night, he had the same dream.

A dream of falling—but never landing.

Only this wasn’t the theatrical kind with symbolism and metaphors. It was real. The air burned. The horizon trembled. A scream echoed. His own. But deeper. Older. Like it didn’t belong to him.

One night, someone knocked on their door.

A woman in velvet gloves. No ID. No smile. “We’ve detected an unauthorized loop,” she said, brushing past his mother. “The boy’s dream doesn’t belong to him.”

Kian ran.

Down steel stairs. Through vapor markets. Into the dream junkyards where broken minds leaked like spilled paint. He met others there—unregistered dreamers. One girl remembered a castle that no one had built. A boy swore he lived two lives—one awake, one in a war.

They called themselves The Rememberers.

They believed not all dreams were born inside us. Some were taken. Transplanted. Others… imprisoned.

Kian’s nightmare, he learned, wasn’t his. It belonged to a rebel dreamer named Lys, who once infiltrated the DreamNet to expose the city’s theft. She fell—quite literally—into oblivion.

But her dream never stopped falling.

And it found him.

With the Rememberers’ help, Kian did what no dreamer had done: he dove back into the dream. Willingly. Searching for Lys.

He found her.

Falling still. Caught in a suspended loop of memory and silence. She opened her eyes. “You came back.”

“I don’t know you.”

“You’re my echo,” she said. “They couldn’t erase me… so they gave me to you.”

They fell together.

And then rose.

When Kian awoke, Neo-Lyra’s servers had crashed. Billboards blinked. People forgot what they'd dreamed. And somewhere in the code, a new loop began—this time seeded not by syndicates, but by a boy who remembered too much.

Now, dream traders whisper of a ghost in the data. A child’s scream. A woman’s name. And a loop no one can trace.

And every now and then, a new dreamer wakes up knowing something they’ve never lived.

Why We Tell These Stories
Story #51 is not just fiction—it’s a signal. We believe stories are not told. They are shared, like blueprints to hidden rooms inside ourselves. Thank you, reader, for unlocking yet another one with us.

Follow our journey toward #60—when the Experimental Short Story Series will be released as a full digital + print anthology with bonus content, author notes, and variant endings.

Because your dreams matter. And maybe, just maybe—they’re someone else’s memory too.

Read. Remember. Return.
Visit: farazparvez1.blogspot.com
For inquiries or collaborations: dr-arshadafzal.blogspot.com


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