[ WP ] A group of developers finally completed their invention that allows people to watch their dreams from the night before . They soon discover that everyone has the same recurring dream every night and no one ever remembers it .

I knew the invention was a big deal. When I ’ m working on something important, I get giddy with passion and frustration. I have days where the excitement just zaps through me, caffeine and adrenaline take over my body until I can ’ t sleep from thinking about the project. I can ’ t focus on anything else. Then there are the down days where nothing happens: slow and long and torturous. So, nothing is going right and we ’ re running out of funding and there ’ s pressures from above to start actually making things work, or starting winding down our use of resources. Those day, I ’ m snappy and irritable. I go to sleep thinking about it and I dream of solutions and I wake up and try them. It ’ s all-consuming. 
 
 It had been like this for the 5 years we ’ d spent on the ‘ dreamcatcher ’, although it had just been ‘ project Z ’ back then. This was the university ’ s big, secret project; the money maker. I couldn ’ t discuss it with my family, friends, loved ones. I spent years tiptoeing around the subject, making vague references to brain signals and coma patients whenever the conversation came up, no talk of the invention, not a single word. I was deliberately dull and closed off in conversations, never giving anything away. Seems funny that now I can ’ t eat lunch at a café without discussing it. There must only be one person in the whole world left, who hasn ’ t given me their opinion. 
 
 The original idea had been to create a visual display of the thoughts of coma or ‘ brain dead ’ patients. Research had slowly allowed us to communicate with the patients through interpreting brain signals. Now we were trying to create a device which displayed images based on these signal interpretations. The idea was to sell it to private medical facilities so that loved ones could literally watch the thoughts that the patients hadn ’ t expressed in years. Imagine that! Your daughter gets hit by a car and can ’ t talk for 10 years, then you get to watch her think about playing tennis or replaying her best memories with you. I didn ’ t know if it ’ d offer any solace at all, but the higher ups thought there was a market for it and the research would be pioneering. I liked the idea of the parents being given the chance to reconnect, at least. 
 
 The experiment had long since peaked when we learnt about The Drumming. We ’ d overcome the challenges, we could see the thoughts in people ’ s head on a television screen and it was crazy. We went out drinking every night, laughing incredulously at our own freaking brilliance, sobbing when it got too much. There were some bugs, sure, but in general it was working great. We ’ d had a big pat on the back. 
 
 One of the guys in the office had been talking about hooking it up to his unsuspecting girlfriend whilst she was sleeping to see her dreams. Slightly unethical is an understatement. Knowing he was the jealous type, suspecting he was looking for any trace of another guy, I decided to pretend I wanted to test it on myself first. I signed it out and braced myself for reliving happier times. Sleeping with the device in was easy enough, it slotted perfectly beside me, lying in the newly empty space of my solitary double-bed. In the morning I awoke, with a blurred memory of a dream, ready to be revitalised by the dreamcatcher. 
 
 A tangle of blonde hair and a flash of blue eyes appeared on the screen. Not quite a perfect recreation of the real thing, but close enough that the scientist in me got to glow with pride. I watched the dream play out in the predictable fashion: a kitten playing on a rug in the sun between us, laughter slowly turning into a sour silence, a slammed door. And there, nestled in between the pang of those memories, was The Drumming. Tribal drumming to be exact, loud and perfectly in time, da-dum, da-dum, da-da-da-de-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-da-da-de-dum. Flashes of colour filled the screen: acid green and buttercup yellow, pumpkin orange and a dusky rose-pink. Stamped on to the brightness were dots, swirls and dashes in a deep, velvety black. It was the weirdest thing I had ever seen. And it seemed odd, doubtful even, that my brain had come up with something so incredibly intricate and out of context. But what else would it have been? 
 
 When I got to the lab, I showed the others, careful to skip through the personal beginning. No mention of the tearful picnic, the silence filling my apartment, or the red wine spilt on the rug. Not exactly the images I want my colleagues to be dwelling on. No, I started at the drum ’ s first beat and paused as soon as it was over. They laughed and shrugged, called me an oddball, pretty much ridiculed me in the way you expect from friends. 
 
 It was only much later, when my colleagues started trying the device at home, that they realised they all saw The Drumming too. Of course, it was a contaminated sample, they ’ d all seen it before, they could just be recreating that memory in their dreams. But then we started doing it on students and patients and all types of different people, and they all saw it too. The same relentless drum beat, the flashes of luminous colour with the dark black squiggles. No one remembered having the dream, no one knew where it came from. 
 
 
 A kid on the student newspaper heard about the phenomenon and interviewed us, then the local paper, the national press, then international. The bosses at the University were very pleased with us. Suddenly The Drumming was a sensation. It seeped into everything: actors discussed it on soap operas, teens sampled the drums on music records, code breakers worked tirelessly to try and find some sort of rhyme or reason in the dream. And everyone asked me what I thought. As if by discovering I had any idea what the fuck was going on. I talked and talked and talked about it, just not to think, to pretend I had purpose. All I knew was that every single person we investigated dreamt the same exact selection of colour and drums and images every single night at exactly the same time. I didn ’ t know what the fuck it meant really. I can ’ t even find any meaning in my own life, let alone find some in weird colours. Religions have been started around the idea that a God is trying to communicate with his disciples through drum dreams. I mean, wow, don ’ t we have anything better to do with our time? But I discuss it anyway, just in case. If someone works out the puzzle, it might be all over. 
 
 Normally when a project is all-consuming, it gets to end. This is different. It ’ s a nightmare I can ’ t seem to wake up from. I know The Drumming off by heart, backwards, mirrored. I could paint every frame of every squiggle, draw the exact curve of each dash. I could pick out the perfect shades of colour in paint. I have heard every interpretation, over and over and over again. Any passion I had has long leeched away. But if I stop, if I don ’ t dedicate my life to this project, then I ’ ve lost my real life for nothing. Just a bunch of squiggles and sound. And I can ’ t help but think, if I do work out the puzzle, then she ’ ll believe me when I say that is nothing else left to consume me, but her. She ’ ll believe me when I saw nothing again could ever distract me from my dream girl. 

