Novara City was built on silence. The streets gleamed with chrome and glass, and the skies pulsed with neon lights that flickered in perfect rhythm. No one shouted, no one fought, no one broke the endless stream of calm that defined daily life. People worked, people ate, people slept, and in sleep, they found nothing but darkness.

Dreams had been declared obsolete a century earlier. The government announced it as a triumph of science and stability. The Neural System ensured that every citizen entered sleep without images, without whispers, without the unpredictable chaos of a human subconscious. Dreams, they said, were dangerous—fuel for rebellion, fuel for madness, fuel for longing.

Daniel had never questioned it. Like everyone else, he woke each morning with a clear head, ready to report to the archives where he spent his days cataloguing ancient texts. It was quiet work, methodical, safe. He had no family, no ties, just the hum of the city and the monotony of days.

But one morning, everything changed.

Daniel woke with his heart racing and sweat dampening his sheets. He sat upright, disoriented, the edges of something clinging to him. He had seen colors. A river that glowed like fire. Faces he did not recognize. A voice whispering his name.

The sensation was intoxicating, terrifying. He tried to dismiss it as a hallucination, some glitch in his neural implant. But that night, when he closed his eyes, the visions returned. They were sharper, brighter, undeniable.

At work the next day, he found himself staring at an ancient manuscript. It spoke of dreamscapes, of the human imagination as a well of infinite power. He had read such words before, but now they pulsed with meaning. He realized he had lived them only hours ago.

For weeks, Daniel told no one. He feared the Dream Enforcement Division, the branch of the government responsible for monitoring anomalies. Citizens who reported dream experiences were taken away for “correction” and rarely returned. Yet each night, his dreams grew richer. He walked in forests that glowed with silver light, spoke to people who seemed to know him, and saw cities unlike Novara, alive with laughter and chaos.

Finally, he broke. He whispered his secret to Elena, a colleague at the archives who shared his quiet curiosity about the past. At first, she laughed, thinking he was joking. But when he described the sensations in detail, her face grew pale.

“My grandmother used to tell stories like that,” she said softly. “Before they erased her memories. She called them dreams.”

Daniel leaned closer. “What if they never vanished? What if they were stolen?”

That night, Elena came to his apartment with something forbidden: a hidden drive she had salvaged from the archives. It contained records sealed by the government. Together, they decrypted the files, and what they uncovered made Daniel’s blood run cold.

Dreams had not been eliminated by science. They had been harvested. The Neural System siphoned them from citizens each night, feeding them into a central repository. From there, they were sold, traded, weaponized. Dreams powered the city’s endless energy grid. The perfection of Novara was not built on obedience—it was built on stolen imagination.

Daniel recoiled, horrified. All those nights of silence, all those mornings of emptiness, were not natural. They were theft. Every citizen had been robbed of their inner world.

Elena’s hands shook as she turned to him. “If what you say is true—if you’re dreaming—it means your implant isn’t working. You’re dangerous to them. You’re living proof.”

Suddenly, everything made sense. The faces in his dreams, the voices, the vivid landscapes—they weren’t fantasies. They were fragments of what the city had taken. Dreams of people long gone, leaking back into him.

The next day, Daniel noticed he was being followed. At first it was subtle—a man in a gray coat on the subway, a woman with mirrored glasses at the archives. Then came the summons: a polite request to report for evaluation. He didn’t go.

Instead, he and Elena fled into the undercity, the sprawling labyrinth beneath Novara where surveillance was weaker. There, among the shadows, they found others. People who whispered of half-remembered visions, fragments of dreams they could not explain. A hidden network, small but growing.

Daniel became their beacon. He described his dreams in detail, guiding others to unlock their own buried fragments. The group began to piece together a picture of what had been lost: love, fear, imagination, rebellion. All the things that made people human.

But the System noticed. Drones swept the undercity, scanning for anomalies. Elena was captured during one raid, her screams echoing as she was dragged away. Daniel barely escaped, clutching the locket she had pressed into his hand moments before.

Alone now, he faced a choice. He could keep running, or he could strike. Guided by his dreams, he navigated to the heart of Novara—the Dream Core, a massive tower pulsing with harvested energy. Inside, the walls shimmered with stolen visions, millions of dreamscapes trapped in endless loops.

Daniel placed his hands on the interface. The system recognized him not as an intruder, but as a source. His broken implant allowed him to bridge the barrier. In that moment, he realized he could free them.

He took a breath and opened the floodgates.

The city trembled as dreams poured back into the minds of its people. For the first time in generations, citizens woke screaming, laughing, crying. They remembered colors, voices, feelings they had never known. The silence shattered. Novara was no longer perfect. It was alive.

Daniel collapsed as the Core overloaded, visions flooding him until he could no longer tell where he ended and the dreams began. He saw Elena smiling. He saw Thomas and Margaret from some forgotten past. He saw forests, oceans, stars. He became the sum of every dream ever stolen.

When he woke, he was lying in the rubble of the Core. The city was in chaos. People shouted in the streets, overwhelmed by the flood of emotion. Some rejoiced. Some wept. Some raged at the government for the theft of their humanity.

Daniel stood unsteadily, his body weak but his mind burning with clarity. He knew the war was just beginning. But he also knew something undeniable: they could never erase dreams again.

He had remembered, and now everyone would.