The Dream Census

At midnight, Laurie opened her door to find two strangers with clipboards, asking who she'd been dreaming of. She almost lied before saying his name.

The woman wore a navy blazer despite the heat. Her partner, younger and pale, carried a leather satchel that bulged with forms and scanning equipment. Both had the bureaucratic stillness of people who knocked on doors after decent hours and expected to be welcomed inside.

"Ms. Harper?" The woman consulted her clipboard. "I'm Agent Morse with the Bureau of Somnolent Affairs. This is Agent Kellum. We're here for your annual Dream Census."

Laurie's throat tightened. She'd moved three times in five years, always hoping to slip through the cracks of their system. The census had been mandatory since 2019, when the Department of Health acknowledged dreams as measurable contact points with deceased individuals. Most people found comfort in the process. Scientists could explain grief now. Chart it. Analyze the patterns of memory that kept the dead alive in sleep.

"I haven't been dreaming much," Laurie said.

Agent Kellum looked up from his scanner, a device that resembled a price gun crossed with a medical thermometer. "That's what we're here to determine. May we come in?"

Her apartment was sparse. A single chair faced the television. Books stacked against one wall. Library checkout slips poked from several volumes on grief counseling, relics from her work as a crisis hotline volunteer. The kind of space that belonged to someone who'd practiced disappearing long before the government started cataloging ghosts.

"Standard questions first." Agent Morse settled onto the couch without invitation. "Have you experienced recurring visitations from deceased individuals in your sleep over the past twelve months?"

The lie sat ready on Laurie's tongue. No visitations. No contact. Just ordinary dreams about ordinary things. But Jimmy's face flickered in her memory. Not the ten-year-old boy who'd drowned in Miller's Creek thirty years ago, but the man he'd become in her dreams. Thirty-eight now, with lines around his eyes and calluses on his palms from work she'd never seen him do.

"Yes," she said.

Agent Kellum's scanner beeped. He frowned at the display.

"Name of the deceased?" Agent Morse's pen hovered over her form.

"Jimmy Vass."

The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Both agents exchanged glances. Agent Morse set down her clipboard and reached for a different form, this one printed on yellow paper with a red border.

"Ms. Harper," she said carefully, "we're going to need you to come with us."

***

The Bureau of Somnolent Affairs occupied a converted federal building downtown. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in the sickly green tint of old office buildings. Laurie sat in a white interview room, her reflection multiplied in one-way mirrors that lined three walls.

Dr. Edda Ames entered with a file thick enough to choke a horse. She was smaller than Laurie had expected, with graying hair pulled back in a simple bun and the kind of soft smile that belonged on a kindergarten teacher, not a government analyst.

"Coffee?" Dr. Ames poured herself a cup from a thermos without waiting for an answer. "I've been reviewing your case. Quite extraordinary, actually."

She opened the file. Photographs spilled across the metal table. Jimmy at different ages, different angles. School pictures, family snapshots, even a few grainy surveillance images Laurie had never seen before.

"James Michael Vass. Born March 15th, 1985. Died June 8th, 1995, at Miller's Creek." Dr. Ames's voice held no judgment, only clinical interest. "Drowning accident. You were the only witness."

"I tried to save him." The words came out rougher than Laurie intended.

"Of course you did. That's not why you're here." Dr. Ames selected a photograph and slid it across the table. "Tell me about your dreams, Laurie. Not the sanitized version you gave the agents. The real ones."

The photograph showed Jimmy as an adult. Laughing at something off-camera, standing in front of an apartment building Laurie recognized from her sleep. Every detail matched: the chipped paint on the fire escape, the crooked numbers above the door, even the dying potted plant on the front steps.

"How do you have this picture?" Laurie's voice cracked.

"We don't." Dr. Ames leaned forward. "That's a composite generated from dream-state neural mapping. Forty-seven sessions over the past six months. We've been monitoring you, Laurie. Your REM patterns, your subconscious architecture. You're not dreaming of memories."

She pulled out another photo. Jimmy reading a newspaper with headlines Laurie had never seen. Jimmy cooking dinner in a kitchen that smelled of garlic and old wood. Jimmy bleeding from a scraped knee after tripping on a sidewalk crack.

"You're dreaming of a living person," Dr. Ames said. "Someone who exists in a parallel timeline where the accident at Miller's Creek had a different outcome. Where you died instead of him."

***

Laurie's apartment felt foreign when she returned. The silence pressed against her ears like water. On her kitchen counter, her work schedule for the crisis center lay marked with Tuesday's shift circled in red ink. Margaret had asked her to cover the overnight calls again. "You're the only one who really listens," she'd said. Laurie had planned to say yes.

She sat on her bed, holding the only photograph she owned of Jimmy. Ten years old, gap-toothed, mud on his knees from exploring the creek bank. He'd named every frog they found that summer. Neil, Luther, Dot.

Dr. Ames's words echoed in the empty room. The conduit between timelines was unstable. Left unchecked, it could collapse both realities. Laurie had been given forty-eight hours to decide.

Option one: neural severance. They would scrape every trace of Jimmy from her memory. Clean surgical cuts through thirty years of grief. She would wake up lighter, Dr. Ames had promised. Like setting down a weight she'd forgotten she was carrying. But Jimmy would cease to exist in her mind. Her version of him would die forever.

Option two: crossing over. Step through the conduit into his timeline. One way only. Physics had memory, Dr. Ames explained cryptically. It might choose the version of Laurie that belonged there.

The question that mattered most had slipped out before Laurie could stop herself: "Does he dream of me?"

Yes. Often. A little girl at the edge of a creek who died every time and left him behind. Frozen in his mind as he'd grown in hers.

Laurie pressed the photograph to her chest and felt her heart hammering against the paper. She thought about the bandaid Jimmy had put on her elbow after she fell from the rope swing. How he'd blown on the scrape first, his breath warm and careful. She thought about his laugh when she'd suggested they dig a tunnel to China, and how he'd actually started looking for shovels.

She thought about thirty years of waking up alone. About Margaret's voice on the phone earlier that week: "We need you here, Laurie. You save people." She thought about Mrs. Hicks from 4B who brought her soup when she caught the flu, and the way her neighbor's dog always wagged its tail when she passed in the hallway.

A whole life, small but real. People who would wonder where she'd gone.

The decision crystallized in her chest like ice forming on a window. She called the number Dr. Ames had given her.

"I want to cross over," she said.

The silence on the other end stretched long enough for Laurie to wonder if the call had dropped. Then Dr. Ames's voice, softer now: "Are you certain? There's no return path, Laurie. Once you step through, this version of you ceases to exist."

"I'm sure."

"Very well. Tomorrow night at ten. Bring something that connects you to the timeline split. Something from that summer."

Laurie hung up and walked to her dresser. In the bottom drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, lay a small stone from Miller's Creek. She'd carried it in her pocket the day Jimmy died. Had clutched it so tightly her palm bled while she screamed for help that came too late.

She held the stone up to the lamplight. It was smooth and gray, unremarkable except for the way it fit perfectly in her palm. Like it had been waiting thirty years for this moment.

***

The sleep chamber at the Bureau looked more like a medical scanner than a doorway between worlds. Laurie lay on the narrow table surrounded by memory anchors: the creek stone, a cassette tape of summer sounds, the photograph now creased from handling. Electrodes attached to her temples felt cold against her skin.

Dr. Ames adjusted the final settings on a machine that hummed with quiet electricity. "Remember, the crossing may not preserve your current form. Physics tends to honor the version of events that belonged to that timeline."

"Will I remember this? Remember crossing over?"

"Unknown. Timeline integration varies by individual." Dr. Ames's hand hovered over the activation switch. "Last chance to reconsider."

Laurie closed her eyes. "Do it."

The world dissolved like sugar in rain. Colors bled together, then separated into streams of light that pulled her forward through space that tasted of blood and creek water. She felt herself stretching, thinning, becoming something less solid than memory but more real than dreams.

Then she was standing at Miller's Creek again. The water ran backward, defying everything she knew about physics and time. In the clearing ahead, a man crouched beside a hiking pack, brushing dirt from a compass. Jimmy, but older. Real. Alive.

"Jimmy!" The word tore from her throat.

He turned, startled. His face was exactly as she'd dreamed it. Weathered by years she'd never shared, marked by experiences she'd only witnessed in sleep. But when he looked at her, his expression twisted into something between recognition and horror.

"I know you," he whispered, shaking his head. "But you're the girl from the dream. You always drown."

Laurie looked down. Her hands were translucent. The sun passed through her like she was made of glass. Her bare feet left no prints in the dirt.

She hadn't crossed as herself. She had become his ghost.

In his timeline, she'd never grown up. Never survived the accident. He only dreamed of the ten-year-old friend who died, and so that was what she had become. A presence untethered from matter, a memory finally given form.

Jimmy's fear melted into something sadder. He smiled, tears tracking down his cheeks. "You're back. Weren't you going to tell me something?"

Laurie tried to speak, but no sound came. Instead, she knelt and pressed her palm to the wet earth. A leaf trembled, then skittered toward him on an impossible breeze.

He watched it settle against his boot. "I miss you," he murmured to the air. "Please stay a little longer this time."

Back in her apartment, the tea kettle whistled itself dry. An email expired unread. Margaret from the crisis center left three voicemails asking if Laurie was alright. Agent Morse marked her case file "CLOSED / CROSSOVER" and dropped it into the digital archive.

But Jimmy began walking near the creek again, knowing the dreams were different now. They held warmth. Direction. Response. He talked to the air more often, and though he never heard words back, he always felt them: You're okay. I'm okay.

He built a bench where he'd last seen her and carved "Laurie's Landing" into the weathered wood.

And sometimes, when no wind stirred the trees, a leaf would land at his feet anyway.