I was twenty-six years old when I started forgetting how to sleep.
Not insomnia. Nothing so clean as lying awake staring at a ceiling. It was subtler than that — a resistance, somewhere at the edge of consciousness, like a door that had always opened easily suddenly requiring effort. Like sleep itself had developed an opinion about me.
I ignored it the way I ignored most things. I had a life to maintain.
My name — this name, the one on my identification and my lease and my employment records — was Ren Caldwell. I worked in data analysis for a logistics firm in a city that was loud and grey and perpetually damp. I had a small apartment on the fourth floor of a building with a broken elevator. I had a colleague named Park who brought coffee he never offered to share, and a manager who scheduled Friday afternoon meetings out of what I could only assume was personal malice.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a completely ordinary life.
I had no memory of anything before it. Not in the way people have gaps — not a missing childhood or a forgotten accident. Just a clean, uncomplicated existence that seemed to have begun in my late teens with a full set of functional habits and absolutely no history worth examining.
I had never found this strange.
Looking back, that was perhaps the strangest part of all.
The first dream came on a Tuesday.
I remembered the day because I had stayed late finishing a quarterly report, eaten something unmemorable at my desk, and come home to an apartment that smelled faintly of rain through a window I'd left cracked. I was asleep within minutes of lying down.
And then I was somewhere else.
Not metaphorically. Not in the dissolving, logic-free way of ordinary dreams where you accept a school hallway turning into an ocean without comment. This was different. This had weight.
A room. Stone walls. Late afternoon light falling at an angle I recognized without knowing why. A window with leaded glass. A chair that scraped back — I felt the sound more than heard it — and the sensation of standing, of moving toward a fireplace mantle with my hands slightly too tense at my sides.
And a woman sitting across from where I had been.
Pale. Still. Hands folded. An expression on her face that I — even in the dream, even without context — felt land somewhere behind my sternum like a splinter.
She was looking at where I had stood as if I had said something that required careful thought before responding.
I didn't know her.
I woke up.
I lay in the dark of my apartment for a long time afterward.
The dream didn't fade the way dreams fade. It sat. It had texture and temperature and a specific quality of light that I could still see when I closed my eyes three hours later, still see when I made coffee in the morning, still see on the train to work while Park read something on his phone beside me and the city moved past the windows in smears of grey and amber.
A stone room. A woman. The feeling of having left something unfinished.
I told myself it meant nothing.
I was good at telling myself things meant nothing. I had, without ever examining it, built my entire life in this world on that particular skill.
The dream came back Thursday.
Same room. Different moment. I was seated this time, and the woman — her — was speaking, and though I couldn't hear the words I could read the shape of them. Careful words. Words chosen by someone who had learned to be precise because imprecision had cost her something once.
I watched her speak and felt the pressure.
That was what startled me awake — not the image, not the strangeness of a recurring dream, but the feeling. Something in my chest, grinding and wordless and furious, like a wall being pushed from the inside by something that had been pushing for a very long time.
I sat up in the dark with my heart hitting hard against my ribs and my hands gripping the sheets and the absolute, irrational certainty that I knew what that feeling was.
I had felt it before.
Not here. Not in this life. Somewhere with stone floors and political marriages and a name that was not Ren Caldwell.
I sat with that for a long time.
Then I got up, made coffee I didn't drink, and stared out the window at the city until the sky started to lighten.
By the time I left for work I had convinced myself it was stress. Overwork. The Friday meetings finally taking their toll on my psychological wellbeing.
I was almost certain I was right.
The dreams disagreed.