“Well, ever since that day, I got the feeling that he was using his free periods to meet girls in that abandoned club room, so during Junior year I had the school move us to the room next door so that I could look in on his antics.”
“I… see…”
There was a knot in my stomach. To think that Lawrence had a similar relationship with Zoey all this time. I suddenly didn’t feel very special at all. Had she invited him over to her house too? I began wavering. That video felt far too personal. Like I was looking into another world that I should never have seen.
“What’s wrong?” She hovered her face right in front of mine, inspecting whatever expression I was making at the time. I looked away nervously.
“Oh. Uh, nothing.”
“Are you jealous?”
“N-no, not at all.”
“You are, right?”
“No…”
“Looks like it to me.”
“Maybe a little...” My face was burning up. I wanted nothing more than to just disappear forever. At my reaction, she folded her laptop and stood up.
“Well, if it helps, I’ll have you know that my relationship with Law is strictly business. I send him information on girls, and he lets me know about what’s going on with people like Benjamin. That information came in handy today, didn’t it?” She was right. If she hadn’t known that Ben was on a rampage today, then maybe I wouldn’t have been able to talk my way out of his grilling.
After plopping herself down on the office chair, she spun around to face me and grinned.
“You already know way more about me than he does, so you shouldn’t worry about him.”
She patted my head gently.
“But, don’t you like… watch that stuff he does?”
“What, and you didn’t like watching it? I saw you, you know. Your eyes were all over Suzie.”
My face turned red. I couldn’t deny it. “It… it looked like fun, okay?”
“Yeah, see? There’s no harm in it. I like cute boys, and you like cute girls. That’s all there is to it.”
“Yeah...”
She said there wasn’t more to it, but that’s not what it felt like to me. Because I know that if she truly wanted to, she could start going out with Lawrence at any point. Her words might have helped me rationalize most of what I felt, but the emotional core of my jealousy would not go away that easily.
“So anyway, tell me about your powers! How do you do it? Can you hack me right now? Go on, hack me, Tristan. Have your way with me.” She leaned forward in her chair with more excitement than I’d ever seen in her before.
“W-wait, calm down. I can’t do it.”
“You can’t?”
“No, well. It only happens when I’m asleep. I thought it was a dream, but apparently…”
“Hmmm. A dream, huh?” She looked down in thought. “Maybe you can only do it during REM sleep then. That’s strange though.”
“It is?”
“Well, the first time you took over my body, I was definitely asleep. But the second time, it happened while I was wide awake.”
“Wide… awake?”
“Well, yeah. I had my suspicions about you yesterday, so I took a bunch of precautions.”
By precautions, she must have been referring to the stuff on her phone. She might have also stayed up in case it happened again.
“But,” she said. “It was still quite the sensation. Having control of your own body wrested from you in that way. It was similar to experiencing sleep paralysis. And not only that, having some unknown entity shove you into the passenger seat like that is...”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“No, it’s fine. Once I knew what was going on, it was easy to regain control when I wanted to.”
Ah, come to think of it, I was suddenly expelled from her body after I realized what was going on. Is it because my powers aren’t perfect? “Then, you could’ve stopped me from sending the text?”
“No, I was asleep at that time. I had no control over my body. It’s not very easy to rouse yourself awake while experiencing a dream, you know. Getting hacked when I was asleep versus when I was awake were like two completely different experiences.”
It seemed as if her unconscious state prevented her from exerting control over her body.
“So I’m thinking that, based on our two experiences so far, your power, which you can only activate during REM sleep, is only useful for taking over people who are also experiencing REM sleep. At the very least, that’s when it’s the most effective.”
She twirled her chair to face her study desk and began writing down this new set of information. “Well, there’s other things too…”
“Other things?” She twirled back to face me.
“Well, when I was inside of you, I kind of… experienced the world differently.”
“Differently? Like, my eyesight was different? Hearing?”
“No, no, like our feelings. I felt the world the way you felt it. Like… How do I put it? When I went through your texts or I p-put my hands your… underwear drawer. I’m really sorry about that by the way, I thought it was a dream!”
“Your feelings relating to those activities were a reflection of mine, then?”
I nodded. “I didn’t feel anything special about your underwear, and the texts… I hated them.”
“What about my memories? Did you have access to those? Is that how you knew my phone’s password?”
“Uh, no. Not your actual memory, but your muscle memory. It was like your fingers knew the passcode without me even doing anything. I did memorize it the second time, though. It was 198030.”
She stared at my face with a look of blatant suspicion.
“Hmmmmm.”
“W-what?”
“Nooothing.”
She turned away and pouted. I wanted to tell her that it didn’t seem like nothing when she makes faces like that, but I decided against it.
“But then wait a minute, why didn’t you use my handwriting when writing that note?”
“The note? Oh…”
She was talking about the apology note I wrote. It was certainly an insightful question. Why didn’t I tap into her muscle memory?
“Were you thinking of anything specific when you did that?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah. I was trying to disguise my handwriting… oh.” Halfway into my answer, I realized where I messed up, and so did she.
“Then you consciously thought about how you’d write it instead of just subconsciously tapping into my own handwriting. That’s amusing. If you weren’t so careful about hiding, you would have gotten away with it.”
I planted my face into my palm with such force that Zoey’s mom would probably misunderstand what was happening in her daughter’s room if she’d heard it.
“Hahaha, that’s really funny… So then, how do you do it?”
“How do I…?”
“I want to do it too. How do I do it? Is it like a séance? Do you need to do some kind of ritual beforehand?”
“No, I…”
“I told you all my secrets, you know? All the deepest, darkest, parts of me. So tell me. What did you have to do to hack me? Is it witchcraft?”
“Uhm…” I sighed, deciding that there was no point in fighting. But explaining to her the steps would be kind of embarrassing. “Like I said, it was an accident. I didn’t know it was going to happen. So the second time, I only repeated the steps from the first night.”
“What steps are those?”
“I… I just thought about you a lot before going to bed.”
She stared at me with a blank expression. “It’s that easy?”
“Uh, I guess…” She slumped into her chair and started thinking.
“I don’t think doing something like that is uncommon… so there has to be something else… wait, why were you thinking about me? You’re not in any clubs, and we barely talk.”
I gulped. As expected, she asked. Would I ever get a better chance than this? Probably not. It was now or never.
I held my breath, exhaled, then stared at her with as much determination as I could muster.
“I… I was thinking about how to ask you to the homecoming dance.”
“Oh.” She went back to thinking, then turned to face me. “Sure. I’ll go to the dance with you.”
“R-really?”
“Well, not really. I do want to keep our ties a secret. But… I think we can share a dance or two if you’re fine with it.”
My mind went completely blank except for three words: Oh my god.
I was going to dance with Zoey at homecoming. I was so happy that I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs. And at my elated expression, she grinned.
“Try not to get too excited. I’m going to be taking pictures the entire time, so it depends on whether I get a chance to sneak away or not.”
“Ah, right.” I blushed.
“So, what do you think? Could you use those feelings to hack me right now?”
“Hack you…? Well… I am kind of tired. I could try taking a nap.”
“To take a REM nap, you’d need to go unconscious for about 90 minutes, so don’t worry about anything. Just think about Friday until you enter my body.”
I nodded and reached into my bag which had been laying on the floor and pulled out my melatonin bottle. Then, after twisting the lid open, I took a capsule out and swallowed it whole.
“Without a drink, huh? You look like you’re used to doing that,” she said.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve had trouble sleeping for a while now, so these are just normal for me.”
“Hmmm.”
She seemed curious about something, but I decided instead to focus on the task at hand. She said to think of Friday, and when I did, warm, fluttering feelings danced around in my chest. Could I even sleep while this excited? Plus, and this is embarrassing to admit, I had been grappling with an uncomfortably raging erection. “Um, could I use your bed?”
“Go right ahead.”
After confirming with her that it was okay, I laid down on her bed while facing her. I gazed at the majesty of her figure. She turned back to her study desk to write something down, but I couldn’t see it. However, that was the last thing I cared about at that point.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
After all...
Zoey Brahm was going to dance with me. The girl of my dreams. And, when you consider the fact that I was already in her room, it was easy to see how I was riding on cloud nine at that moment.
To be honest, I kind of wished that she would have joined me in the bed, but I decided that it would probably be pushing my luck. I didn’t want to ruin her impression of me. I had already messed up by insulting her and Mao earlier. All thanks to Ben. His advice was so awful that it’s a wonder that I even tried it at all. Someone having experience doesn’t mean that they’re an expert, after all.
When I realized that my thoughts were drifting toward Ben, I shook my head and refocused. I needed to avoid other people in case it got in the way of the hack.
Zoey, Zoey…
“Mmmnnn…” I was extremely tired, so falling asleep wasn’t too difficult.
Before I realized it, my consciousness had already faded.
---
My reality warped, and I was inside Zoey’s body for the third time. The miracle of whatever this phenomenon was would never fail to impress me.
To actually become someone else, to share their body, there really was nothing like it. This time was different though. This time, I was aware that she would be watching my every move. She had entrusted her body to me this time. And this time, I would do my best to experiment with this in order to understand this power better.
The first thing I did was turn back to face the bed. There, I found my unconscious body resting without a care in the world. The power to possess someone else’s body was weird enough on its own, but it was surreal to watch myself sleeping there from an outside perspective. However, I got the nagging sensation that my attention should be else where, and ended up looking down at Zoey’s desk. There, I found a note that appeared to have been intended for me.
I’m writing this at 6:38pm. I want you to take my cellphone and glasses case and hide them behind the coffee machine without my mom noticing. This is related to the cooler I had you bring over. Sorry for not relaying this to you beforehand, I didn’t want to add any interfering thoughts to your hacking.
I checked her phone. It was already 7:52pm.
My (her) head turned to the window, and I found that it had already become dark outside. I really had been sleeping for a while. It appeared that her REM theory might have been on the mark. It seemed as if I could only hack her while dreaming.
Well, there was no real point in delaying it that much. It took a while to actually get to that point, after all.
I slipped the phone into my (her) pocket, grabbed the glasses case, and exited the room.
Once in the hallway, I was consumed by the darkness. It appeared that the lights hadn’t been turned on yet, so I wasn’t entirely sure where I should have been heading. However, almost without my knowing, I reached out and immediately flicked on the light switch.
“Oh,” I said aloud.
My own actions had surprised me. I had no idea where the light switch was, and yet I had turned it on without thinking. It was the muscle memory again. Zoey probably flicked that light switch so often that her body just instinctively knew where it was. Having hacked Zoey a few times, I was becoming aware of how many of a living thing’s actions are just subconscious mannerisms that we’ve worked into our body by repeating them.
“Woof!” Once the light came on, Mao immediately ran out to greet me.
“Woof woof!”
The brown terrier barked at me with as much excitement as he had when he first saw me in this hall. “Woof! Grrr…”
And, feeling playful, he decided to sink his teeth into my (Zoey’s) toe.
“Ow!”
I pulled away as carefully as I could until his resistance faltered and he let go. I wasn’t entirely sure how old Mao was, but it was entirely possible that he was still teething.
“Woof! Woof, woof!”
“Mao, sit.”
At my command, he sat enthusiastically. It was a good thing that Zoey trained her dog to be this obedient. “Stay. I’ll be back, okay?”
“Woof!” I sighed and headed down the stairs.
The sound of the TV, which had barely been audible while I was upstairs, was filling up the entirety of the first floor. Her mom appeared to be watching a talk show that just started, so it was safe to assume that she wasn’t going to pay me any attention.
“You used a condom, right?”
Scratch that, she was still Zoey’s mom. I decided to ignore her and headed over to the kitchen, holding the glasses case in the hand facing away from the living room. If I were in my own body, my heart would’ve been pounding out of my chest doing this.
But as Zoey’s feelings flowed into me, this whole thing felt like it would be a cakewalk. There was nothing to fear here.
The conclusion I came to once I arrived was that, if I were to do this, I would need to disguise my reason for coming down. I couldn’t just casually waltz into the kitchen, scoot the coffee machine over, then head back up. That would raise far too many questions if she were even remotely attentive.
Maybe Zoey was just getting a drink for her guest? Disguising my actions using that premise seemed like a good idea. Tapping into Zoey’s muscle memory, I reached to open one of the cabinets and correctly guessed which ones contained the cups used for drinking water.
Then, after grabbing two of them and setting them down next to the coffee maker, I opened the fridge and grabbed a pitcher full of water that had been standing out front on the shelf.
Carefully, I poured the contents into the cups, then placed the pitcher onto the counter.
My eyes shifted back to Zoey’s mom.
She didn’t seem to be paying me any attention.
Thinking that, I scooted the coffee maker up from against the wall and slid Zoey’s glasses case into the opening. Then, I quickly followed with her phone before moving the coffee maker back in place.
And as soon as I did, my consciousness blurred once more.
---
Zoey returned to the room with a tray that carried two plates, each with about five small sandwiches, and two glasses of water.
“Were you okay with water?” she asked. “It’s a special occasion after all.”
“Ugh, whatever. I panicked and took the water, okay? Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Woah, you’re grumpy all of a sudden.”
“I feel like shit. I never want to nap again...”
“Long naps will do that to you.” She took a bite of her sandwich. “Why were you panicking, though?”
“What are you on about now…?”
“You talked about how you inherit my feelings while in my body, right? I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t panicked at all. If anything went wrong, I was ready to take control from you and rectify the situation, so you shouldn’t have felt anxious about anything.”
“Oh, really?”
Thinking back, she certainly wasn’t wrong. I did feel unusually calm about the whole situation. So why did I grab the pitcher of water?
“What do you usually get from the fridge, Zoey?”
“Me? I usually drink water… oh. Hmm.”
Yeah, it was all starting to make sense. It seemed as if, when it came to subconscious decision making, the body defers to the original owner’s ‘auto-pilot’ rather than mine. I definitely would have picked juice over the water pitcher under normal circumstances. Yet, when I gave her body the command to ‘get a drink from the fridge’, it obeyed it in the way that it usually would have. However, that wasn’t the only strange thing that had happened during the hack.
“Uhm, by the way, is the spot that Mao bit still painful?” I asked.
“Hmm? Oh yeah, a little bit.”
“Well… I still feel it.”
“You do?” It could have been ghost pain, but it felt far too real to be something as vague as that.
“It can’t be the case that your soul links up with mine or anything during a hack, right?” she asked.
“Souls? Do you actually believe in them?” The conversation was taking a shape that I could no longer follow. Inheriting feelings with her body, taking her pain back with me, this power was completely incomprehensible to me.
“This just gets more interesting by the minute.”
But Zoey, like an honest to God scientist, seemed to be enjoying building her hypothesis around these strange powers. She bit into another sandwich and began writing more things down in her notebook.
Though, I didn’t entirely dislike the situation. Having something that could make her this elated to spend time with me was a good thing. I was glad to be someone that she found interesting.
“Okay, so here’s what we know.”
Once she was done writing, she decided to summarize our current knowledge of the dream hacking ability based on the information we had gathered so far in a neatly made document.
1. Hacking can only be activated during my REM sleep.
2. In order to select a target, I need to think about them obsessively right before falling asleep.
3. The target still has access to senses such as sight, sound, and smells while hacked.
4. If the target isn’t also sleeping, then the target can easily rescind control once they’re aware of what’s happening.
5. The way in which the target experiences life, including their feelings towards people or things, as well as their own personal preferences, all influence me while I’m in their body.
6. I am able to tap into the target’s muscle memory in order to do things in the way they normally would.
7. I am unable to access the target’s inner thoughts or memories.
8. Any physiological changes to the target’s body such as wounds are reflected onto my own body.
“We can call this the Laws of Dream Paralysis,” she said.
“Dream Paralysis?”
“Yeah, the hacking. Remember how I said it felt like sleep paralysis? Well, I think from the victim’s perspective, Dream Paralysis is a good term for it.”
“Oh, I see.” I looked at her notebook and read the laws over again.
“As far as our information gathering goes,” Zoey said. “Numbers 3 and 4 were the only things I was completely aware of before talking to you. Being able to witness all your actions in full detail, as well as feeling complete control over my body when you hacked me the second time helped in that regard. I had a hunch about number 6 and 7, muscle memory vs pure memory access, based on how quickly you inputted my phone’s passcode. If it were something like reading my memory, then you wouldn’t have inputted it as if it were second nature. But a part of me couldn’t dismiss the fact that you might have that kind of power. Numbers 1 and 2, the requirements for you to hack someone, I had no idea about. I had just assumed that you targeted me at night because of my ability to rescind control while awake. As for number 5…”
She tapped the fifth discovery.
The ability to experience a person’s feelings.
“It’s not quite the same as accessing someone’s memories or reading their mind, but it’s close. You’re able to parse through how someone ‘feels’ about things. With it, just by thinking, you’re able to discover things like their favorite foods, their hobbies, who they like, who they dislike…”
“It’s terrifying,” I interrupted her.
“You think so too, huh?”
“Yeah. I don’t think I’d want anyone to peek at my feelings like that.”
The more Zoey told me about Dream Paralysis, the more conscious I became of how evil these powers truly were.
If this power were given to a hero in a comic book, I have no doubt that it would be spun in a positive light somehow. There would be an endless number of justifications given to the hero for them to use their powers unilaterally at their own discretion.
But since these powers are my reality, I’m forced to grapple with the weight of its morality.
“I think it might be wrong to use these powers.”
“Really? No matter what?”
“Like, just now. What would’ve happened if I peeked into your feelings and found something you’d rather keep hidden?”
“Hmmmmm.“ She looked down with a hand on her chin to think for a moment, then smiled. “Well, that’s fine for now. We can talk about it later.”
“Later?”
“You came to work on your paper, right?” She gestured to the laptop.
“Oh, yeah. Right…”
Though I traded places with her and took the seat at her study table, I wasn’t exactly in the right head space to be working on a paper. My head still felt like it had been put in a washing machine because of the nap.
No, even without that, there were so many thoughts running through my head at that moment. And above all of those is the fact that, despite my blunder earlier, I was now capable of having a conversation with Zoey.
I wondered what Lance would say if he could see this. Would he be happy for me? Or would he continue talking about how disappointed he was in my taste in women? Just what did he not like about Zoey, anyway?
She had been nothing but nice to me so far. Sure, it might have been because she was curious about my power, but does it matter what I use to get my foot in the door? Even if she never really spoke to me much before she figured it out...
No, I remembered, she was nice to me even during our conversation at lunch. It seemed more likely to me that he just hadn’t seen that side of her before. Her intellect, her poise, her compassion, it all culminated into the amazing human being that was sitting before me. Why couldn’t he see what was so great about her? It boggled my mind how closed minded he could be sometimes.
That line of thought made me curious about her opinions of him. If she said bad things about him, then I would have to defend him as his friend. But at the very least it would mean that their feelings were mutual.
“Hey Zoey, what do you think about Lance?”
“Lance? Your friend from this morning?” I nodded.
“He seems pretty smart. I like him. I’d like you to introduce me to him properly at some point. Oh, I guess we’re keeping our connection a secret. Never mind, pretend I didn’t say that.”
I was so upset at how effortlessly he received her praises that it probably would have been better if she ran him into the ground. I sighed.
“He’s going to be pretty upset if you sit around daydreaming instead of working on your paper, though.”
“Sorry, I just have a hard time focusing on school stuff…”
“Oh yeah, I totally get that. I always end up getting bored and scrolling through something completely unrelated.”
“Right?! Eventually I end up giving in and playing video games or something. I don’t know how you get through studying the way you do.”
“By listening to music.”
“Music? But… wouldn’t that distract you?”
“No, you just need to know what to listen to. Here, I’ll play something for you. Open the desk drawer right next to your leg, there should be some Bluetooth speakers in there.” I did as she said and placed the Bluetooth speakers onto the desk next to the laptop after turning them on.
“Hang on, let me just connect to them, and… there.”
A sharp, metallic bassline, harmonizing with consistent drumming and eventually, icy-cool male vocals filled the room. It was a song I recognized almost immediately.
“Wait, this is… god. It’s coming back, hang on. Right, this is Radiohead, right?”
“Oh, you know them?”
“Know them? My dad used to listen to them nonstop. I’m surprised that someone our age likes them too.”
I honestly wasn’t too much of a fan. I had gotten sick of listening to Radiohead when I was ten years old thanks to my dad, but I decided to play into it if it meant getting on Zoey’s good side.
“Like them? I absolutely love them! Your dad has great taste. Here.”
She reached down underneath her bed and pulled out a large vinyl record case. I recognized it as the cover for their album “OK Computer”, whose contents we were currently listening to.
“I don’t have a record player, but I got this one since I love it so much. Every song just has so much character. You could tell they really put their all into it. It’s absolutely magical. I love listening to it while studying. It’s gotten me through a ton of really boring classes.”
“Oh, wow. You’re more passionate about them than I thought.”
She bobbed her head rhythmically while looking down at her record.
“I want to get all five of their signatures on this one day.”
It seemed like I had stumbled my way into something very personal for her. Slowly but surely, I was learning more and more about the girl named Zoey Brahm.
I turned back to the laptop and began typing away in the text document before me. For some reason, I found it much easier to concentrate this time. The atmosphere was like something out of a dream. I was munching on sandwiches and working hard on my paper, right next to the girl that I loved, all to the nostalgic sounds of Radiohead’s OK Computer. It was the second out of body experience I had had that day.
Perhaps my dad was onto something with this album. I wished from the bottom of my heart that my time in this moment would last forever.