Have you heard of Lucid Dreaming?

The realm of dreams is one of the most mysterious places humans have ever stepped into. Although neuroscience is making great progress in understanding mental illnesses and coming up with ways to cure them, scientists haven’t even found the beginning of this mystery’s thread, called dreaming.

But when the beginning of the thread is found, the one who found it will sooner or later understand that it has no end.

~Chapter 1~

The sunlight was penetrating the gloomy bedroom from the gaps between the curtain and the window, with the sunrays being so clear and undisturbed, creating the romantic hallucination of being solid. The room seemed to be unstirred, unchanged for a long time. The books on the bookshelf were organised and neatly positioned, while the desk underneath the window had hardly anything on it, but a notebook and a mechanical pencil. A single bed across the window, in the corner of the room, was taking most of the space. Every object was standing still and silence was the predominant element of the scenery. Surprisingly though, no hint of dust could be detected in any surface or hidden corner.

A dim movement between the sheets breaks the harmonical silence of the motionless room. He opens his eyes with heavy eyelids, trying to get used to the light coming from the outside. He rubs his eyes and swallows with difficulty, then takes a deep breath. After a quick check on his watch, which was resting on the table next to this bed, he takes one more deep breath and grabs another notebook with a pen attached on it, lying next to his pillow. He starts writing with an incredible speed for a person who has just woken up, taking only short pauses to think, making a frowning face, like he’s trying to remember.

Done.

After he feels satisfied with what he’s written, he leaves the notebook back to its initial position and gets up. He opens the curtains and heads to the kitchen to make coffee. He moves methodically with exact motions, knowing exactly where to find anything he needs. Today he chose the Hazelnut filter coffee which was lying between the five different coffee types on the top right shelf above the coffee machine. The sweet smell fills the room with autumn notes, coloring the kitchen with an invisible brownish yellow of fallen leaves and wet dirt after a light rain. Although this is obviously his daily routine, he looks silently satisfied and happy.

Naito (夢翔 - 22 years old) was a black-haired, pale-skinned but weirdly attractive young man, who started living in his own apartment in the age of 18, because it was closer to his university and could save time from traveling back and forth from his father’s house every day. This precious time could be used for anything else but getting frustrated in the packed trains every morning and every afternoon, being forced to just wait to reach his destination patiently.

Living on his own gave him space to grow and discover sides of his personality he didn’t know. He learned many things about surviving as an adult, about responsibility and life management, and he became independent after he found his first part-time job. He was working at a quiet manga-cafe, a job that would pay as much as he needed, where the workload was controllable and he had time to read books behind the reception stand, when there were few or no customers.

It was one of these nights when the cafe was almost empty and only 2-3 booths were occupied by hardcore otakus who never got out of there until their time was up. Naito was completely indifferent to what was happening around him, and hardly any situation could move him, in contrast with his co-workers, who found many people “weird” and “creepy”, although they were otakus themselves. He couldn't understand the meaning behind criticizing and having an opinion about anything that was happening. He preferred reading his books in silence, getting dragged into a different world each time he opened a new book cover.

This is how it started.

This is how he got dragged into a world he couldn't, or maybe didn’t want to get out of.

On page 50, he read the phrase which made his mind stop and forced him into an abyss of thoughts and mysteries.

“There was only one place to find her, only one place to feel her. When he was sleeping she would come to him.

He was meeting her in his own dreams, where he could finally see her, hear her voice, touch her, smell her..”.

This abstract from the romance book he was reading at the time triggered Naito’s interest. He was thrilled by the fact that somebody could fall in love with a thought, an apparition.

How powerful is one’s mind?

How much can the brain actually do?

This stimulus led him to a vast search on the web about sleep and brain functionalities that control the subconscious.

Can the brain create a person that doesn’t exist, or does it collect information from people an individual has already seen or met in their life?

Can somebody really fall in love with someone they created on their own?

Do these fictional people have their own will, or are they mimicking their creator’s ethics? Does that individual have a split personality? Is that individual psychologically unstable?

....……..Can that individual control when he wants to dream of them?...........

So many questions that needed to be answered. Naito was jumping from one website to another, he was dragged by reference links to irrelative topics, until he ended up discovering what was about to change his life.

LUCID DREAMING.