Your dreams start shaping reality.

The first changes arrive in places no one thinks to watch.

Constellations slip out of alignment. Not dramatically—just enough that astronomers argue. A star appears slightly dimmer than it was the night before. A familiar cluster loses one point of light, and no one can agree which one it was.

Dreamers begin to wake with residue clinging to them.

A man dreams of falling and gravity deepens around his house. The air feels thicker there, like it remembers weight. A child dreams of wings and birds gather where she sleeps, crowding rooftops, bending branches under a sudden abundance of life. People start to notice that the world near certain sleepers feels… edited.

Reality becomes responsive.

The more vivid the dream, the more pronounced the change. Mountains shift their silhouettes. Rivers reroute themselves by inches, then miles. Time hesitates in rooms where someone dreamed too hard of the past. Governments form departments. Scientists stop using the word impossible.

Dreamers are mapped.

Measured.

Protected.

And then there is a blank space in the data.

Me.

I don’t dream.

Not in fragments. Not in metaphors. Not in flashes that fade with morning. When I sleep, my mind produces nothing at all—no symbols, no images, no emotional static. It is a perfect blackout, as if consciousness itself steps out of the room and turns off the lights.

At first, they think this means I’m harmless.

Until the sky near my apartment loses depth.

The stars above me don’t move—they recede. As if distance itself is being erased, layer by layer. The night feels closer, flatter, like a backdrop pulled too tight. Telescopes aimed in my direction return errors. Not darkness. Not obstruction.

Missing information.

Around me, things begin to simplify.

A tree outside my window stops producing leaves with veins. They grow smooth, featureless, wrong. Shadows lose their softness. Buildings near me look unfinished, as if someone stopped rendering them halfway through. Street names blur. Memories tied to those streets grow unreliable.

When I sleep, the universe exhales.

And forgets.

Dreamers add to the world by imagining it forward. Every dream is an act of insistence—this exists, this matters, this continues. Their minds stitch reality together each night with stories, fears, desires.

I don’t stitch anything.

I unravel.

It becomes impossible to ignore when the cosmic background radiation drops near me—imperceptibly, but consistently. As if the echo of creation itself is being dampened. Space around my body grows quieter in ways instruments can’t fully explain.

They tell me I’m dangerous.

That I’m collapsing probability. That matter requires narrative to persist. That existence needs to be dreamed, again and again, or it begins to thin.

I lie awake, staring at a ceiling that feels less solid every night, and understand something no one wants to say out loud:

The universe does not fear destruction.

It fears being unimagined.

By the time they ask me to stop sleeping, entire regions of the sky have gone dark. Not destroyed. Not exploded.

Simply… never there.

And the worst part—the part that fills me with a terrible, aching reverence—is this:

When I wake, I don’t feel empty.

I feel spacious.

As if something vast has passed through me and taken what it needed. As if I am not a void, but a door.

And the universe, exhausted from being held together by dreams, is finally learning how to let go.

And for the first time, I understand why dreams were never meant to stop.
When I sleep, the universe remembers how to forget.