The paranoia Ethan felt in his apartment was one thing, but the fear he felt while watching the abandoned building from afar was something else entirely.
It was a primal, physical fear. The kind of fear any person of flesh and blood feels when they are about to enter a predator's den.
He spent a full day preparing. This wasn't a dream he could shape with his will.
In the real world, the laws of physics were absolute, and a single mistake could be his last. On his laptop, he studied old satellite maps of St.
Jude's Hospital, memorizing its general layout. He read faded news articles about its closure a decade ago due to "financial troubles" and "outdated facilities"—a perfect cover story for any secret operation.
In the afternoon, he took a drive in his cheap rental car, passing by the site. The building was a beast of concrete and red brick, perched on a small hill and surrounded by a forest of weeds and wild pine trees. The chain-link fence surrounding it was rusted and collapsing in places.
The windows were dark and empty, like the eyes of a massive skull. There were no obvious signs of life or activity, but that complete stillness was, in itself, suspicious.
When night fell, Ethan returned. There was no moonlight, only an overcast sky that cast a thick darkness over the scene.
He dressed in all black, put on leather gloves, and carried a backpack containing tools that were practical, not fantastical: a powerful flashlight, a small crowbar, pliers, and a small first-aid kit. He felt the absurdity of the situation, like a teenager playing at being a thief.
But his heart pounded in his chest, reminding him that the danger was real.
He easily found a gap in the back fence where rust had eaten through the metal. He slipped through, his movements quiet and deliberate. The sound of his clothes brushing against the dry grass sounded like a scream in his ears.
Every one of his senses was stretched to its limit. Here, he was not the powerful "Morpheus." He was just Ethan, a seventy-kilogram young man whose story could be ended by a single bullet.
He circled the building, avoiding the main entrances, searching for a weak point. He found it on the lower level: a small window that had been boarded up. The wood was old and rotten. Using the crowbar and an effort that made him hold his breath, he managed to pry the board off with a muffled tearing sound. He squeezed through the narrow window, landing softly on a cold, damp concrete floor.
He was inside.
The air was thick with the smell of mold, dust, and the long-faded scent of chemical disinfectants. He switched on his flashlight, its pure white beam cutting through the dense darkness like a sword. He was in a basement, with narrow corridors and rusted pipes running along the ceiling like dead industrial veins.
He began to move forward. The echo of his footsteps was unsettling in the heavy silence. Every small sound made him freeze: the drip of water from a pipe, the creak of metal as the building settled, the moan of the wind through broken windows on the upper floors. He felt a strange sense of isolation and vulnerability. In the dream world, he controlled the environment. Here, the environment controlled him, pressing in with its darkness, its silence, and its sick history.
He climbed the stairs to the ground floor and found himself in a wide reception hall. The front desk was overturned, and papers were scattered across the floor like autumn leaves. The waiting room chairs were torn, their yellowed stuffing poking out from the gashes. His flashlight beam caught the glint of shattered glass on the floor.
He moved cautiously down the long corridors. Doors hung open to empty patient rooms, where rusted metal beds still stood, some still holding the tattered remains of stained white sheets. On the walls of the children's ward, cheerful murals of smiling animals had peeled and faded, giving the creatures distorted, sickly expressions. The entire place was a monument to suffering and forgetting.
Ethan was looking for anything out of the ordinary, any sign of recent activity. After nearly half an hour of searching the lower floors, he found it.
In a side hallway, he noticed the dust on the floor was less dense than everywhere else. There was a faint trace of a clear path, as if people walked this way regularly. He followed the trail. It didn't lead to patient rooms or offices, but to an isolated wing at the back of the hospital, a wing that was likely used for the most severe cases.
At the end of the hall, he found what he was looking for. Where there should have been an old wooden door, there was a modern, grey steel door. It had no handle, just a small black digital keypad beside it, with a tiny red light blinking steadily.
This was their entrance.
Ethan felt a mixture of triumph and frustration. He had found the den, but it was sealed tight. This door couldn't be opened with a crowbar, and that digital panel was surely connected to a sophisticated alarm system. He had reached a dead end in the physical world.
He stood there in the darkness, the beam of his flashlight trembling on the cold steel. He felt a surge of anger at his own limitations, at his physical frailty. He could defeat psychological horrors in people's minds, yet he was helpless against a simple metal door.
Then, as he stared at the small, blinking red light, an idea came to him. A bold and desperate idea.
He had been thinking like a thief, like a field agent. But that's not what he was. His real weapon wasn't the crowbar in his bag.
He couldn't get through the door... but what if someone was already inside? A security guard, a technician on duty, a scientist working late? Those people had minds. And those minds dream.
Ethan retreated into the shadows, making his way back to an empty room far from the steel door. He sat on the floor, leaning his back against a cold, peeling wall. He turned off his flashlight, plunging himself into the complete darkness of the abandoned hospital.
He closed his eyes. He was about to do something he had never done before. He had no physical "key," no specific target. He was going to perform a "blind hunt." He would cast his consciousness into the subconscious ocean around him, throwing out his net and hoping to catch a dream—any dream—emanating from behind that steel door.
It was like jumping into a dark ocean without knowing if there was water below.
He took a deep breath, clearing his mind of fear and of the cold floor beneath him. He began to focus, pushing his awareness outward, not into a specific person's dream, but into the empty space around him, searching for any signal, any echo, of another mind dreaming in this forgotten place.