Dream Control

One person's dream is another's nightmare - horror flash fiction (500 words).

Photo by BehindTheTmuna on Unsplash. Text all rights reserved © Saint-Lazare, 2026.

A switch nestled in the center of his nervous system, moistened by all the surrounding flesh, could only produce electric arcs. He could only explain it this way, this harrowing passage between the bliss of the dream, in her arms, and the agony of the empty bed, the mental sutures stretching, reviving the cellular memory of the broken heart. Enough now. Ten years since she had left his life, since he had pierced the purulent wound, emptying his heart from that long stream of pus and poison. And yet, the dreams of her, of them, kept stabbing him like a conjuration of traitors. He had tried to drown it in the ballet of double-decker buses, in the metronome of legs on the sidewalks, in the voices that lived only in his phone; but the chill remained under his skin, like a wandering, teasing bruise.

Until the A-frame sign blocked his path. “Dream control. Free entry.” A dry, imprecise complement to a door opening onto a space plunged in twilight, without a welcoming face. In a university town, this could foreshadow all sorts of things, from an undergraduate happening to some cult proselytism. And yet, it sounded like a doctor’s response to an ailment. His own. He had swallowed some riskier medications.

When he buried his head in his pillow that night, he remembered the words of the old woman with ashen hair. “You can enter someone else’s dreams, to escape your own. Tourist, participant, the choice is yours.” He closed his eyes, brushing aside any feeling of ridicule, and focused on the steps of the method. And above all, on those girls he had met last week at work. The hot Italian twins.

Darkness behind his eyelids, absurd phrases colliding in the background of his mind, a blur vanished, and he found himself standing in an unfamiliar room. Impersonal. Hotel. On the bed, the two young women slept, their breaths caressing each other’s identical faces. He had not expected this, but he approached them. They did not wake, and he grew bolder, caressing their bare, warm skin, lying down between them. Lost in their sleep, they welcomed him docilely, moaning indolently; illusion of permission to play the incubus. Deep in his fantasy, he almost missed the creak of the door.

Freezing, he heard footsteps sinking into the cheap carpet. Heavy. With something being dragged. A blade whistling across rough fibers. He did not like that, and leaped towards a half-open wardrobe. Just in time to see a large, dark figure enter, and the flash of an axe in the glow of the security light. Soon, all that remained of his twins was a heap of minced meat, clots, and pools of congealed blood. When the killer turned his masked face toward the wardrobe, he gained the certainty he was not in the girls’ dream. As he searched in vain for any trace of the old woman’s voice that would guide him out of that nightmare, the bloodied axe rose again.