Onirobiont, story by Víctor Parra Avellaneda at Spillwords.com

Onirobiont

Onirobiont

written by: Víctor Parra Avellaneda

 

To Mario Bellatin

 

“I don’t remember when the last time was I dreamt,” the patient explains to the doctor, his voice weary. He holds in his hands the notebook where he meticulously records every detail of their conversation.

On the margins of one of the pages, he begins to sketch a pair of fish amidst the freshly written words. The strokes are slow and sometimes marred by the nervous tremor of his hand, but finally, after a few seconds, the ink takes on the desired form of the marine creatures.

All in an effort not to forget.

After completing the drawing, his reddened eyes gaze across at the doctor, who attentively reviews the medical results from her desk. Her expression is notably serious, her gaze shifting intermittently between him and the stack of papers before her.

“Even though I sleep, I feel like I never rest,” he adds, reviewing the symptoms he experienced in the past days, carefully noted among his records:

“I’m exhausted all the time.
My head hurts a lot.
I feel like my mind is swollen.
I’m starting to hear sounds that shouldn’t be there.
My vision is starting to blur.
I forget what people say within minutes.
My sense of time has shattered…”

The doctor, after listening to the patient, takes a deep breath and extends the medical records towards him.

Upon receiving them, the patient only sees the printed image of a dark brain accompanied by a series of tables and numbers that mean nothing to him.

What exactly is he observing? What information hides behind all those numbers, columns, and lines that, to his eyes, seem randomly distributed and devoid of any sense? Under different circumstances, he might comprehend something as simple as this, the patient thinks, but now everything is unreadable.

He simply doesn’t know. He stares at the sheet, the dark dots and blank spaces, the scientific jargon written in an incomprehensible alphanumeric code.

Before him lies a true enigma.

As if sensing his perplexity, the doctor decides to explain in detail what it all means.

“The image is a tomography of your onirobiont,” the doctor explains. “In a healthy brain, there would be a blue glow in the image.”

The patient, as on previous occasions, tries to focus when spoken to, but easily loses concentration. The sound of the doctor’s words sometimes morphs into an indecipherable noise, and he feels like he’s sinking beneath a deep ocean. The doctor’s voice sounds metallic, with a strange echo that distorts the meaning of what she’s saying.

He must exert great effort to grasp the words in this distorted atmosphere engulfing his mind.

Noticing his absentmindedness, the doctor repeats what she had said a few moments ago. This time, she takes the patient’s notebook and with her pen, she meticulously writes the sentence in ornate script. Then, the patient picks up the notebook and reads what’s written.

He reads the words. At first, the letters are just strange shapes. What are those things supposed to be? There’s something in them, a message, a code, yes, but his mind barely comprehends how such angles, curves, and dots in the characters hold a message for him.

Slowly and not without some intense headache that traverses the right half of his head, the patient, placing his index finger on the letters, reads each word aloud. Upon finishing, he repeats the process five times, until the sentence written by the doctor resonates in his mind in such a way that it becomes the only sound reigning in his head.

Finally, after struggling with his dwindling concentration, he manages to assimilate the message.

“I think I understand what you’re saying,” the patient responds. His speech is very slow, as even speaking has become a very difficult task. “But, if that’s the case, why is there nothing in the image? I only see what seems to be my brain, don’t I? Just a brain and nothing more.”

The doctor nods.

“There’s no blue glow because we didn’t find any onirobiont within you.”

After waiting for a long time while the patient processed what the doctor had told him, he looked around and continued speaking.

“How? You didn’t find it? But the test, and all the chemicals they made me take…”

“The chemicals are designed to bind to the chemical structures of the onirobiont. Like a dart hitting its target. We can see where that dart has struck and measure that information. When we do the tomography, the chemicals will make it visible to the scanner. But, since there isn’t any in your brain, nothing showed up on the tomography. No glow, no color. Nothing. This explains why you haven’t been able to dream for several months. You can’t because the responsible mechanism no longer exists in your brain.”

Meanwhile, the patient quickly writes down what the doctor just told him, doing so carefully. The handwriting is large and at times takes on disproportionate curves, giving the words an asymmetrical appearance. The pen moves wearily. The patient’s breathing is labored, inhaling, and exhaling with difficulty as he writes in a hunched position. While doing so, he murmurs what he writes, as if not to forget what he’s doing. The doctor simply watches him from her desk.

“Look,” the doctor says, handing over another tomography where the blue glow is present, like a celestial glow over the image. “This you see here is the image of a healthy dreamer’s brain.”

The patient stops writing and receives the tomography sheets on his notebook. He looks at the image very carefully. Amidst all the array of strange shapes and contrasts, he distinguishes a blue glow in the tomography.

“And that glowing, like an aurora borealis, is the onirobiont, right? It’s the onirobiont of a person who can dream,” he says, pointing with the pen to the blue glows in the tomography region.

“Yes, that’s correct,” the doctor replies.

The patient stares at the image for a long time. He shifts his gaze to the sheets containing his own clinical examination to compare, then back to the image of the healthy patient.

The doctor briefly observes her patient’s scribbled notebook, then returns her gaze.

“When we performed the onirometry, we couldn’t find anything. When there’s a deterioration in the stability of the onirobiont, this happens. Clinical studies show these kinds of results—diffuse dark spots, or simply a void—that provide enough information for us to understand that the machinery responsible for generating dreams has degraded and detached from the nervous system,” she adds.

The patient’s hands tremble. There’s astonishment and evident confusion in his gaze. He furrows his brow, and his dry lips twist into a grimace of confusion.

He looks at the doctor, then down at the desk, the ceiling, and around him.

Once again, he’s absent for a few seconds, before returning to himself.

“I don’t understand. There’s no blue, no diffuse spots here. There’s nothing, just darkness…” stammers the patient, shaking his head as he looks at the images. He can’t believe his mind boils down to a clinical sheet.

“All of this is because your onirobiont degraded. It’s the reason why you can’t dream or remember well anymore. The onirobiont is like a second memory, parallel to the central nervous system. When the dream genes are lost, this second memory is lost too,” she says.

“And what causes all of this? Why can’t I dream? What happened to me that didn’t happen to others?” says the patient, his voice breaking.
The doctor remains silent for a few seconds, then looks back at her patient.
“We still don’t know for sure,” she tells him. “Several things are suspected. Some doctors believe that microplastics in the environment affect neuron communication and kill the onirobiont. Others lean towards the idea of it being a genetic disease that kills dreams.”

“Dream disease? Could it be a genetic disease? Are you saying something like cancer?” the patient says.

He hastily writes the word ‘CANCER’ on the notebook pages, followed by the word, sketching circular scribbles representing a group of cells reproducing uncontrollably.

“Cancer, cancer, cancer, a cancer of dreams…” whispers the patient, clutching his head with his hands. He looks at his notebook, then around him, and again his gaze returns to the doctor.

“Something like that, yes,” she responds. “But, I must emphasize again, we’re not certain what it is. There are many possible causes, but we have nothing confirmed. The truth is, you’re not the only person with this ailment. Every day, more and more people stop dreaming, and their minds collapse,” confesses the doctor.

The patient rubs his eyelids with his fingers, then closes his eyes, breathing deeply while his mouth quivers with a brief spasm. When he opens his eyes, they are reddened, and timid tears peek through. Occasionally, the doctor’s face distorts before him, a kind of diffuse halo surrounds her features, making them indistinguishable in detail. This has also happened with most of the things he observes in the world. Sounds and things he sees distort because of the time he has spent unable to dream.

He breathes again, now more forcefully, closing his eyes again and pressing his lips tightly.

“I know it’s very hard to assimilate,” she says, trying to calm him, while her hands move slightly in the air softly between each sentence. “There are many treatment alternatives to choose from. Typically, patients are induced to sleep with sedatives, but the problem hasn’t really been solved. You’ve undergone this treatment where you can sleep but not dream. What we doctors want is to find a way to restore the brain’s ability to dream. Currently, an experimental therapy has been approved, which involves transplanting the onirobiont from a cadaveric donor. A dream transplant if you will. But it’s more complex than it sounds.”

The doctor’s words become diffuse and strange again. The only thing he can understand from the plethora of sentences and noises is the general idea of a transplant.

“Trans…plant…t; dream transplant…” the patient repeats, writing in his notebook with large, forceful letters on the paper. “A dead person is needed…” the patient murmurs, repeating the phrase over and over, entranced, trying to understand its implications. “You can’t take something out of the brain without opening someone’s head, and if that’s the second memory as you say, then they have to be dead, isn’t that right?”

The feeling of not being in his own body is normal in the patient’s current state. The words he speaks seem to him like they’re uttered by someone who isn’t him, or some entity playing his role, as in a play he’s watching from the seats of a solitary theater. While speaking, he knows he’s speaking, but at the same time, he can’t believe or give credence to the words he pronounces, just like the movements of his body.

He writes next to the rest of the main ideas of the conversation, the following, in uppercase letters, as if wanting to scream and not forget anything:

DREAM TRANSPLANT WITH THE BRAINS OF DEAD PEOPLE.

Swallows saliva and takes a deep breath.

“Yes, what you’re saying makes sense. A corpse is indeed necessary for the transplant. To be honest, we haven’t heard of any cases of curing this disease. I can’t lie to you. Everyone dies within a few years. But there’s no harm in trying this new therapy.
Perhaps this could be the solution. Perhaps not.”

The doctor falls silent, pondering what she’s going to say next.

“Recently, it has been experimented on rats. The results are promising,” she says after the brief pause.

“On rats?”

“Yes. Rats that cannot dream start dreaming again.”

“But, rats? Isn’t this a human-exclusive disease?”

“It is.”

“Then how on earth did they rob rats of their sleep?”

“Their dreaming ability is artificially destroyed. Through genetic engineering and toxic substances. Then healthy rats are taken, sacrificed, their brains are removed, and the onirobionte is transferred to the sick rats. After the procedure, they start dreaming again,” she explains.

“And the next step is to do this on humans…” he says.

She nods.

“It’s logical,” she responds.

“I understand, I understand,” he murmurs. “But, in any transplant, there’s a risk of rejection, of an adverse reaction,” the patient says.

“The only adverse reaction is not being able to dream,” the doctor interrupts. “When the nervous system of rodents rejects the onirobionte, the body simply degrades it with no further effects. We trust that the transplant in humans will be effective. If it’s rejected, we’ll know because you won’t dream. You’ll be just like before.”

“I don’t know which is worse,” he replies.

After saying this, a solid silence forms between them. He feels that silence, sharp, has turned into something like a fluid, perhaps the violent gusts of waves from an invisible ocean that have flooded the doctor’s office. Within these strange sensations for his body and his sanity, he feels like they’re both drowning in that invisible sea of silence.

The patient looks at his notebook, considering the situation for a long time. Since losing the ability to dream, he has perceived sounds distorted, they disturb him, confuse him, and he forgets things too easily, to the point that he must write everything down, as if his memory no longer functions. In part, that’s it, his second memory has ceased to exist. He knows it’s not normal, that these are accumulating sequelae like a snowball preceding an avalanche. He knows perfectly well that there will come a point where such an avalanche will end his life. He turns the pages of his notebook, where there are drawings of fish because, according to the words accompanying the illustrations, he likes fish. Seeing the illustrations brings him some calm. Perhaps that’s why he likes fish, for the calm they bring him every time he sees them.
He finds a text from two weeks ago where it’s written that the brain needs to dream because otherwise it collapses. It’s such an obvious truth that it goes unnoticed until one has lost that truth in one’s life and suffers the effects of its absence.
There are more drawings of fish swimming alongside the notes, while small bubbles emerge from their mouths, transforming into water planets.

“It seems I have no choice,” says the patient, after the silence.

“That’s it, or wait for your brain to gradually disintegrate and there’s nothing left,” says the doctor. “That’s what happens in all cases.”

“Yes, yes,” the patient replies quietly, with a lost gaze. “I have felt my mind crumbling every passing day. Sometimes I only know because I’ve written it down. Other times the memory appears fuzzy.”

He takes a deep breath.

“Fine,” says the patient, resigned. “The situation has brought us here. It’s inevitable.”

The patient turns his gaze to the pages of the notebook. He finds the sentence where it says that he will be able to dream again with the brains of dead people. He reads it several times and repeats its content quietly, as if trying to grasp the meaning of that sentence through repetition. However, he feels that everything is escaping him fleetingly and that the written words are trying to transform into something else. Finally, despite the instability he feels growing within his concentration abilities, he manages to understand.

“The transplant, from dead people. Dead people…”

“Dead people,” says the doctor. “That’s basically it. Like organ transplants. It’s something very similar. Except here, it’s a creature that produces dream substances. It’s not a transplant of an organ, but of an organism from its natural habitat to another. Although in essence, both things involve waiting for the new tenant to adapt to its new place,” explains the doctor, watching the patient read the notebook. The patient sometimes looks, then returns his gaze to what’s written and repeats this several times. It seems he grasps the meaning of the message, but the doctor internally doubts it. She knows that without the ability to dream, the mind gradually undergoes a process where it dissolves until all primary functions cease, and the person becomes a living dead.

“With what little I can understand, I must accept. There’s no other option,” says the patient after hesitating for a while. “I accept the proposal.”

After the interview with the doctor, the patient is taken to a special ward inhabited by other patients like him, people unable to dream.

Like the rest of the patients, he is subjected to strict dietary regimes, undergoes countless medical tests, X-rays, neurological analyses, interviews, and genetic studies. He notes down what he can remember in his notebook, although most of the ideas written appear disjointed at first glance. What predominates on paper are drawings of fish in the white spaces of the notebook.

Nurses, doctors, and their endless clinical questions come and go around him, which the patient answers with the help of his notes; although it’s the doctor who answers for him. It seems that, in reality, they ask questions to see the advanced state of his illness and not to obtain information from him, information that the doctor provides.
Even so, the patient writes down all the conversations with the nurses, all the things he has eaten, the medications he has taken, and the times he has used the bathroom.
His stay in the hospital lasts for eight weeks, during which he has conversations with some of his neighbors, other patients like him, in different stages of the disease. Some have just been admitted and do not show as severe a deterioration as his; however, there are other people who have simply lost the ability to speak and spend all day lying on their backs, staring into nothingness, with bald and reddened eyes. Others are subjected to sedative cocktails to plunge them into an indefinite coma. Some of them only respond to stimuli with the most basic reflexes of their bodies, but others seem like vegetables, they don’t respond to anything, and it seems to all appearances that they are dead.

This makes a great impression on him, to the point of seeing himself in the place of his more severe companions. Sometimes, when his mind seems to be traveling from his body to another, he ends up seeing himself locked in his neighbor until he returns to sanity after the brief trance that seems like a horrific vision to him.

The lack of sleep and the effect of the sedatives that force him to sleep knock him out for most of the day. The light hurts his eyes, the food tastes bland despite having salty, spicy, or sweet ingredients; the contact with his tongue and stomach causes heartburn and even nausea, turning his rest into a tedious experience. The people moving around him in the daily tasks of the hospital are nothing but strange, diffuse forms, like shadows or blurry specters. To try to calm himself, he takes the sheet of his bed or the fabric of his clothes and runs his fingertips over them to feel their texture. He tries to focus solely on that, on the texture, the shape, the volume, and the smells of something specific. At times, this works to keep his mind from wandering too much and returning the bothersome and distressing sensation of seeing everything from the outside.

During the intervals where he feels a little calmer and has regained a sense of reality, he exchanges some words with the other patients nearby.

One of his companions, with whom he has spoken in the last week, is a forty-year-old man who seems quite calm despite the poor state of his body. He has pronounced dark circles, as if they were two craters in his eyes; his hair seems greasy and brittle, and his skin sometimes appears yellowish and other times completely pale like cardboard, with folds and numerous wrinkles that draw patterns more reminiscent of the erosion of an ancient mountain.

“How did you start with the disease?” his companion asks him. “I realized a week and a half ago; I went to sleep and when I woke up, I felt like I hadn’t rested at all. I thought it was just normal insomnia. I wish it had been that. Two more weeks passed without being able to dream, and everything started to mix up, and there came a point where it was dangerous for me to do simple tasks like going to work. If I told you what happened to me that day…” he says.

The patient looks at him with interest, trying to pay attention to what he was saying. Perhaps talking to someone else who was in his situation would allow him to understand the situation better, or at least cope with it.

“Well, to make a long story short, I’ll say that I started seeing people and cars, and I wondered what those things were; my eyes saw them but my brain didn’t know what my eyes were seeing, I don’t know if I’m making myself clear,” his companion tells him. “So I panicked, ran scared through the street, and I don’t know how I ended up at one of the metro stations asking people what day it was and who I was. I even asked one of the metro drivers if he could take me home. Until a policeman came, took out my wallet, and showed me my voter ID and asked if it was me. Then I looked at the photo and thought, ‘Wow, that guy looks a lot like me!’ then I realized that indeed, it was me.”
The patient listens to his companion, and as his words reach his ears, he searches through his notebook for notes from the first pages, finding paragraphs that recount similar events, months ago:

TODAY I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT MY NAME WAS OR WHAT DAY IT WAS. I LOOKED AT THE CLOCK AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT THOSE THINGS WRITTEN ON IT ARE, THEY LOOK LIKE LETTERS BUT THEY’RE NOT LETTERS. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THOSE LONG THINGS TURNING TO THE RIGHT ARE FOR. THERE’S ANOTHER THING JUST LIKE IT THAT MAKES A CLICKING NOISE AFTER A SHORT TIME. I COUNTED THE TIMES IT MAKES THAT SOUND PER ROTATION AND IT’S SIXTY. I TRIED TO SPEAK TO A MAN ON THE BUS AND I FORGOT WHAT LANGUAGE I SPEAK. I WANTED TO ASK HIM WHERE WE WERE, BUT HE JUST LOOKED AT ME STRANGELY. TRUTHFULLY, I DON’T REMEMBER IF I ACTUALLY SPOKE TO HIM OR IMAGINED IT. THE THINGS I REMEMBER DOING TODAY TURN OUT TO BE THINGS I DID TWO WEEKS AGO…

The patient shows his notes to his companion, who nods in agreement.

“Ah, of course! I experienced the same thing. Not just with numbers, but with letters too. When I read the newspaper or a book, I didn’t know what those small black things were, like tiny ants. Suddenly, it occurred to me that I was reading a new language, like Chinese. There are moments of calm, like now, and then there are sudden ones that come when you least expect it, and that’s when I can’t understand the things I say, or distinguish one person from another. It’s exhausting. You’re always tired even if you sleep, but sleeping is useless if the mind doesn’t rest. The mind without dreams never rests. It burns out, like a computer that’s never been turned off. It works, yes, but it works poorly, until it catches fire from being on and on like that.”

“What have they told you about the illness?” the patient asks his companion.

“Well, the same as you. That there’s a new treatment they want to try on us,” he says, flipping through the patient’s notebook. “You draw some very nice fish,” he says, pointing to one of the drawings in the notebook. “I can’t remember when I heard that dreams originated in the sea, did you know? I remembered because of the fish. Fish are from the sea. Although some are from rivers, right? There are fish that live in seas and rivers, streams and lakes. And there are also people who have fish living in small fish tanks. But anyway, as I was saying, I can’t remember who told me that dreams originated in the sea.”

“In the sea?” the patient asks, surprised.

“Yes, in the sea. It seems like all things emerged from the sea,” his companion replies.

“How is that?” the patient asks, while writing in the notebook:

DREAMS COME FROM THE SEA

“Let’s see, how was it?” his companion stutters, but even though it seems like he has the answer, he falls silent for two minutes without either of them noticing that time has passed. His companion simply blanks out, and upon regaining his senses, he says, “Oh, excuse me! The truth is, I don’t remember anymore. I’m starting to forget the things people tell me. That was, I don’t know, maybe a week ago, or a month, or… Oh, I can’t remember when they told me! My doctor explained it to me, but I don’t know when. I think I need to do the same as you and write down all conversations in a notebook, so I won’t forget,” his companion says. “A notebook is a good idea in these circumstances. One can’t trust their mind anymore.”

“It’s very necessary, believe me,” the patient replies.

“I’ll ask my doctor about dreams and the sea, I’ll write it down and tell you. It’s something I promise to do,” his companion says.

“Well, maybe I’ll forget about it, and you will too,” the patient responds, laughing. “That way, we’ll have several forgotten tasks and not even realize it.”

Both of them laugh at the joke.

***

Hours later, the doctor arrives accompanied by other medical staff. They glance at the patient while flipping through medical notes. During the visit, the doctor explains the details of the procedure to which he will be subjected. She explains that the brain of the deceased donor will undergo a series of chemical processes to separate the onirobiont from the neurons. As they explain the procedure, the patient writes, scribbles, and crudely draws a person being injected in the head with the luminous piece of brain from a cadaver.

OPEN THE SKULL.
INJECT THE STUFF OF DREAMS.
WAIT…
6 DAYS MINIMUM (?), he writes in the notebook, alongside the drawings of the transplant procedure.

The patient agrees to the operation, and after countless procedures that include signing bioethical documents, authorizations, liability waivers, and other legal processes, the day of the operation finally arrives.

When the doctors come to take him to the operating room, his companion wishes him luck. Additionally, he realizes that he had brought a notebook and a pen that he didn’t have before. He smiles.

“Look, friend! I have a notebook now, so I won’t forget the story of dreams and the sea! Good luck! When you come back from the operation, you’ll know all about dreams and you can remember everything for me!” his companion says as he is escorted away by the doctors down the hall.

He arrives at an operating room where he is sedated with a cocktail of anesthesia and other unknown substances to him.

“Friend!” his companion says upon seeing him again one day in the common room. “How has everything gone? Have you dreamed yet? Are you cured?”

The patient doesn’t recognize his companion. He furrows his brow, betraying his confusion. Stabs of pain in his head become present, traveling from his eyes to his teeth.

He searches for some familiar feature in his interlocutor’s face.

“In your notebook,” his companion says. “Look in your notebook,” he insists.
So he searches among the pages of his notebook and finds written that the person speaking to him is his companion.

“I forgot, sorry,” he says, babbling, still under the effects of the doping. “I am alive, that’s for sure. But the doctors understand that my body has rejected the onirobiont, so they want to try another donor.”

“Another donor?” his companion asks. “Meaning they will perform another operation, right?”

“Yes, that’s correct…”
“And what do you think about it? From what I understand, it’s a complicated procedure. They have to open the skull and who knows what other intricate things.”

“I’m going to go through with it,” the patient replies.

His companion looks at him with surprise.

“Well, another operation like that must be exhausting. But everything is for the sake of dreaming again,” his companion says. “Without dreams, one can only aspire to die.”
The patient flips through the notebook and alongside the description of his companion and the topics they discussed weeks ago, he finds mention of dreams and the sea. When he reminds his companion of the topic, he doesn’t seem to recognize what he’s talking about. Until he searches his own notebook and realizes he has forgotten to ask his doctor about the origin of dreams.

“I promise I’ll ask my doctor the next time I see him. I promise. I’ve forgotten again. You know how it is, days pass and memory get worse each time,” his companion tells him.

After several months of studies and waiting for a new cadaveric donor, the patient enters the same operating room again, where they open his skull once more, inject the new onirobiont, and monitor his brainwaves without any result.

The doctors, engulfed in frustration, don’t understand why everything has been a failure. They endlessly discuss all the variables involved, but no one can find a resolution to the problem, leaving the matter suspended in absolute mystery.

Could it be that transferring dreams from person to person is not possible? But how? If it’s possible among animals. Perhaps, the doctors reason, the human body’s dream system has a much more complicated mechanism to integrate into the nervous system. It’s not just about placing the onirobiont in a new brain, but even the slightest variation in each person’s brain determines whether there is acceptance or total rejection. It happened with the first organ transplants; sometimes they were successful, and other times they ended with the organ destroyed by the immune system. Under these reasonings, some doctors, amid discussions, theories, and frustrations, even begin to think that dreams have an immune system. That’s why, they reason, even when a person who is capable of dreaming becomes seriously ill, they develop nightmares. Perhaps even dreams have their fight against infectious diseases.

But it all remains conjecture, ideas about the possible evolution in which dreams are integrated into different taxa of the animal kingdom and what subtle but important differences exist in each species.

It all remains just talk. What matters now is that all those ideas serve for something practical and immediate.

The doctors contact biologists, virologists, veterinarians, infectologists, neurologists, and anyone who knows about evolution, life, and dreams.

Some say that the human body has a very high level of complexity, and that results in a paradox when determining that the exchange of parts between one body and another is riskier. On the other hand, if it’s done with a species with a much lower level of complexity, the risk could be lower. The immune system of reptiles or fish is simpler than humans; there isn’t the overwhelmingly large number of factors that, no matter how small they are, result in the rejection of an organ and its dramatic destruction. Some of these scientists propose that the further back you go in the evolutionary line, you’ll find an animal that would be an ideal candidate to transplant its dreams to humans. Just as some doctors already used tilapia skin to treat burns in people, being much better than using skin grafts, perhaps using the onirobiont from a species evolutionarily further from humans could be the solution.

The point is that all of this was theory, hypotheses, and conjectures. All those ideas had to be tested to see if they worked and didn’t end in tragedy.
Here and there, in all the cities and countries where the disease has spread uncontrollably, thousands of scientific articles are published like hotcakes. Due to the urgency, some of this research has not been properly reviewed, so there are errors that are discovered once the results are attempted to be replicated.

Scientists read as much as they can, trying to connect the dots, although, amidst so much information, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to discern which data are relevant and valid.

Which research to believe in?

It’s true that the urgency of the situation has given priority to investigating the transplant of dreams and its possible solutions, but amid so many discussions, among so many works, everything becomes blurred, incomprehensible.

Exhaustion also affects scientists, doctors, everyone. On television and social media, nothing is talked about other than the dream disease. For the first time, scientific terms like symbiosis, holobiont, onirobiont, onirometries, and other words become common usage, although it’s not well understood what each concept means.

How could the disease have arisen? Nobody knows; there are only conjectures.

It could have been the contamination of microplastics, whose tiny particles accumulated over generations in humans until they destroyed the onirobiont’s support and intoxicated the brain. Perhaps it could also have been a new type of virus that infects the onirobiont, killing it and causing the absence of sleep.

Or maybe it was the sun and its radiation; the intake of such and such food…

Everything falls into the unknown. Especially when studying other non-human animals and finding that they do dream.

Some think, distressed, that humans might not be the first of many animals to lose sleep. In that case, how long would it be until dreams disappeared from the entire tree of life?

But, the answer to these questions is just one of many unknowns. Perhaps this would be something transitory, perhaps it would be something exclusive to humans and trigger their extinction. Or perhaps none of these things.

To reach an answer to something so complex would require not years, but decades of research, trial and error, to solve the puzzle.

In a period of a few months, it was impossible to solve so many empty fields of knowledge. The only thing within reach is not to find the origin, causes, and evolutionary implications in humans of the loss of sleep, but how to dream again.
First, an ideal donor that the human nervous system would not reject must be found.
Then the other conjectures could be investigated, if it’s not too late by the time that moment comes.

***

After a few confusing weeks, the doctor tells the patient about a new type of transplant.

“In laboratories around the world, it became clear that there was an organism that could be an excellent candidate for transferring dreams to humans,” she explains.
The patient reviews his notes, finds the page where he mentions his companion and the topic of dreams and the sea.

“Fishes, you say?” the patient asks the doctor while pointing to the page in his notebook.

She nods and approaches to read.

“Ah, I see!” she says. “Yes. Dreams likely originated in the sea.”

“And how do they know that? How did they come to know that?” the patient asks.

“Well,” the doctor says, “the onirobiont has a genome very different from that of humans, so it’s possible to trace in which animals it has been. Thus, it was discovered that the genome of dreams is present in all animals with a nervous system. You know, the first animals to exist inhabited the seas.”

“Then,” the patient interrupts, “the first to dream did so in the sea, right? Like the fish.”

“That’s correct.”

“And that’s why they’re going to open a fish’s head for you?” the patient asks the doctor.

“In fact, yes,” she says. “It has to do with that. Although in reality, the animals with the oldest nervous system are hydras, some invertebrates. But it’s fish whose sleep system has more similarity with all vertebrates. It’s neither too simple nor too complex. It’s in the middle, ideal for experimenting.”

“Really?” exclaims the patient, surprised.

“Yes,” the doctor tells him.

“And about dreams, I have a doubt. How did they originate? Were those hydras you mentioned the first to dream?”

“The hydras? No. They appeared long after the first creature that dreamed. In fact, initially, there were no creatures with the ability to dream.”

“Let me see if I’m understanding. There was no dream? Then, if they couldn’t dream, their brain would burn out like mine, and they would die, right?”

“Something like that,” the doctor replies. “A billion years ago, there were two types of creatures. The first ones had a brain that collapsed due to the overload of stimuli, so it didn’t last more than a couple of weeks, as if it were a machine that is on all the time and burns out. Just as you said about the brain burning out. That’s why sleep is important. The brain recovers when we dream; people feel rested. Not just people, but all animals.”

“What about the second creatures?” the patient asks. “You mentioned there were two types of creatures, but so far, you’ve only mentioned one.”

“Yes, yes, there were two creatures. The second ones were the onirobionts. They were devoured by the first animals, and they defended themselves by intoxicating their brain by generating unreal stimuli in all their neurons, creating something similar to a hallucination that put them to sleep.”

“Hallucinations? That sounds like a drug,” the patient says, jotting down in his notebook what he just heard.

“The mechanism of sleep is very similar to drug intoxication, yes, definitely. There’s a substance, DMT, that is produced during dreams, and DMT itself is a very potent drug.”

“Does that thing, does the onirobiont produce it? Then couldn’t that substance, DMT, be used to cure the disease? Just inject me with DMT, and that’s it, I can dream again.”
“We’ve already tried, and it doesn’t work. We did it in fish, in rats, in hydras, in worms, in birds, and in people. Nothing at all,” the doctor replies. “Dreams are a very difficult process to replicate; it’s not just a substance and that’s it. There are many, many things that we haven’t fully understood. To dream, an onirobiont is obligatorily required.”

“You were telling me about those creatures, the onirobionts, and how they intoxicated the brain of their predators. Did dreams originate like that? Is that why those things live inside the brains of animals?”

“Basically, yes,” the doctor responds. “The predators that initially ate the onirobiont became dependent on the sensory hallucinations they produced, and a symbiotic relationship was established.”

“You say they became dependent, meaning they became addicted to the effects of the onirobiont’s toxins. It’s like chili, which defends itself from being eaten, but humans like its taste and have become fond of eating it.”

“Yes, yes, something like that,” the doctor answers, emitting a slight smile at the mention of chili and how despite defending itself with its spicy taste, it is devoured by humans.

“So. Let me see if I understand. We descend from animals that millions of years ago became addicted to dreams, right? Could it be said that they were addicts, or is that too severe a word?”

“Dependent is the right word,” the doctor replies seriously. “Dreaming isn’t an addiction but a vital necessity, like breathing. Can you imagine if you couldn’t breathe? The same with dreaming. It’s a fundamental process. Well, as I was saying, when the onirobiont integrated into the nervous system, animals began to dream, and their brain found a way to rest, restore itself, become more complex, larger, capture more information without destabilizing, and evolve to the nervous system of modern species.”

“That’s like a parasite, isn’t it? That thing lives inside you.”

“It’s more like a symbiont. Not a parasite. Parasites feed on their host until they kill it. But the onirobiont doesn’t. By evolving inside the brains of animals, the onirobiont no longer had to expose itself to the elements or seek food or be an easy prey to predators. This creature gave animals the gift of dreams and rest. As a result, a beneficial relationship formed between them, where both species depend on each other; if one disappears, the other dies.”

“It’s what’s happening to me. Not being able to dream, not having the onirobiont, kills…” the patient says.

The doctor nods as she watches him write in the notebook and make drawings of fish and some scribbles resembling cobwebs, which she deduced were a crude attempt to draw an onirobiont being engulfed by a prehistoric fish.

“Without the onirobiont, we can’t dream, right?” the patient says. “And without sleep, our brain burns out, collapses, and we die.”

“I see that you’ve grasped the idea very well,” the doctor says, congratulating him on remembering the conversation.

“Without the onirobiont, animals die. Their brains are destroyed,” the patient murmurs to himself. Then he writes those words in the notebook.

“Doctor, do all animals dream?” the patient asks.

“That’s right,” the doctor replies, even though she had just mentioned a moment ago that all animals dream. “All animals do, from hydras, through flies, cockroaches, dragonflies, reptiles, to humans.”

ALL ANIMALS DREAM, writes in his notebook.

“What do animals dream about, doctor?” the patient asks.

“For example, it’s known that cats dream about hunting, birds dream about singing, and fish dream about swimming. All of this is known by studying the brainwaves of these creatures. Humans dream about going to work, watching a movie, going for a walk, seeing someone, or even being in the bathroom. Other dreams are more fantastical,” the doctor explains.

As the patient takes notes on what the doctor tells him, he realizes that all creatures dream about their lives, about situations that could occur while awake.

“In addition to preventing mental collapse through dreams, onirobionts train their hosts for life. It has been like this for billions of years. Dreams are like a reality simulator,” the doctor says.

“A simulator?” the patient asks.

“Yes, a simulator. If it weren’t for the onirobiont and the dreams it produces in the brains of animals, I’m afraid that evolution would have taken very different paths. Perhaps we wouldn’t even exist,” the doctor tells him.

The patient listens, takes notes, and remains silent as he reads through all the notes he has written.

WILL I BE ABLE TO DREAM AGAIN?,

he writes, while drawing a small fish fluttering among this question.
He is mesmerized when he sees the drawing of a fish. He sees its scales, fins, eyes and bubbles coming out of its mouth.

He writes in big letters:

TO DREAM WHAT A FISH DREAMS.
TO DREAM OF THE OCEAN.

Afterward, his gaze drifts away and an omnipresent white forms in his mind.
Absent, once again.

After that lapse, he regains his focus and his gaze turns to the notebook. He reads what he just wrote and reviews it.

“Don’t let me forget, don’t let me forget, don’t let me forget…” he says in a trance, in a low voice.

“Do you know anything?” the doctor interrupts him. “There’s something that might be helpful to you during your stay here.”

The doctor listens to him and observes him attentively. She gets up from her seat and goes to one of the bookshelves in her office and takes two books and hands them to the patient.

He receives them and looks at them perplexed.

On one, he distinguishes on its cover a school of fish.

He reads the title slowly:

FISHES OF THE WORLD

He opens the volume and finds countless photographs of fish of many varietie
The patient feels excited, flipping through page after page and quickly scanning each fish he comes across.

“It’s a book about fish! Fish! I really like fish!” He also looks at the other book.
“That one is about what is known about dreams. It talks in a simpler way about the onirobionte,” the doctor tells him.

Upon opening that book, he also found fish surrounded by a strange blue aura, like a ghostly specter surrounding his head.

“There are fish here too, doctor! More fish!” he says, shouting euphorically.

“I thought you would enjoy flipping through them when you have any doubts. It’s fine to take notes in the notebook, but sometimes one doesn’t understand their own handwriting, and these books have illustrations that you will surely enjoy. So when you have your lapses of absence, you can look at the fish.”

“What do you mean, are you giving me these books to keep on the bed in the room?”
“Yes, yes,” the doctor replies. “They’re for you. Not just for your stay here, but for you to keep. They’re a gift from me.”

“Really, doctor? Fish! A book with fish! Many fish, doctor, there are many fish here!” he says, excitedly.

For a moment, amidst that gloomy setting, the patient could forget, for a moment, the ghost of his illness.

“Don’t thank me, please,” she says. “Given everything you’re going through, something like this will do you good,” the doctor adds. “I was also thinking about an outing that will surely do you a lot of good.”

“An outing?” the patient responds. He seems anxious and excited at the same time. Many things have happened in a short time, so the idea of an outing seems intriguing to him. “An outing for what?”

“You like fish, and looking at them is really relaxing. So I’ve planned a visit to the city aquarium, before the surgery and all the procedures that follow. Visiting the aquarium, I believe, will be beneficial.”

The patient doesn’t respond. He seems incredulous at the doctor’s statement.

“Aquarium?!” the patient responds, excited. “It means I’ll see fish… I’m going to see fish!”

He is lying on his bed. Around him, everything remains equally monotonous. Doctors bring their instruments, and nurses conduct daily check-ups on all patients.

“Friend,” says the voice of his companion from the other side of the bed.

He returns to the notes from weeks ago to remember that this individual is his companion and that they have had several conversations.

He notices that his companion also has a notebook like his, where he has written down several things.

“We know each other, don’t we?” his companion says to him. “From what I see in my notes, some time has passed since we met. I think my memory is starting to fail more and more,” his companion says, while reading the notebook.

“Yes,” he replies. “We’ve known each other for a while.”

At that moment, the patient takes the sketches of the conversation he had with the doctor where she explained the origin of dreams and the sea.

He mentions this to his companion, who responds with surprise, as he has again forgotten to ask his doctor about the history of dreams.

“I always forget to ask!” his companion tells him. “He’s not like your doctor who allows me to jot things down calmly. He just lectures me on medical matters and doesn’t give me time to jot down everything he says. And then when I want to search my notes, he hits me with another question, and I forget what I was looking for,” his companion explains.

“Well, you won’t have to rely on your memories when your doctor comes; mine has told me the complete story of the origin of dreams and even gave me this!” he tells his companion, showing him the books the doctor gave him.

“Wow, those are two very nice books! That one has a beautiful school of fish on the cover, and the other has a fish with something like, I don’t know! What’s that?”

“That’s a fish and its onirobiont. The doctor gave me this book because it talks about the history of dreams and the onirobiont. I don’t have to jot down everything anymore. Now I can open the book, and since it has fish pictures, it makes me feel good, and I also learn about dreams in their very distant beginnings.”

“I’d like to hear about its origin, if I’m honest. I think I’ll never remember to ask my doctor,” he says, laughing.

Thus, the patient told his companion the story of dreams and the sea. He read the words from the dream history book, and his companion, excited by the information, began jotting down the main key ideas of the story in his notebook…

“No, stop taking notes,” the patient tells his companion. “Take the book,” he says.
“But, it’s your book, what if I forget to return it?”

“You write down that I gave it to you. And besides, I want it to be our book. From both of us. So we can read about the onirobionte whenever we want.”

“Share the book?”

“Yes, why not? When you read the dream one, I’ll read the fish one, and when you read the fish one, I’ll have the dream one. Besides, don’t you think all this is boring? Beds, sheets, medicines, sedatives. A bit of color and sea, even if printed, won’t hurt.”

“Wow, that’s really a good idea!” his companion tells him.

The patient hands the book to his companion.

“Now it’s your turn to continue.”

So his companion continued reading about dreams and their origin billions of years ago in the prehistoric sea.

“It’s an incredible story!” he says. “Now that I have it here in the book, we’ll never forget it,” he adds. “I hope they can find a cure for this,” he says.

“That’s why they want to do it now with fish,” the patient tells his companion, “like the one on the cover. That blue thing that looks like a bright aurora is the onirobionte of the fish living in their brain. They want to transfer that thing from fish to humans.”

“From fish? Oh, I see now! Since fish are from the sea and there have been fish since the beginning of time, they must be the animals that have lived with dream creatures for the most years,” his companion reflects. “It makes a lot of sense. The only downside, for me, is that poor fish will have their dreaming ability taken away and they’ll be as crazy as you and me,” he adds. “It’s really quite desolate. Taking dreams away from fish to give them to humanity. Now I wonder, who will give the dreams back to the fish?”

Both nodded in silence as they wrote down the answers to their conversation in their notebooks.

“Do you think this treatment will work, that fish will be our salvation?” he asks his companion.

“No one knows that,” his companion tells him. “Look at what happened with the rats. It worked, indeed, in rats, but not in humans. Now this, it’s a matter of luck, I think.”

“It’s something we’ll find out soon, when it’s our turn,” he tells his companion.

“I hope it works. Otherwise, I’ll have to use another notebook; mine is already filling up. Imagine, using two notebooks to remember what we talked about a couple of days ago; I might mistake the notebook and forget about you and everything else, or worse, I might forget that I have more notebooks!” his companion says, laughing.

“I forgot to mention something,” the patient interrupts, laughing.

“That you forgot to tell me something? Well, that’s no surprise around here, to be honest,” his companion responds, teasingly.

The patient had his eyes on one of his pages from the day he talked to the doctor and gave him the books about the fish.

“My doctor has organized a visit to the aquarium,” the patient tells his companion.
“To the aquarium!” his companion exclaims. “That’s really good news. Who will go? Just you?”

“I hadn’t thought about that. I imagine that patients who are unconscious, for obvious reasons, won’t be able to go,” he responds.

“I imagine so too. It’s just a matter of waiting for the day to come and see what happens,” his companion tells him.

“I’ll bring my notebook; I’d like to draw some of the creatures there,” the patient says.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been to an aquarium. Well, saying that is ambiguous, but I know what an aquarium is and what it houses. But I know I haven’t been there in a long time. I don’t remember when was the last time. I’ve forgotten,” he laughs. “But it’s definitely one of those places I’d like to visit before my mind turns into a piece of charred meat.”

“Me too,” the patient responds to his companion. “I also don’t remember the last time I went to an aquarium.”

“Well,” his companion says, “now you can write it down in the notebook and not forget it! Especially the drawings!”

***

Among all the creatures swimming in the enormous aquarium tanks, the cat sharks are what have caught his attention the most. They swim calmly, their bodies swaying as the light penetrating the water’s density is reflected in their scales, creating a shimmer akin to metal. The cat sharks are divided into several groups. Some of them swim along the length of the tank, while others rest on the bottom alongside other small creatures floating amid particles of sea sand. The large glass allows all visitors to observe the creatures in great detail. It’s like being in the sea and yet not being there at all.

The visit has lasted several hours, and beside him are the doctor, accompanied by several nurses, a small group of patients whose minds hadn’t turned into blank slates, and their families. The visit has been something like a day of camaraderie, an idea to clear the mind and immerse oneself in other environments.

Meanwhile, he writes down everything he can, while the guide points out the characteristics and peculiarities of each marine species.

He meets the axolotl and its habit of eating its offspring. He also sees some sea anemones enclosed in a small tank of saltwater; their polyp-like shape resembles multicolored grass, and he’s surprised that such a seemingly simple creature possesses strong venom. In another room, there’s a pair of moray eels, huge, displaying their sharp teeth while resting in an improvised setting with rocks and algae reminiscent of their habitat in the depths of the reefs. He also sees some small zebrafish that glow thanks to a genetic modification that makes them shine like lights. Another creature he encounters on the tour is a group of sea sponges. Motionless, colorful, some with amoeboid shapes and others resembling the tubes of a musical instrument. Up to that point, he had assumed that they were a plant or simply a mineral, but his surprise is great when the guide explains to everyone that sponges are animals like him and the fish.

“They are among the oldest animals in the world,” says the guide.

At that moment, the patient approaches the doctor and whispers to her:

“Do sponges dream too?”

“I don’t think so,” she replies. “I highly doubt they dream. They don’t have a brain or nerves; no nervous system.”

Then, in a trance, the patient sees himself reflected in the tank where the sponges are. He feels like them, unable to dream. For a moment, the idea of being a sponge seems strange and somewhat terrifying.

“Do they have organs, like us?” he asks again. “Can they transplant their organs?”
The guide approaches the patient and the doctor, having heard the question and finding it intriguing.

“Interesting,” says the guide. “Really interesting. Although they are animals, sponges don’t have tissues or organs. But there’s something about them that strongly resembles organ transplantation.”

The patient listens and takes notes; sometimes, the feeling of unreality sets in, causing him to lose track of what the guide is saying. The objects around him blur, and the sounds become distorted noises. However, like a kind of wave, the rough waters subside, and upon finishing that trance, he looks at his notebook and realizes that he has noted down some ideas:

IF TWO DIFFERENT SPONGES ARE PUT TOGETHER, THEY KILL EACH OTHER. THE SAME HAPPENS WITH ORGAN REJECTION.

The patient reads those words aloud. The guide listens again to what he says.

“Yes, that’s right!” he exclaims. “That’s why it’s believed that the immune system and sponges actually have a lot in common. Isn’t that curious?”

“Here I wrote that… they annihilate each other when they’re different… right?” the patient asks, stuttering.

“Like a cataclysm,” the guide replies.

The patient falls silent. The doctor notices this and asks him what’s wrong. He confesses that he’s afraid something similar will happen to him as when two different sponges come together.

“That?” the doctor asks.

“Yes! Exactly that! Like the sponges! If my brain rejects the onirobiont, they’ll both be destroyed!” he confesses, sobbing.

The doctor tries to calm him down.

He no longer remembers the next few minutes or what he says. He doesn’t write it down, so he’s unable to know the sequence of events.

What he remembers is that afterward, he’s sitting at the final stop, in front of the large tank of cat sharks.

His gaze is fixed on these animals.

Time there seems to cease to exist.

Watching the large fish traverse the water, silently, becomes his entire existence for a moment.

He looks through the glass, and he can also see his reflection on it.

He thinks about the bodies of those animals, trying to imagine what it would be like to see through their eyes, breathe through their gills, and feel the temperature of the water surrounding their entire body.

He also wonders if the cat sharks at the bottom, the ones resting, might be dreaming.
Would it be from these fish that they would extract the next onirobiont?

The doctor, a few meters away, watches over the patients together with the nurses. The murmuring of the relatives as they speak sounds like white noise to her, and at times she feels calm; no incidents have occurred to worry about.

Meanwhile, she watches the patient. She sees him approach the glass of the enormous tank to touch it and see the cat sharks from all perspectives.

She approaches his notebook, placed on one of the seats, and can see, as it’s open, some of the fish drawings he’s made. Some of them closely resemble what he’s seeing.

Cat sharks all over the page, with him among them, swimming.

Somehow, that was happening.

He’s just inches away from the water, separated only by a massive glass panel, and on the other side, a habitat where dreams still exist.

***

At first light, the patient is taken back to the operating room.

The anesthesia courses through his body, the breathing mask settles over his mouth and nose, the operating room light illuminates his face and eyes; he is observed by the masks and goggles of the neurosurgeons; gloves hold scalpels, the drill emits its mechanical sound, and its bit spins rapidly toward his head.

He can’t see it, but on the other side of the room, contained in a tank with a thick, viscous liquid, lies the onirobiont. The doctors carefully move the tank, with its intense blue glow, whose core is a creature, or rather, a shapeless entity suspended in the liquid. Anyone who saw it might think it was a mantle of energy or perhaps the breath of a nebula contained in the fish tank.

Meanwhile, in the operating room, the patient’s vision fades and his ears grow deaf.
He stops feeling his body and senses himself suspended nowhere.

Then a silent darkness emerges stealthily to engulf him.

After the dimness, a timid point of light emerges, gradually expanding until it floods everything with brightness.

He recognizes that this light is not from the operating room.

He feels something enveloping him and he floats.

On what does he float?

He looks up and discerns the sunlight distorted by the glass of the water and the waves.

There is a deep blue, a completely liquid and dense atmosphere, the thunderous noise of ocean currents crashing against each other and carrying his body along with the tide.
He watches schools of silver fish swim past him and algae swaying gently in all directions.

He is in the ocean, and his view is that of a fish.

For the first time, after so long with that illness, he has returned to dreaming.

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