Souls Reborn: BEWARE!!!!!

There is a theory that when we dream, we are brought to a world where our dreams and nightmares can manifest. Some even speculate that it is the same world. However, the world we enter has an Astral barrier that prevents our soul from passing through and entering another person's dreams, leaving our physical bodies behind and vulnerable to the Spirits and other supernatural creatures that lurk in this world if the ties to our body are severed we may become lost forever leaving those Supernatural being a vessel to enter Our world. My name is Leo I’m a neuroscientist or at least, I was assigned to a black-budget operation called Project Dreamscape. Officially, we were researching advanced cognitive immersion. Unofficially, we were trespassing into places the mind was never meant to go. The lab wasn’t tucked away in some desert or underground bunker. No, it sat right in the heart of the city a four-story concrete shell of a building wedged between a vegan café and a vape shop. Unremarkable. Deceptively mundane. That was the point. To the outside world, it looked like a medical testing firm. Inside, the walls were lined with soundproofing foam, the lights hummed with sterile indifference, and cameras blinked in every corner. No sunlight. No clocks. Just recycled air and the slow rot of overambitious science. At the center of it all was the Dream Pod a sleek, coffin-like chamber connected to a maze of servers and neural link processors. Its purpose was simple in theory: allow test subjects to enter a controlled dream simulation. We told ourselves we were building therapeutic breakthroughs, but what we were really doing was slicing open the human subconscious and seeing what bled out. Then they brought in Rena Moral. She was a civilian. A college student. Twenty-two, maybe. Too young to be this desperate. She didn’t look like the others we tested—soldiers, patients, hardened cases. She looked... ordinary. Fragile, almost. I first saw her in the waiting room, curled up in a folding chair with a sketchbook on her lap. She was drawing something birds, I think but when I looked closer, I saw they had too many wings. Their eyes were bleeding. We spoke between assessments. She was warm, even funny at times, but there was always this tension in her smile. I asked her why she volunteered. She hesitated. “My mom died last year. Cancer. Left my dad in debt. I just... I needed the money,” she said. It was the kind of answer that should’ve made me feel sorry for her. Instead, it made me afraid because I knew what they were willing to sacrifice for the data. And she didn’t. I tried to warn her, gently at first. She thought I was being overdramatic. “They emailed my professors,” she said. “It’s part of an official partnership. I’m getting extra credit.” Extra credit. For what? Feeding yourself to the void? When Dr. Kavner found out I was speaking out of line, he cornered me in the server room. “You’re done after this run,” he said coldly. “And if you keep talking to her, I’ll make sure you’re blacklisted. Don’t make this your hill to die on.” But what if she died on mine? The test began at 9:13 PM. It was raining outside. Thunder echoed faintly through the building’s thick walls. Rena walked to the pod with hesitant steps. She glanced over her shoulder once at me. I gave her a reassuring nod I didn’t believe in. Inside the pod, she was fitted with electrodes and a breathing mask. Her fingers trembled as the lid sealed shut. The sync initialized. At first, everything was routine. Pulse steady. Brainwaves aligning. Then the waveforms shifted. She began to convulse. “Heart rate spiking 170, now 180!” “EM signature off the charts,” another tech said. Then came the scream. It wasn’t just fear it was primal, guttural, as if something inside her was trying to claw its way out through her throat. The Dreamscape display flashed static. For a second, we saw an image: a hallway, impossibly long, lit only by flickering bulbs. And something moving at the end. Not walking. Crawling. Fast. “Shut it down!” I yelled. Dr. Kavner slammed a button. “No! If we pull her out now, it might come back with her!” “What the hell is it?” I screamed. The screen went black. Rena’s vitals flatlined then spiked again. Whatever she saw, it hadn’t let go. “We isolate the pod,” Kavner barked. “We contain this. Everyone out.” I fought to stay. I begged. But two guards dragged me from the chamber. As they pulled me up the stairwell, I looked back through the observation glass. Her face was visible in the pod eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream. But the thing that chilled me? Her breath had fogged the glass... from outside the mask. If i didn't get back in she would die.