Between Waking and Dreaming

Lu Mian has lived a double life since the age of twelve.

By day, he is a graduate student in psychology at Linchuan University, no different from any other young man. Every night, when he falls asleep, he returns to a city beneath a pale violet sky. There is an old bookstore, a cat named Moyu, and a few friends he has known for fourteen years. That world has its own timeline, its own joys and sorrows, and it all feels so real that he never wants to wake up.

He thought it was just a dream. Then an app called Morpheus led two hundred million people to start lucid dreaming. Then someone claimed to have killed a person in a dream, and that person really died. Then, in a dream, he met a strange woman who told him

“Your dream isn’t yours. You’ve been in someone else’s dream all along.”

When dreams can be controlled, can you still tell which side is reality? When you make a different choice in a dream, is that “you” still you? When actions in a dream begin to leave traces in reality, who is responsible for what happens there?