Story classification: Original fiction. This story was created for darkrecord’s Dreams & Premonitions archive and is not presented as personal testimony or a documented event.
Dreaming of someone with my face becomes a clinical mystery when Dr Evelyn Shaw’s patients begin seeing the same woman in their sleep.
Dr Evelyn Shaw first saw the woman in a hotel corridor.
The carpet was wet beneath Evelyn’s bare feet. Identical doors stretched into darkness on both sides. Each bore the number 806.
A woman stood at the far end of the hall.
She wore Evelyn’s navy suit, Evelyn’s silver watch and Evelyn’s face.
Only the smile was unfamiliar.
“You’re late,” the woman said.
“For what?”
“For waking up.”
Every door opened at once.
Evelyn awoke in her own bed with blood beneath her fingernails.
She worked at a sleep clinic in North London, treating parasomnias, recurring nightmares and trauma-related insomnia. She believed dreams were meaningful, but not prophetic. They revealed associations, fears and unresolved memories—not messages from beyond the measurable mind.
The following afternoon, a patient named Daniel Cruz described a new recurring dream.
“I’m in a hotel,” he said. “Every room has the same number.”
Evelyn’s pen stopped.
“Which number?”
“Eight-oh-six.”
Daniel looked toward the observation mirror.
“There’s a woman in the corridor. She looks like you.”
Within two weeks, four more patients reported the same dream.
None had met one another.
Each described the wet carpet, the endless doors and the woman wearing Evelyn’s face.
“She asks me to remember her,” said one.
“She says you stole her life,” said another.
The youngest patient, a nineteen-year-old student named Mina, refused to sleep after seeing the woman.
“She isn’t copying you,” Mina whispered. “You’re copying her.”
Evelyn reviewed their medication, appointment times and contact histories. She checked whether any patient had seen her photograph online. She asked a colleague to examine the cases for accidental suggestion.
There was no obvious connection.
Then Evelyn found Room 806.
It belonged to Saint Aldwyn’s Hospital, where she had been born.
Her mother had died when Evelyn was young, and her father refused to discuss the delivery. The hospital had closed twenty years ago, but archived records showed that Room 806 had been part of a restricted maternity ward.
Evelyn requested her birth file.
Most of it was missing.
One surviving form listed two infant heart rates.
Only one child had been discharged.
That night, Evelyn returned to the corridor.
The other woman stood closer.
“You took the first breath,” she said.
“I had a twin.”
“You had a choice.”
“I was a baby.”
“You were both dreaming. Only one of you woke.”
The doors opened.
Behind each lay a different version of Evelyn’s life.
In one room, she was a child sitting beside her mother.
In another, she married a man she had never met.
In another, she died at fourteen.
In the final room, a newborn girl slept inside an incubator.
A second infant lay beneath the same blanket.
The other woman leaned close.
“I have lived in the part of you that sleeps.”
Evelyn woke in Room 806.
Not the dream version.
The real abandoned room inside Saint Aldwyn’s Hospital.
Rain struck the broken windows. Dust covered the floor. She had no memory of leaving home.
A hospital bracelet circled her wrist.
SHAW, E.
Beneath it was a second bracelet.
SHAW, ELISE.
Footsteps moved in the corridor.
Evelyn fled.
Security footage later showed her entering the abandoned hospital alone at 2:14 a.m. At 3:06, two identical women left through separate doors.
Evelyn watched the recording repeatedly.
One woman walked toward her car.
The other disappeared behind the building.
She could not determine which one she was.
Her patients began improving immediately.
The hotel dreams stopped. Mina slept through the night. Daniel remembered nothing about the woman with Evelyn’s face.
Evelyn should have felt relieved.
Instead, she noticed small errors in her own life.
Her apartment key no longer fit smoothly.
Her coffee tasted wrong.
A childhood scar had moved from her left knee to her right.
Her father answered the telephone and called her Elise.
When Evelyn corrected him, he became silent.
“Dad?”
“You were not supposed to know that name.”
“Which one of us survived?”
Her father began to cry.
“I don’t know.”
That night, Evelyn placed cameras throughout her apartment and tied a length of red thread around her wrist. She secured the other end to the bedframe.
“If I leave,” she told the camera, “I need to know.”
She fell asleep at 12:41.
In the dream, she stood inside Room 806.
The other woman lay in the hospital bed.
For the first time, she looked frightened.
“You let me out,” she said.
“You wanted to wake.”
“I wanted you to remember me.”
“Then who left the hospital?”
The woman turned toward the doorway.
A third figure stood in the corridor.
It wore Evelyn’s face imperfectly. The eyes were too far apart. The smile continued beyond the corners of the mouth.
Behind it, every door displayed a different name.
Not room numbers.
Names.
Daniel.
Mina.
Evelyn.
Elise.
The thing stepped into the room.
“We needed twins,” it said. “One to open the door and one to hold it.”
Evelyn woke standing beside her bed.
The red thread remained tied around her wrist.
The other end disappeared beneath the mattress.
She pulled.
Someone beneath the bed pulled back.
Evelyn did not look underneath.
She ran from the apartment and drove to the clinic.
Her patients were already waiting in the corridor, although it was four in the morning.
Daniel.
Mina.
All of them.
Each wore Evelyn’s face.
At the end of the corridor stood the hotel door marked 806.
Mina smiled.
“You’re late.”
Evelyn looked down at her hands.
They belonged to someone else.
Inside the treatment-room mirror, the real Evelyn pounded silently against the glass.
The woman wearing her body opened Door 806.
Every sleeping patient in the city dreamed the same dream that night.
A hotel corridor.
Wet carpet.
Endless doors.
And a woman with their face waiting at the far end.
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