By 8K’s Ashanti Chandler.

The Asylum was not a nice place. It was a tall, concrete building that occasionally oozed a sinister blue light and never had the same number of floors as before. There were hardly any windows and they often changed position. I t was almost as if the entire building rearranged itself when no one was looking; a playful intent on making the adults doubt their sanity.

The whole asylum was built for one purpose: giving the ‘treatment’. The ‘treatment’ was a brilliantly clever idea, so well thought out and planned that nothing could go wrong. Of course, similar people had claimed the Titanic was the ‘unsinkable ship’.

In principle, it was perfect. You’d have a bad dream, the horrifying type that harasses you night after night, and simply sell it to the Asylum. Your dream is gone, never to return, and you get paid for it.

Perfect, right? Or that was the idea. In reality, people began selling good dreams, (as those are worth far more) for a little extra cash. Or they began scoffing cheese before they went to bed, hoping for a nightmare they could part with.

Of course, an idea so perfect and wonderful simply had to go wrong at some point. People who began selling their dreams began getting side effects, ones that made their thoughts dangerous and terrifying. Soon, the Asylum even began taking dreams you didn’t want to sell; your family holiday at the beach or when you learnt to ride a bike. The Asylum became its own person; a building that didn’t need staff to operate the machines anymore.

Then, it wasn’t just taking dreams; it was taking memories too. People left the building with a wad of cash and no idea who they were or how they came to be there. The worst part about the Asylum, though, was that no one realised how dangerous it had become until it was too late. The damage was done; thousands of people wondering around without a clue as to who they were or what happened to them…