Dreamed You, Found You

Chapter 5 ## The Doctor's Question

The meeting was a waste of time.

Adrian sat at the head of the conference table, his pen moving across the page in front of him. He wasn't taking notes. He was calculating. The Southeast Asia projections were off by three point seven percent, and no one in this room had noticed except him.

He let the regional director finish his presentation, waited three seconds for anyone to ask a question, and when no one did, he spoke.

"The forecast for Q3 doesn't account for the currency fluctuation in Indonesia. Adjust the model and resubmit by Friday."

The regional director opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded.

Adrian stood, and the meeting ended.

Marcus followed him out of the conference room, tablet in hand, already moving to the next item. "Your two o'clock canceled. Legal pushed the deposition to next week. And I scheduled that consultation you asked about."

Adrian stopped walking. "What consultation?"

"Psychiatrist. You said—"

"I know what I said." Adrian resumed walking, his pace faster now. "When?"

"Tomorrow. Four PM."

"Cancel it."

Marcus didn't argue. He never argued. But he also didn't put his tablet away. "You've been having trouble sleeping. You said so yourself. And the other day, in the middle of the earnings call—"

"I lost my train of thought for ten seconds."

"Twenty-three seconds. I counted."

Adrian turned to look at his deputy. Marcus was not a tall man, not an imposing man, but he had been with Volkov Industries for eight years, and he had learned to stand his ground.

"Twenty-three seconds," Adrian repeated.

"I'm not trying to interfere. I'm just saying—you've been different lately. You're not sleeping. You're not eating. You leave meetings early, which you never do. And yesterday, you smiled at the mailroom clerk."

"I did not smile."

"You did. It was small, but it happened. The clerk almost fainted."

Adrian said nothing.

Marcus shifted his weight. "The consultation is at four. I'll send you the address."

He walked away before Adrian could respond.

---

The dream came that night, as it had every night for the past week.

Adrian stood in the grey city—the same grey city, the one he had never visited, the one that existed only in sleep. The buildings rose around him, sharp and cold, their windows dark. The sky was the color of steel.

And she was there.

He couldn't see her face. He never could. But he felt her presence the way he felt the shift in air pressure before a storm—subtle, inevitable, charged with something he couldn't name.

She was close tonight. Closer than before.

He reached out his hand.

She didn't reach back.

But she didn't move away either.

*Stay*, he thought. He didn't know if he said it out loud. In dreams, it was hard to tell.

The grey city flickered at the edges, like a screen losing signal.

And then he woke up.

---

The smell hit him first.

Not the recycled air of his office, not the faint chemical scent of cleaning products from the floor below. This was different. This was—

*Earth. Rain. Something green and growing.*

He had never smelled anything like it in Chicago.

Adrian stood very still, his hand on the back of his desk chair. The office was exactly as he had left it. The city spread out below the windows, grey and familiar. The smell was gone.

He had imagined it.

Or he had dreamed it.

Or—

He sat down and opened his laptop. The quarterly report was still on the screen, the same numbers he had been staring at for three days. He forced himself to read them, to calculate, to focus.

It didn't work.

---

Dr. Chen's office was on the seventh floor of an old building in the Gold Coast, the kind of building with crown moldings and a doorman who had been working there since the seventies. Adrian arrived at four o'clock exactly, wearing a dark suit and no tie.

The receptionist smiled. "Dr. Chen will see you now."

The office was warm. Books lined the walls—Freud, Jung, dozens of titles Adrian didn't recognize. A Persian rug covered the floor. In the corner, a cat slept on a pile of papers.

Dr. Chen was a Malaysian Chinese man in his mid-forties, with grey-streaked hair and calm eyes. He wore a cardigan, no tie, and when he shook Adrian's hand, his grip was firm but unhurried.

"Mr. Volkov. Thank you for coming."

"Adrian."

"Adrian." Dr. Chen gestured to the chair across from his desk. "Sit. Please."

Adrian sat. The chair was comfortable, which irritated him. He didn't want to be comfortable. He wanted to be efficient.

Dr. Chen sat as well, folding his hands on the desk. He didn't take notes. He didn't pull out a clipboard. He just looked at Adrian with those calm eyes and waited.

The silence stretched.

Adrian had outwaited billionaires, regulators, hostile board members. But this silence was different. It wasn't a negotiation. It wasn't a power play. It was just—empty. Waiting.

He cracked first.

"I've been having dreams."

Dr. Chen nodded. "Tell me about them."

"There's a city. Grey. Tall buildings. I've never been there, but in the dream, I know it." He paused, searching for words. "And there's a woman."

"A woman."

"I can't see her face. But she's there. Warm. Like a lamp in fog."

Dr. Chen's expression didn't change, but something in his posture shifted. "How long have you been having these dreams?"

"Every night for the past week. Maybe longer. I don't remember dreaming before that."

"Before that?"

"I don't dream. Or I don't remember dreaming. Either way, it's the same."

Dr. Chen picked up a pen and wrote something in a notebook. His handwriting was small, neat, unreadable from where Adrian sat.

"When did you last feel an emotion?"

The question caught Adrian off guard. "What?"

"An emotion. Any emotion. When did you last feel one?"

Adrian started to answer, then stopped. He thought about it. Really thought about it.

"I don't know," he said finally.

"You don't know?"

"I feel things. I make decisions. I run a company. That requires—"

"It requires calculation. Not emotion." Dr. Chen set down his pen. "When did you last feel something that wasn't tied to a business outcome? Something you couldn't measure?"

Adrian said nothing.

The silence returned. This time, it was heavier.

Dr. Chen wrote something else in his notebook. "These dreams you're having—the grey city, the woman. They're unusually vivid."

"They feel real."

"More real than other dreams?"

Adrian considered. "I don't have other dreams to compare them to. But yes. They feel... specific. Detailed. The temperature of the air, the weight of the light. It's not like imagining something. It's like being somewhere."

Dr. Chen nodded slowly. He wrote again, and this time, Adrian caught a glimpse of the words: *Emotional description unusually detailed. Far beyond normal dream recall.*

"Thank you, Adrian," Dr. Chen said. "That's enough for today."

Adrian stood. He didn't want to leave. He wanted to talk more, to explain, to make someone understand what it felt like to stand in that grey city with a woman whose face he couldn't see.

But he didn't say any of that.

He shook Dr. Chen's hand and walked out.

---

In the elevator, his phone buzzed. A message from Marcus: *How did it go?*

Adrian typed back: *Fine.*

He deleted it, typed again: *He asked when I last felt an emotion.*

Marcus's response came immediately: *What did you say?*

Adrian didn't answer.

He put the phone away and stepped out into the Chicago afternoon. The sky was grey—the same grey as the dream, but different. Harder. Colder.

He walked three blocks before he realized he was heading toward the lake. He stopped, turned around, and walked back to his office.

The smell of rain and earth did not return.

He didn't know if he was grateful for that.

---

Dr. Chen sat at his desk for a long time after Adrian left.

He read through his notes twice. Then he opened his laptop and checked his email. There was a message from a new patient, an inquiry from someone in Indonesia.

He didn't open it.

Instead, he looked at his notebook again.

*Emotional description unusually detailed. Far beyond normal dream recall.*

He had seen only one other patient describe their dreams with such precision.

A woman. Also from Southeast Asia. Who had also dreamed of someone she couldn't identify.

Dr. Chen closed the notebook and set it aside.

*Coincidence*, he told himself.

But he didn't delete the email.