The Insomnia Studies

My name doesn’t matter. What matters is where I work: a government-funded sleep research facility. Officially, we study the effects of prolonged wakefulness. Unofficially… it’s stranger than that. Every night, our patients are wired up to monitors and forced to listen to recordings—audio designed by researchers and machines to keep them awake for as long as possible. Some are simple tones. Others are stories, fragmented and unsettling. I"ve been smuggling copies of these recordings out of the