Dreamscapes - Story Ideas and Writing Prompts

Traumas of a Dream Spy

Part of a futuristic spy/police training program, young students (teenagers) are trained in various things like software hacking, deception, interrogation, crime solving. They get unknowingly sent into a virtual reality world mimicking the real world and then things go to shit with an attack on the school (simulated) that they have to try and use their very rudimentary skills to solve. Some of the students "die" early, but one of them becomes paranoid/suspicious that things are really real. He ends up cutting of the actual professors means of monitoring/contacting them in his efforts to "solve" their problems. He's the last one to survive, but because he's been cut off the professor's ability to contact him, he essentially ends up in a self-induced dream coma, where his mental state deteriorates the longer he's in there with only the NPCs to interact with. Eventually one of the NPCs is able to be reprogrammed to reinstall the professor's contact and they terminate the simulation, pulling him back into the world. What they don't realize is that after he managed to sever contact with them, the time maintenance system was unable to regulate things and therefore, it entered into "dream time." With his mind already in flight or fight mode, and processing more stimuli per second than normal, the few real-life days he was in a dream coma felt like years to him in the dream world, so he's a very different person when he wakes up. Hide the time discrepancy from his professors and other students. He suffers from paranoia and PTSD-like symptoms as well as dissociation from reality and difficulty telling what's real and what's imaginary.