Dream Hunters

In a world perpetually bathed in the harsh glare of an unshifting sun, where the gentle embrace of sleep has become a forgotten myth, dreams are the rarest of jewels, echoes of a lost world traded in hushed whispers.  The Somnolence Malady, a neurological anomaly, has silenced the lullaby of slumber, leaving humanity trapped in an unrelenting, unshifting day.  From the ashes of this sleepless society rises a new breed of specialist — the Dream Hunters.  They are the gatekeepers of the subconscious, venturing into the minds of the rare few who can still dream, the Sleepers, and extracting those ethereal fragments of the sleeping mind, selling solace in a world starved for it.
Rose Nelson, a Dream Hunter with an almost preternatural talent, navigates the intricate landscapes of the sleeping mind with the grace of a seasoned explorer. Her partner, Alex Jenkins, a former neuroscientist, provides the technological and scientific bedrock for their perilous extractions, a grounding presence in a world increasingly defined by the intangible. Their shared workspace is a clandestine laboratory, a humming haven of wires, monitors, and softly glowing neural interfaces, a sanctuary nestled within the heart of a sleepless city. Alex, a man tethered to logic and empirical data, watches the flickering readouts with a practiced eye, ensuring the precarious equilibrium between dream extraction and the Sleeper's delicate mental state.  Rose, however, is propelled by a deeper, more personal yearning. The relentless wakefulness has eroded her senses, leaving her craving the solace of sleep, a solace she finds only vicariously through the dreams she extracts, a bittersweet echo of a world lost.
One fateful night, while connected to Theresa Hernandez, a Sleeper known for her vivid dream narratives, Rose stumbles upon a dreamscape unlike any she has ever traversed. It isn't the fragmented chaos of the typical subconscious, but a cohesive, meticulously crafted reality.  Theresa, beneath an amethyst sky, converses with beings of pure light, wielding powers that defy the very fabric of Rose’s waking world. This encounter rattles Rose to her core, leaving her questioning the nature of reality itself, the boundaries between the tangible and the intangible blurring before her eyes. Alex, initially rooted in his skepticism, attributes the anomaly to a glitch in the extraction process, a momentary aberration in the complex dance of technology and the human mind. But as subsequent extractions unveil similar landscapes, variations of the same cities, the same people, existing under different celestial bodies, governed by different physical laws, a startling realization dawns on them: these aren't mere dreams; they are glimpses into parallel realities, windows into worlds beyond their comprehension.
This paradigm shift transforms Rose’s focus from solace to scientific inquiry, from profit to profound exploration. The dreams she once sought for personal respite now represent keys to a vast, multiversal tapestry, threads of an intricate cosmic design.  Their groundbreaking discovery, however, doesn't go unnoticed. Kristin Strickland, a ruthless corporate magnate who holds the dream market in her iron grip, sees in these alternate realities a potential for unimaginable power and exploitation, a chance to reshape the very fabric of existence to serve her own avaricious desires.  Kristin, fueled by an insatiable thirst for control, begins to stalk Rose and Alex, her agents weaving a web of surveillance around them, tightening the noose around their groundbreaking research.