Dive Into the Dream Realm With Doctor Strange: The Fate of Dreams

“I need you to dispel all doubt from your mind. Believe that I can bring you through this. Now, take my hand.” 

Doctor Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, addressed the figures in the mirror with calm authority. Instead of a reflection, the mahogany-framed rectangular glass showed three men—two uniformed police officers and one very distraught burglar—pressing their hands against the inside of the glass as they stared out imploringly at him. Behind Doctor Strange—just outside the glowing protection circle he’d drawn with arcane energy on the off-white laminate of the briefing-room floor—the burglar’s partner, along with a historian from the Merchant’s House Museum and most of the Sixth Precinct, watched and waited with bated breath.

Lt. Reynard Bacci took a sip from the mug of coffee in his hand and watched with narrowed eyes as Strange reached through the glass, grasped the burglar’s arm, and carefully pulled the 173-pound man out of the three-inch-deep mirror. Behind Bacci, the thief’s partner-in-crime exhaled with relief and moved to grab him, but a sharp look from Strange stopped him from stepping into the protection circle. The rescued burglar fell to his knees, babbling with fear and gratitude. 

“Thank god! You gotta hurry! There’s something in there with them, man, something that ain’t happy to have visitors! Those cops’re gonna get eaten if you don’t get ’em out! Place’s got skeletons, man—human skeletons!—in every corner! Something’s in there, man, I’m telling you!”

A chorus of alarmed murmurs joined his terrified ranting as the room’s occupants reacted to his news. 

“You’re all right now.” Doctor Strange’s words were reassuring, but his manner was brusque.  “If I could please have another moment of quiet?”

“All right! All right!” The lieutenant waved his coffee cup over everyone’s heads. “Pipe down and let the man work!” Turning back to Strange, the tall, gray-haired policeman spoke with obvious esteem. “You just tell me when I can cuff him.” 

“In a moment,” Strange answered distractedly. He reached through the glass again and took the hand of one of the two policemen still inside. “I’d prefer they not leave the circle until I’ve cleansed them of spiritual residue.”

“Sure thing, Doc.” 

Bacci had taken one look at the cursed mirror and gotten on the phone with Wong, Doctor Strange’s assistant—and that was before officers Smith and Hoskin had managed to get themselves trapped inside of it along with the perp. It had all started earlier that afternoon when the perp’s accomplice, Gabel, had come running into the precinct in a panic, carrying the mirror—which he had hastily covered up with his windbreaker—and hollering that his friend was trapped inside. He told the desk sergeant that he and his buddy had gotten the cockamamie idea to pull a B&E at the Merchant’s House Museum, convinced they could get rich selling small antiques swiped from the National Historic Landmark. In addition to being ill-conceived—the Merchant’s House Museum was a beloved city institution tended by a dedicated staff who would surely note missing items almost immediately—it was an oddly ambitious plan for two men whose collective experience with crime didn’t extend past shoplifting candy bars. The job had gotten much, much weirder, though, when the one called McHale had “disappeared” into a mirror he’d found hidden away in a trunk on the third floor. 

By the time Doctor Strange arrived, Officer Smith had been sucked into the mirror while trying to get McHale out, and Officer Hoskin had been similarly ensnared attempting to free his partner. 

Bacci would have preferred to live in a world devoid of supernatural incident, but as it was, he was damn grateful to know the Master of Mystical Arts who lived at 177A Bleecker Street. Though the guy dressed oddly in a blue tunic, black boots, and a flamboyant red cloak, Bacci had always found him remarkably sane—and unfailingly effective. He was apparently some kind of big-shot sorcerer—head honcho of all magic users, if Bacci understood correctly—not to mention supreme defender of the entire planet or, as the doctor himself was more apt to put it, “the mortal realm.” Whatever it was that he did, he always made himself available when anyone from the NYPD called him with something they couldn’t get their head around, and he’d gotten them out of more than a few jams over the years. 

The lieutenant, therefore, had complete confidence in Doctor Strange’s ability to get everything back to normal. He leaned against the lectern, took another swig from his cup, and made a face. Damn stuff was getting cold. A gasp from the men around him made him look up again. Strange was holding Hoskin’s arm and had him halfway out of the mirror, but a long, black tentacle reached out through the glass to wrap itself around the officer’s chest, clearly attempting to pull him back in. A few of the cops pulled out their firearms in alarm. Bacci gestured coolly for them to lower their weapons.

“All right, boys, take it easy. The doc can handle this.” Chin nodding in the direction of a particularly jumpy patrolman, Bacci thrust his mug at him.  “You, get me a refill. The rest of you, let the doctor work.”   

Doctor Strange only frowned and touched the large gold clasp that held his cloak in place. The amulet seemed to open like an eye, instantly bathing the mirror in a radiant, mystical glow. The tentacle unwound itself from around Officer Hoskin’s chest and slipped back into the recesses of the mirror, allowing Strange to pull the man free. 

“Don’t leave the circle,” Strange warned McHale and Hoskin over his shoulder as he reached through the mirror one final time to retrieve Officer Smith. 

Hoskin nodded, but indicated his partner. “You gotta get him outta there! That thing’s got his ankle!” 

Doctor Strange’s brow furrowed, but he didn’t hesitate: He stepped into the mirror, appearing instantly next to Officer Smith on the other side of the looking glass. Bacci squinted again and tried to lean in closer, but couldn’t quite make out what was happening. Strange had a hand out, bidding Smith to stand still, and both men had fixed their attention on something happening below the frame. There was a flash of yellow light—it appeared to Bacci to have come from the doctor’s hand—and then Strange was helping Officer Smith climb out. As Smith emerged into the briefing room, the sorcerer turned to face something behind him in the mirror, his dark-red cloak obscuring Bacci’s view. 

Back in the briefing room, Hoskin clasped his friend’s shoulder. “You okay, man?” 

Smith’s eyes were wide, but he nodded. “He sliced it offa me with some kinda laser beam that came outta his hand.” He opened his mouth to say something else but was interrupted by the sound of shattering glass.  

The mirror had exploded into a million glistening pieces. 

The reactions were immediate: Several cops turned their guns toward the detonation as others pushed their fellow officers out of harm’s way. Smith and Hoskin dove protectively over McHale as Bacci darted in front of the woman from the museum. He was trying to calculate who was in the blast zone when the mirror fragments froze. They hovered in midair for a full second before rushing back in toward their point of origin, then disappearing into a pinpoint of light from which a pillar of acrid, black smoke suddenly billowed up. Doctor Strange stepped calmly out of the smoke and waved it away. No sign of the mirror—not even a fragment—remained. 

Bacci watched the sorcerer’s eyes sweep over everyone in the room with something like regret. The radiant, mystical light was still pouring from the eye in Strange’s amulet, and he somehow directed it outward with his hands, slowly and deliberately creating a concentric circle that expanded over every person in the briefing room. Without deciding to do so, Bacci took a deep breath as the light washed over him, feeling the adrenaline ebb as a comforting sense of serenity filled his body from head to toe. It seemed to have a similar effect on everyone it touched: Bacci watched the shoulders of his officers settling as they stood up a little straighter, several even sighing as the tension drained away. 

The eye in the amulet closed then, and just like that, the light was gone. Strange made a precise gesture with his hand, and the protection circle he’d drawn on the floor faded from sight. He nodded to Bacci. “You may take them into custody now, if you wish.” Bacci motioned to Hoskin and Smith, who helped the perps up off the floor and led them out of the room for processing as Strange spoke quietly with the museum historian. 

“I apologize, Ms. Hazel, but I was not able to save the artifact. If it’s of any comfort, I rather doubt it was an antique. It appeared to me to have been created fairly recently in an attempt to trap the entity within it.”

Anne Hazel waved away the doctor’s concern. Bacci imagined that, like him, she was caught up in the excitement of having spent a Friday afternoon witnessing such an unusual series of events. “No, it’s all right. As I mentioned to the lieutenant, that absolutely wasn’t an item belonging to the Tredwells—I’d never seen it before. I have no idea how it came to be in the house. Should we be concerned?” 

Strange folded his hands into the recesses of his cloak. “The house has a reputation for being haunted, does it not? Perhaps someone hoped that you would know how to care for the dangerous item they’d created. In any case, no, please don’t worry. I’ll send one of my colleagues over to do a sweep and make sure no more dangerous objects are hidden in the building.” 

“Thank you, Doctor.” 

It seemed to Bacci that Hazel was rather taken with the mysterious sorcerer, and why not? If the cape didn’t put you off, he was an attractive man—something of a throwback, the lieutenant mused, to Rat Pack elegance and savoir faire. Older than most of the capes-and-tights set you’d occasionally see around the city, Doctor Strange had an air of commanding maturity about him. He was quite obviously a man who had seen things, who knew things. Unfortunately for Hazel, he was also a man with places to be. Clearly determining the threat was over, Strange abruptly excused himself. Bacci followed, stopping to accept the refilled cup of coffee from his patrolman as he walked the doctor out. 

“Thanks again for your help, Doc.”

“Certainly.” 

“If there’s ever anything we can do for you, you just call, you know?” 

“Just be safe.”

Bacci nodded, and then remembered that he’d wanted to ask the doctor about something else. “Oh, hey, real quick—I ain’t been sleeping too well lately. It’s gettin’ real bad, messing with my concentration, you know? So I was just wondering. You know any hocus pocus for that?”           

Doctor Strange stopped, turned, and looked pointedly at the cup of coffee clutched in the lieutenant’s hand. 

“Switch to decaf,” he said dryly. As Bacci blinked down at the mug, Doctor Strange let himself out of the small brick building and disappeared into the pedestrian traffic of Greenwich Village. 

Stephen hadn’t made it two steps out of the police department before he felt an insistent pressure against the inside of his skull. Though the sensation was an unpleasant one, the presence that attended it was warm and familiar. He dropped the psychic shield—his usual precaution when he left home—and telepathically greeted his assistant, Wong. Though he probably would have looked distracted to anyone watching him, Stephen’s lips did not move as he and his friend conversed over the distance of half a mile. 

“Yes, Wong? Is all well? I’m leaving the police station now.”

“Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to let you know that we have a visitor.”

Stephen stepped off the sidewalk onto a narrow parking ramp between two row houses and a six-story brick apartment building. “I’ll be right there.” Glancing at the garage entrance to make sure no one was watching, he opened a portal to his living room and stepped through. 

Wong, as always, had directed the guest’s attention toward the Richter painting, so Stephen was able to enter the room behind them without immediately frightening a stranger with a demonstration of dimensional transportation. 

Rubbing his hands, which had started to ache, Stephen tried to hold back the assault of psychic information streaming off the woman standing beside his friend. Wong liked to introduce people as a formality, more for their sake than Stephen’s. Stephen cleared his throat, and Wong turned, gently guiding the woman to do the same. 

“This is Dr. Sharanya Misra of the Baxter Foundation,” Wong began, with a decorous nod to his friend and employer. “Dr. Misra, this is Dr. Stephen Strange.” 

Stephen smiled, and the woman smiled back, but the pleasantry did not reach her eyes. She appeared to be in her late 20s, her shiny dark-brown hair pulled back from a square-shaped face in a sleek ponytail. Her dark-brown eyes were attentive, her lips pressed together with barely contained skepticism, and Stephen could feel tension and misgivings radiating off her slender frame in waves. Meeting her eyes as they flitted across his face, he was hit with a sharp vision of blood and viscera. She’d recently witnessed some kind of gruesome tragedy, which probably accounted for the tightness through her shoulders and back, not to mention the ten-foot-long Malebranchian psyche-leech burrowed between her shoulder blades. It was twice as thick as a flex duct, with black-spotted, purple-tinged skin and a large sucker mouth. 

Casting a quick spell of divination with a barely noticeable flutter of two fingers, Stephen gleaned that she was 32, born in Queens to first-generation immigrants from Karnataka, lived alone, held a doctorate in Neurobiology and Behavior from Columbia, and was running a Baxter Foundation-funded metacognition study at the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane. She meditated and practiced yoga every morning, spoke Kannada and Hindi as well as English, was in excellent physical health, and had an inordinate fondness for kombucha. 

“Welcome to the Sanctum Sanctorum,” he said, pulling both hands back into his cloak at the precise moment most people would have thrust one out to shake. Though he had become comfortable enough with the scars that covered them to retire the gloves he had worn throughout the earlier years of his duties as Sorcerer Supreme, Stephen remained self-conscious about the extent to which his hands still trembled. “How might I be of service?”

Dr. Misra fiddled with a silver Ganesh charm bracelet fastened around her left wrist. 

“I’m … not sure you can help, to be honest. I really shouldn’t even be taking up your time, it’s just that my mother …”  She trailed off, the color in her cheeks rising as she eyed Stephen’s nearly floor-length cloak. “She’s really into psychics and everything, and I … to be honest, I’m not entirely clear on what you do. It’s just … easier to humor her sometimes.”  

She said the word “psychics” with dismissive humor, and Stephen shared a look with Wong. He was now confident it would have made no difference had he emerged from the portal right in front of her. People were amazingly adept at explaining away the mystical; seeing a man step out of thin air was nothing to someone determined to negate the supernatural. Secret passageways. Mirrors. A trick of the light. Stephen knew from personal experience that once a person had made up their mind not to believe, they could willfully mistake a six-foot Berev’ha Dentii for an overfed hamster. He had been that person once himself.

“I could explore the circumstances surrounding your visit unaided,” Stephen admitted, “but many people find such analyses invasive.” He lowered his voice slightly, his bright-blue eyes dancing as he met Sharanya’s gaze and sought to establish trust. “I know the first time my mind was read, I found it quite disorienting.” 

That wasn’t technically accurate—the first time his mind had been read, he’d been too arrogant to notice—but it was true enough on an emotional level to be worth sharing. He studied the woman’s aura as Wong picked up where he’d left off. She was surrounded by a strong field of rich, deep blue, tinged with gray around the edges, reinforcing Stephen’s sense of a normally strong and balanced individual coping with a temporary darkness.

“What is it your mother thinks you need help with?” Wong prompted. He had an easy way with guests that Stephen had grown to rely on. 

Sharanya winced and dropped her gaze. “There was an … incident at my work. A lot of people died. Quite violently.” Her voice had lowered to a hush, and Stephen caught himself leaning forward to better hear her.

“Through supernatural means?” he asked, one eyebrow jutting up in curiosity. 

“What?” Sharanya looked up at him with confusion before belatedly comprehending his question and shaking her head. “Oh. No. No, nothing like that. They murdered each other. My research subjects.” She spoke haltingly, the psychic trauma of the experience still reverberating within her. But something just beneath that had caught Stephen’s attention: a burning need she carried to understand what had occurred. He could tell it wasn’t enough for her to know what had happened—Sharanya’s mind was caught on the why of it, turning the question over again and again, like a tumbler polishing a small stone.

Stephen waited until she looked up at him. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” 

Sharanya hesitated, her eyes darting toward the pocket doors of the living room. “Like I said, I’m sure there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing for anyone to do; the police have finished their investigation and everyone involved is …” 

Dead. In Sharanya’s sudden silence, Stephen heard the word as clearly as if she had shouted it. Wong shifted his weight slightly as he stood beside her, gently bringing her attention back to the living.  She continued, her speech becoming more and more rapid, as if she was suddenly in a hurry to get the story over with.

“I’m working on a study of metacognition in lucid dreaming at Ravencroft. We have a full Oneirology department and study all kinds of dreams: problem-solving, healing, prophecy, epic, lucid... Anyway, we’re looking specifically at how dreaming interacts with behavior—how the dreams of the most violent criminally insane differ from other offenders, for example—and ways we can use dream therapy to guide them away from acting out their psychoses. We have a sleep lab at the Institute, and eight days ago 12 research subjects woke up and … attacked each other. And didn’t stop. No one could stop them, there were people there that night who tried, but they … they just kept going until everyone was dead.”

Stephen nodded. That explained the psyche-leech; the giant, wormlike psychic parasites were very partial to survivor’s guilt. He’d have to remove it before she left the house. 

“Twelve people, all snapping at once. I mean, these were violent offenders, but they knew each other—they’d been participating in this study together for months without incident. On the security-feed playback it looked like they all woke up from nightmares at the same time and just …” She stopped to rub her forehead, and Stephen could tell there was something she still wasn’t saying. He looked at Wong, who caught his gaze. Stephen knew what he was thinking; the same thought had crossed his mind. Nightmare, a demon who ruled the Dream Dimension realm that bore his name, was one of Stephen’s oldest and most dangerous enemies. It was certainly possible that he had had a hand in the events Sharanya was describing. It did not seem possible, though, that Sharanya could have surmised as much. 

Though horrific, her story was surprisingly devoid of supernatural danger from a common perspective. Normally people didn’t find their way to the Sanctum until they woke up compulsively vomiting flies, their head twisted around 180 degrees. It was true that Sharanya was hosting the psyche-leech, but she didn’t know that. Her brain wasn’t being used as a dimensional breach for an invading demonic army, or as a relay post for paranormal splinter cells. No one was making entire buildings disappear just by walking into them or being harassed by corvids screaming at them in Esperanto. There wasn’t even a psychic sinkhole. Stephen had already made up his mind to do everything in his power to help her, but other than removing the psyche-leech—and perhaps initiating a chat with Nightmare—he wasn’t yet sure what that might be. 

Seeming to notice Stephen’s distraction, Wong began to question Sharanya about her mother, giving Stephen time to gently probe her mind. As Sharanya clarified how her mother had heard of Doctor Strange’s work—apparently he’d helped her grocer’s niece with a possession—Stephen closed his eyes and psychically touched her mind with his own, quietly sifting through her memories of the event. 

His eyes flew open a second later. Sharanya winced and touched her temple. 

“They called my name?” Stephen asked, his tone hard.

“Yes, but how would that even … ? It doesn’t make sense!” Sharanya was stammering, thrown off by Stephen having uncovered the part of her memory she’d been reluctant to share. Stephen turned to Wong to explain. 

“When they woke up, all of her research subjects screamed ‘Doctor Strange!’ Seconds later, they attacked each other.”

“How do you know that?” Sharanya seemed to be oscillating between curiosity and consternation, her eyes wide and her fists clenched. She turned to Wong, desperate to articulate a version of reality that made sense to her. “Maybe they were just calling for me or one of the other doctors and saying that they felt strange. I mean, yes, it’s true, they all said it the same way: ‘doctor strange!’  But they could have been referring to anything, right?”

Wong smiled at her enigmatically. “Simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones. Even when you don’t understand them." 

Sharanya shook her head at Wong. “So he’s reading my mind, and you’re quoting Occam’s razor to me. You’re right, I don’t understand any of this.” 

“My work frequently intersects with other realms,” Stephen said, by way of explanation.  “It’s possible that these individuals were made to speak with the voice of an alien entity intent on getting my attention. That’s potentially a good sign, as it implies a willingness to cooperate.” As he spoke, Stephen pulled his hands free of his cloak and discreetly drew a sedation ward across the back of the psyche-leech with the index finger of his left hand. To those inexperienced in magic, it would read as a distracted hand twitch. “My guess is that what you’ve experienced is an echo of a larger imbalance in a neighboring dimension.”

And are there many of those?” Sharanya asked, her voice pitched somewhere between derision and wonder. “Neighboring dimensions?” 

Stephen met her eyes, wondering how much she really wanted to know. There were thousands of them—aggressive and predatory and ever-expanding. The reality she existed in was such a small, fragile thing that it had already been completely wiped out and replaced at least once that he knew of. 

He was the only one alive who remembered. 

“There are,” he acknowledged. “And I suspect the answers you seek lie within one of them. If you’ll allow me to investigate on your behalf, I’ll be sure to contact you as soon as I have more information.” 

Pretending to adjust the position of an artifact on the mantel as an excuse to move out of his guest’s line of vision, Stephen maneuvered himself behind the psyche-leech and placed a booted foot firmly on its tail. He wasn’t usually shy about tending to his business in front of the general public, but he did take pains to pace himself, mindful of not causing undue distress. Most people were happier remaining oblivious to the spiritual organisms swarming their mortal frames. 

“What, um … what would something like that cost me?” Sharanya asked apprehensively, craning her neck around to follow him with her eyes. 

“We can’t know that until we better understand the forces with which we may be dealing,” Stephen replied distractedly. The psyche-leech had become aware of his presence and was burrowing further into Sharanya’s back. 

Wong rushed in to clarify. “There’s no monetary cost associated with the doctor’s assistance.”

Sharanya brightened considerably at that and turned back to Stephen. “So, is there anything else you need from me at this point, or … ?”

“I’d like to put a ward of protection on you before you go, but don’t let that alarm you. It’s not an indication that I’m anticipating threats to your safety.”

Stephen threw the ward up hastily as the scientist watched him over her shoulder. When he was done, he gestured for Wong to escort her out of the room.

“If you’ll follow me, please, Dr. Misra?”

Sharanya looked startled as Wong began moving toward the living room doors. She started to turn all the way around to face Stephen—the leech turning with her, trying to slip out of his grasp—until Wong stopped her with a gentle touch to her elbow. “Oh, uh, bye,” she said to Stephen over her shoulder. “Thanks for your … help. It was nice meeting you.” 

Stephen nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t so much as look toward her. He was busy quietly wrapping tendrils of energy around the psyche-leech’s cylindrical frame. It was a simple enough matter to separate it from its host. 

Doing so without causing harm to either, though—that took concentration.