"The Sixth Dream" by Bernard Werber, summary

This science fiction novel by a French writer explores the unexplored depths of the human unconscious, proposing the existence of a sixth stage of sleep that allows one to transcend the linearity of time and connect with one’s past. The book is not part of any series and stands alone as a stand-alone work. The concept grew out of the writer’s journalistic work in the 1980s, his personal struggle with chronic insomnia, and a television experiment in which he was asked to mentally revisit his childhood self. Having completed the manuscript on April 16, 2015, in a café in Montmartre, Paris, the writer published the novel in France later that year.

The legacy of a neurophysiologist

Twenty-seven-year-old medical student Jacques Klein grew up in the shadow of the discoveries of his mother, Caroline, a prominent sleep researcher at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. His father, the renowned yachtsman Francis Klein, once set a world record thanks to polyphasic sleep developed by his wife, but later died during a solo round-the-world regatta. The sailing ship "The Last Call" struck an iceberg while the tired skipper was fast asleep in the cabin.

Caroline raised her son using oneirological methods. The boy kept a dream journal, learned to enter paradoxical states, and, on an imaginary island of Pink Sands, overcame childhood neuroses like bedwetting and a fear of depth.

Jacques’s adult life seemed stable until the day his mother called the team together for a closed experiment.

In the basement laboratory of the Hôtel-Dieu, Indian yogi Akhilesh attempted to dive deeper than the fifth stage of REM sleep. Caroline was searching for a hypothetical level — Somnus incognitus, where brain waves reach the epsilon rhythm. To slow the volunteer’s heart rate, she administered a potassium and magnesium solution through an IV. Akhilesh’s heart failed to withstand the strain. The instruments traced a straight line, and attempts at resuscitation with a defibrillator and adrenaline injections failed.

The next day, newspapers were filled with accusations of the volunteer’s murder. The department’s chief physician, Eric Giacometti, immediately fired the researcher to deflect damage to the clinic’s reputation.

After a difficult conversation with her superiors, Caroline arrived for dinner with Jacques and his new acquaintance, Charlotte, at their Fontainebleau country house. The woman appeared composed, smoked heavily, talked about the indigenous Senoi tribe of Malaysia, and denied any wrongdoing. That night, in her Montmartre apartment, she experienced a bout of sleepwalking, emerged onto the roof naked with a butcher knife in hand, and the next morning, vanished without a trace, leaving her phone and belongings behind.

The search through the police station and private detectives reached a dead end.

Desperate, Jacques locked himself in his bedroom, filled his bed with a stash of chips, and became addicted to heavy tranquilizers. Benzodiazepines numbed his anxiety, erasing his dreams. He tried to find relief from his apathy at a meeting of anonymous night owls in the suburb of Montrouge, where he met an informal student named Justine.

The days turned into an endless haze of marijuana, sex and pizza.

During his next fix on the night of his twenty-eighth birthday, Jacques fell into a paradoxical sleep for the first time in months. On a familiar sandy beach, he was met by a stranger of about forty-eight. The man wore a Hawaiian shirt, held a piña colada, and had the same Y-shaped scar on his forehead.

The guest claimed to be Jacques Klein from the future.

He reported that he had survived thanks to the sixth stage of sleep and a personal discovery codenamed "Aton." His mother was alive, hiding in the Malaysian jungle among the Senoi aborigines, and was currently dying at the hands of mercenaries.

Jacques Jr. dismissed the encounter as a drug-induced delirium. Then his future self exacted a punishment, locking the young skeptic in the grip of sleep paralysis. Justine and her drug dealer friend, Patrick, assumed the motionless guest was dead from an overdose. Fearing the police, they wrapped the living body in an old carpet, took it to the Ourcq Canal, and tied two heavy cinder blocks to its ankles.

Only at the moment when the edge of the canal was under his feet, Jacques, with the power of his mind, begged the guest from the future for salvation, broke the paralysis and was saved from imminent drowning.

The Jungle and the Dream Mistress

Arriving in Kuala Lumpur, the young man sought out French reporter Frankie Charras in an opium den. The former legionnaire suffered from bouts of narcolepsy, suddenly falling asleep mid-conversation or mid-step. For three thousand euros, Charras agreed to help.

Together, they hired elephants, then mounted bicycles and raced through endless rows of oil palm plantations. Ancient rainforests had fallen to the axe of the timber industry. Local fishermen pointed them further east, remembering the blonde European woman who had loaded the remnants of the tribe onto a ship and carried them out to sea.

On a tiny, nameless island among the reefs of the South China Sea, travelers were taken captive by natives with sarbakans.

Jacques was untied by a blind girl with white eyes. Her name was Shambaya, the daughter of a local elder and the title of Mistress of Dreams. She confirmed that Caroline had bought the island with her severance pay, sheltered three hundred and sixty outcasts there, and taught them French. However, the land had attracted the Kiambang Tour company because of the deep-sea Blue Hole, ideal for diving.

Shambaya led Jacques to a mound with a gravestone and said that three days ago, mercenaries shot the scientist during a night raid.

Overcoming his grief, Jacques remained in the community. The Senoi subordinated their entire daily life to nightly visions. Every morning began with a communal fire, where residents shared dreams, smoothed over conflicts with gifts, and asked forgiveness for offenses inflicted on others in their dreams.

Soon, mercenaries kidnapped Jacques and delivered him to the mother ship, where he met with Abdullah Kiambang, the head of the travel agency. The former counterintelligence officer demanded that the island’s deeds be re-signed, subjecting the captive to sleep deprivation. For two days, the children’s song "Little Brother Jacques" blared in the brightly lit cabin. The captive endured the torture by feigning insanity.

As the bandits took the tied-up Frenchman out on a boat to be thrown to the circling sharks, the Senoi ambushed him with poisoned darts.

Returning to the island, Jacques initiated a counterattack.

That night, a detachment of pirogues stormed the mercenary ship. The spoils they obtained radically altered the balance of power: the community now possessed machine guns, computers, and a satellite antenna.

Relying on clues from his older self in his visions, Jacques devised an elegant defense plan. The Earth couldn’t be hidden forever. They contacted Sereinitis Associated, a Canadian travel company promoting eco-friendly and spiritual vacations, online.

The Canadians built a closed, elite retreat with just twelve bungalows. Tourists paid huge sums for diving in the Blue Hole among dolphins and lucid dreaming lessons from Shambaya. Official recognition of the business rendered any bandit raids pointless.

Jacques finally settled among the natives and took Shambaya as his wife.

The Dream Mistress taught the European the ancient technique step by step. He learned to see hands in dreams, fly like a bird, dispel daytime fears, and enter the noosphere — a unified layer of human dreams, resembling a gigantic snowy plain. Over time, he overcame his long-standing fear of open water, learned to swim, and dove with dolphins.

Nine months later, the couple had a sighted son, Icarus.

The years passed. The island prospered, Charras married a native woman, Mugita, and Jacques settled into a quiet family life. Sixteen peaceful years passed. The forty-four-year-old man felt completely happy, until one day, his future double appeared again on the pink sand.

A gray-haired old man of sixty-four years old demanded in a commanding tone that they immediately leave the island and return to France.

The sixth phase of the dream remained unsolved. The main shock came from the guest’s words about his mother.

In the middle of the night, Jacques ran to the grave on the hill and dug up the earth with his hands. Beneath the turf lay only cobblestones. Shambaya confessed to a grave deception. Caroline had faked her death sixteen years earlier, frightened by her own sleepwalking, during which, as a young woman, she had accidentally taken the life of her younger brother. The scientist had secretly returned to Europe after noticing that wild dolphins were induced into a trance by the poisonous bile of the pufferfish.

Having packed his bags, Jacques, his wife and teenage son boarded a plane to Paris.

Morpheus Laboratory and the Klein Loop

The French capital greeted the family with a stuffy, smoky atmosphere. The door to their old apartment in Montmartre was unlocked. The bedroom was in disarray, and through the open veranda window, Jacques saw a naked old woman standing on the tin roof, a fork in her fist.

Carolina was walking in a trance along the edge of the abyss again.

Jacques climbed onto the wet roof, fell, and at the last moment found himself hanging on a flimsy gutter. His scream pulled the sleepwalker from his reverie. Coming to at a height of twenty meters, the elderly woman swayed and slid down. Her son managed to catch her wrist, but her fingers loosened. After whispering the order to open phase six, Caroline fell, plummeting through the branches of a tree in the courtyard.

She survived, but fell into a deep coma.

An aging Eric Giacometti showed up at the hospital. It turned out he’d been secretly working with Caroline all these years. They’d opened a private clinic, "Morpheus," where they studied extreme sleep disorders and sought methods for inducing somnus incognito through controlled hypothermia. The patient was transferred to the private center’s intensive care unit.

Jacques got involved in scientific work.

Charlotte Delgado, married to an influential military official, soon joined the project. Relying on her husband’s connections, she protected the clinic from attacks by pharmaceutical giants, who were losing profits due to the benzodiazepine revelations. Charlotte designed a device called the Dream Catcher, capable of reading brainwaves and projecting dreams directly onto a movie screen.

Nineteen-year-old Icarus became the first star of the new genre, introducing the public to an oneiric remake of the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train.

While oneiric cinema conquered festivals and Shambaya led meditation courses, Jacques struggled with the mystery of the fugue.

Having contacted the spirits of the Haitian voodoo pantheon in his dreams, he extracted from the ghost of Baron Zupimba the formula for a zombification potion. The deadly tetrodotoxin from fish liver was to be stabilized with mandrake and belladonna juices, and brought back to life with a mixture of datura and henbane.

The poison paralyzed the somatics without destroying the intellect.

Having successfully revived the test rodents and the monkey, Jacques decided on a desperate step. He lay down in a saltwater float tank, hooked up the Dream Catcher helmet, and commanded Giacometti to begin cooling the environment.

As my body temperature dropped below thirty degrees, my brain waves slowed. A lethal serum made from fugu venom entered my vein.

The heart dropped to twelve beats per minute, breathing stopped, and the temperature dropped to twenty-five degrees.

Jacques sank to the bottom of a personal abyss. Having overcome the wall of dense nightmare, he found himself in an endless labyrinth of pulsating neurons of his personal unconscious. A gray-haired double appeared next to him.

A flash of doubt nearly destroyed the traveler: his rebellious subconscious generated an electrical storm that wounded the guest from the future. Jacques realized that for years he had been harboring resentment against his parents, envying his enemies, and subconsciously hating himself. By suppressing his inner egoism and accepting his fate, he extinguished the storm.

The older double led him to the long-term memory node.

Together, they mentally folded the neuron into a spatial shape, where the outer surface merged seamlessly with the inside of the neck. The Klein bottle closed the neural impulse into a temporal loop.

The Aton device has started working.

Seconds before midnight, Jacques Klein stepped into the vessel’s vortex, overcame the thickness of years, and materialized on the pink sand.

He saw his younger self, just rescued from the clutches of drug dealers, felt the sand in his palm, and uttered the memorable words: "Oh my God! It worked!" The cycle of time had closed. He repeated the dialogue of twenty years earlier, sending the young man to save his mother to the ends of the earth.

Returning to his body with the help of an antidote administered by his friends, Jacques did not celebrate his triumph.

He ordered his dying mother placed in the chamber. Through the sarcophagus’s microphone, her son guided her fading mind, explaining the geometry of the Klein bottle and urging her to forgive herself for the long-ago childhood tragedy. An hour and a half into clinical death, the monitor’s readings faltered.

Caroline Klein crossed the line, returned through all the phases of sleep and opened her eyes in the arms of her crying son.