THE SLEEP TEST
When dreams become evidence, sleep becomes a crime scene.
Dr. Nora Vex believed the Somnus Array would revolutionize neuroscience, a breakthrough technology capable of mapping the sleeping mind with unprecedented clarity. What she didn't anticipate was that monitoring consciousness could become weaponizing it.
When the first subject, Claire Mercer, reports experiencing an invasive presence during dream monitoring, Nora dismisses her concerns as a psychological reaction to the equipment. It's a decision that will haunt her for decades.
Six years later, people begin dying in their sleep, killed not by disease, but by their own forced confessions. Dr. Anton Volkov, a grieving father turned digital executioner, has transformed the Array into something terrifying: a weapon that invades sleeping minds, extracts buried guilt, and destroys people with their own memories. No trial. No defense. Just consciousness weaponized against itself.
As seventeen victims die and dozens more suffer permanent neural damage, Nora must confront the catastrophic consequences of her ambition. The technology she created to illuminate consciousness has become a tool for psychological execution. And Claire Mercer, the woman whose warnings she ignored, has become Volkov's accomplice, her own trauma weaponized to help him deliver his twisted vision of justice.
But stopping Volkov means entering his network voluntarily, experiencing the forced transparency that has already killed so many. It means confronting not just his crimes, but her own: the subjects she failed, the warnings she dismissed, and the safeguards she didn't implement because career advancement mattered more than caution.
The Sleep Test is a psychological thriller that spans twenty-five years, examining what happens when the last truly private space, the dreaming mind, becomes accessible to invasion. Through multiple perspectives and across decades of evolution in consciousness technology, it explores impossible questions: Can forced truth be justice? Does accountability require psychological violence? And how do we protect consciousness when the very act of studying it creates vulnerability?
In a world where neural monitoring becomes routine, where dreams can be surveilled, and where sleep itself requires security protocols, how do we preserve the sanctuary where consciousness processes what waking life cannot fully face?
Some knowledge should have remained theoretical. Some doors should never have been opened. Some minds should have stayed unmapped.
Perfect for readers of Black Mirror, The Minority Report, and philosophical horror that makes technology's darkest possibilities feel uncomfortably plausible.
Praise for Angel Mukhiya's Dark Fiction:
"Mukhiya writes darkness with purpose, examining horror not to glorify it, but to understand how individuals and institutions fail when conventional morality becomes inadequate."
"Psychological complexity wrapped in atmospheric dread. Characters who resist simple categorization. Ethical questions that haunt long after the final page."
"Where supernatural horror offers metaphorical monsters, Mukhiya's speculative work presents technological nightmares that feel dangerously possible."
Content Warning: This novel contains depictions of forced psychological exposure, consciousness invasion, neural trauma, suicide, and themes of institutional failure enabling catastrophic harm. Reader discretion advised.
Categories: Psychological Thriller Science Fiction Techno-Horror Speculative Fiction Dark Fiction
"The mind you save might be your own."
