When The Body Sleeps

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• March 2, 2026

Chapter One.

Quinn Harting was a normal boy who likes dinosaurs and superheroes. He was frightened of the dark, a quality his father thought was sign of weakness, completely forgetting his own fear of the dark when he was small, clinging to his mother’s leg. So the irony was completely lost on Quinn’s father when he banished Quinn from sleeping beside his mother and father, and directed back to his room where there were no monsters.

This would be the first time Quinn would have a memory of his ability, though it would take years to harness. Because just before turning seven years old, Quinn would wake up from his bed, looking at himself lying there in the sheets. Freaked out, he ran upstairs to his parents room, trying to shake them awake. But he found his touch had no such effect. He could not feel his parent’s warmth. Literally. He ran back to his room to himself, and his panic subsided when he could see that his body was breathing. His chest was rising up and down. He was not dead or dying. Quinn was too young to know the term “out of body experience” but often we understand things before they are labeled.

Quinn went to the front door but found opening doors in a dream state frustrating, so he crawled through the doggie door to go outside. He attempted to fly, but was disappointed that physics still played some sort of role in this lucid dreaming state. Instead, he wandered around the neighborhood, in the dark. He noticed more stars than he had before, he looked into the window of his insomniac neighbor watching old sitcom reruns, he even approached a beautiful young woman with tears in her eyes smoking a cigarette and he wished he could hug her because he was so innocent at the time, he didn’t think beautiful women ever had a reason to cry (his older sister would tell him beautiful women have the most reasons to cry because people never loved them, just how they looked, but like most men, he wouldn’t understand what she was saying till much later), but he walked on and a dog barked at him. The dog couldn’t see him at all, but the dog had some sort of sense he was there.

There was a playground just over a mile from Quinn’s home, with a giant slide that the bigger kids played ‘king of the slide’ on, which he was not allowed to play because he was too small and easily hurt. He ran towards there. He saw that playground in the distance, but as he got closer, something was not right. Trees started disappearing and reappearing. His legs felt impossibly heavy. Stars fell from the sky.

His pillow wet from sweat, Quinn woke in his bed. This was the exact moment Quinn stopped being afraid of the dark.

The experience stayed with Quinn, but it didn’t reoccur until puberty, so the memory was placed on the back burner of his brain. And he continued on as most normal children do. A regular routine of mom gently waking him with a hug and kiss, dad scrambling eggs, his older sister getting annoyed at his younger sister, and he went to school which he found boring, played soccer which he found fun, and looked forward to climbing trees and candy snacks during movies.

He started experiencing the normal awkward pangs of puberty— starting with body oder which his sisters relentlessly mocked him for and he overcompensated with his father’s expensive cologne. His interest in dinosaurs shifted to girls. His voice was changing, his body was changing and he started repeatedly waking up in the middle of the night, standing over his own body.

Quinn had a good group of friends, and one afternoon when they were all playing video games, he found a window to nonchalantly ask if anyone had dreams where they left their body, and some one replied, “I only have dreams about banging your mom,” and all laughed.

Despite Quinn’s research, he was unconvinced he was merely lucid dreaming at night. He was more and more certain he could leave his body as he slept and be a sort of spirit walker. Though it wasn’t an exact science, or science at all, there were rules. Like he couldn’t fly. And he could only go about a mile from his body before he would be forced back into it, and be jolted into reality.

Though it is perverted, keep in mind, any horny teenage male with this ability would do the same. When he left his physical body, he would stalk the beautiful women in the neighborhood. He was literally the invisible man. He watched women shower. He watched women masturbate. He sometimes watched people having sex, but he preferred watching women where another man wasn’t there.

Amy was a young woman who recently graduated from college and rented an illegal attic apartment two blocks east of Quinn’s house. He was standing in her room watching her undress late one night, and he said, “I wish I could love you,” and Amy reacted. She reacted. She didn’t hear what he said, but she heard something. She frantically threw on an oversized t-shirt, threw on all the lights and searched the apartment. Amy was as logical as she was fair, and assumed perhaps she overheard her downstairs neighbor. But then Quinn did something he never did before. He knocked over her water glass. He never moved anything in the real world in this state. Amy got freaked out and said, “ghost, you are not welcome here!” So Quinn obeyed, and left.

Some days later, he talked to his older sister, Jenna about his “spirit walking” as there was no one on the planet he trusted more than Jenna. He left out most of it. Most of the fact that he uses this power to be peeping Tom. Fearing judgement from Jenna. You didn’t want to be judged by Jenna, simply because he deemed her the authority on fair and good, even more than his own parents who grew up in another reality and seemed like a different species to him. He told her about Amy and knocking over the glass.

Jenna thought on this. She also knew Amy. Well, she didn’t really know her, but she’s seen her and knew who she was at least. Jenna was unconvinced her brother was actually leaving his body and watching people in real time. She explained it really was all just a dream. Very unusual, and possibly a warning sign of a diet mental illness. Quinn did not take this offensively. Jenna was accepted to every college she applied to and wanted to be a doctor. It was Jenna’s firm belief that almost everyone had what she called “diet mental illness.” That everyone had a touch of mental illness and it didn’t mean we needed medication or make it our identity or excuse, but to rather harness it and use it to make the best version of ourselves.

His sister said there is one solution to prove whether she is right or if he is actually so called “spirit walking” and that would be to go into Amy’s apartment because he had never seen the inside in real or waking life. If it was the same as his dream, perhaps he was a “diet superhero” but if it was different, then that would be proof that this is all just a dream. “Are you suggesting I break into Amy’s apartment?” His sister laughed, “of course not, but maybe there’s a way in that isn’t so… illegal. Like actually being invited in.” Now, Quinn felt like a vampire. “I’m not even sixteen yet, why would a twenty-something invite me up to her apartment.” Jenna smiled, “who said it had to be you?”

Quinn respected his sister for a myriad of reasons, but he loved her for being a little mischievous. It was Jenna’s plan. And it was brilliant, Quinn thought. She would pretend she was considering commuting to college (she wasn’t) and wanted to see how the apartment was made, pretending to have an Aunt in the neighborhood with the same model house that was interested in converting the upstairs into an apartment. It worked. Not overnight. But Jenna put herself in a position to approach Amy in a friendly way and ask if she could see her apartment. Amy admired the sort of independence and confidence Jenna had, and invited her in. Jenna took pictures of the apartment “for reference for her aunt” and immediately sent them to her brother.

The images raised every hair on Quinn’s neck. It was just like his “dream.” He was not dreaming at all. His spirit self could walk out of his physical self. But he texted his sister back, “lol, totally different from what I imagined.” And they hardly ever talked about it again.

Knowing this, Quinn didn’t stop being a pervert. In fact, he become a little more perverted. Like he would nap during the day, and then wander into the locker room at school to see every girl in his grade naked. But more importantly, or more impact-fully, he started cheating on tests. He found ways to exhaust himself by depriving himself of sleep at night or taking supplements to nod off during tests. It took so much practice to sleep leaning on one hand so it wasn’t obvious he was sleeping, and even more practice to realize that he could in fact move light objects a little, so he could force his own hand to selecting the correct answer. If he put as much effort into studying, he probably could have aced any test, but he became the “smartest” person in his graduating class by cheating in a way no one even thought was possible. His teachers and family alike praised how he went from a B student to straight As. He rather liked that praise. The only person suspicious of him was Madeline— the girl he cheated off of the most. She was the valedictorian. He was the salutatorian. They both would go to college at NYU.

At NYU, he hardly saw Madeline, which she was grateful for, and frankly, so was Quinn. It was hard to be a fraud around people who knew you were a fraud. Of course, he couldn’t go to school for medicine, like his sister, since he wasn’t actually learning. So he went for business instead, because he was sure you didn’t have to be that smart to be successful in business, and it seemed almost every highly successful person in business proved this, despite themselves.

New York City was the place to be the invisible man. There was SO MUCH to see within a mile radius. Quinn was never bored. He was also never broke. New York City, notoriously expensive, was home to very wealthy people. He could spy on them at night. Learn their alarm codes and safe codes. Quinn justified his actions that he hardly took enough for these elite to notice. A few thousand off the top. If reported, surely authorities would say, “why would someone break into your safe to only steal a thousand dollars and leave the rest of the money and gold bars?” Their own children would be blamed, or house maids, which he would feel bad about. But none the people he robbed made news. Someday, he’d make his own money, but he relished in the hero status of buying rounds at the bar for the boys, or taking a girl to an Omakase Sushi dinner.

One could judge Quinn for his behavior. Or one could accept that this is what most young men in this position would do. He was not good nor evil, just an immature young man, looking to have fun and hedge his bets.

In his sophomore year at school, NYU would make headlines after two girls were found murdered in the closet at an apartment where a party was taking place. Quinn was at this party. It was a typical college party. Alcohol was the drug of choice, but other drugs were circling. Boys eyed the girls they wanted to have with. Those girls were eyeing the older boys, foolishly thinking a senior in college is more mature than a sophomore in college. Quinn was playing beer pong, and winning. He was great at beer pong and didn’t even have to cheat! He was mid throw when he heard the scream that stopped the party. A girl opened the closet and a bleeding and clearly dead girl plopped out. It wasn’t until further investigating that she wasn’t the only dead girl in that closet.

The party was evacuated and every one was brought in for questioning. The students were as disturbed as the police and the public that they were partying in a place where two bodies were hidden. But it seemed no one knew what happened, even though every one was a suspect.

Forensics would confirm that the girls were killed before the party, but mere hours. No one was even sure if they were killed in the apartment or moved there. Detectives were stumped. The boys sexually involved with those girls were the prime suspects, but besides the fact that they seemed like nice kids who were devastated, there was no evidence concrete or circumstantial to even near a conclusion.

A lot of girls transferred to other schools after that. Months went by, and there wasn’t so much as a suspect. The parents of the dead girls pleaded on social media to the student. Surely, someone knew something. Rewards were posted for tips that led to arrest. The disturbance wasn’t just felt by the school, but the whole city.

Leaving his body in the middle of a test, Quinn stood over the shoulders of the smartest kids in his class, unbeknownst to him. But this would be the first test Quinn failed not just in college, but since he’d being doing this little trick. Quinn would never finish this test at all. Because something happened that day. Something that would change his life forever. When he looked up, he saw her. She was bloody like the day she was found dead. Walking through the classroom.

“Holy shit,” Quinn said. And she turned. She turned and looked at him and she saw him. She said, “you can see me?” And that that exact moment he woke up, and ran out of the classroom with a fright he had not known since he was a kid, running up the stairs to his parents house in the middle of the night from a nightmare. Just like that, Quinn was afraid of the dark again.