“Waking Moments” is episode thirteen of season four of Star Trek: Voyager.
Harry has just come off work when Seven of Nine approached him and says she needs urgent assistance in a Jeffries tube. Tuvok is asleep when the bridge comms him and asks him to report. The captain enters an empty mess hall and the lights don’t come on. Tom is piloting a shuttle when Chakotay checks in with him.
Tuvok is walking to the bridge and other crew are avoiding looking at him. In the Jeffries tube, Seven is hovering weirdly over Harry. She didn’t need him to look at her work. She’s learned from Tom and B’Elanna that humans need a pretext prior to being intimate. And kisses him. Tom is having problems on his shuttle and the orbit is decaying. Voyager can’t hear his request for an emergency beam out. The captain is surprised by Neelix and asks him where everybody is. He’s surprised she didn’t see them and turns the lights on. There are several cobwebbed corpses sitting around a table.
Tuvok arrives on the bridge and everyone laughs – which includes, Tom, Harry and Captain Janeway. He has forgotten to put his uniform on. Tuvok re-enters the turbolift and finds an alien there. Janeway is asking Neelix what happened. They died because she didn’t get them home in time. The same alien is there. Tom sees the alien through the shuttle’s viewport. Harry sees the alien where Seven of Nine was. He screams and jolts upright in bed before falling back to sleep. The other three all wake up. Everyone was dreaming.
Tom is in his quarters when B’Elanna arrived. She asks if he slept well. Not really. Why is she there? She thought she’d stop by and ask why Tom why he didn’t meet B’Elanna in the mess hall. 40 minutes ago. He had a nightmare. They don’t have time now and apparently aren’t seeing much of each other. A date is arranged for Friday. Tom wants to go skiing. B’Elanna wants somewhere warmer. In the mess hall, Tom asks Neelix for coffee. Then spits it out and asks Neelix if he had a rough night. Because he has just poured Tom a steaming cup of cooking oil. Yes; Neelix had nightmares too.
Captain Janeway arrives on the bridge and comments to Chakotay that they are shorthanded. Tom and Harry are both late. The captain says she is a little late herself. Chakotay says he had a bad dream. Tom arrives and takes his station as Captain Janeway asks Chakotay about his dream. He mentions seeing an alien and Tom looks round. The captain says there was an alien in her dream and starts describing it. It matches Chakotay’s alien and Tom says he saw the same alien too. Tuvok admits he had an unsettling dream when asked and saw the alien. The captain wants to summon the senior staff, but Harry isn’t responding. He’s still in his quarters.
Janeway and Tuvok head to Harry’s quarters. She asks what happened with the alien, which he saw in the turbolift. It scrutinised him, followed him back to his quarters then watched him getting dressed. At Harry’s quarters, Tuvok overrides the door and they find Harry still asleep and he won’t wake up.
He’s not the only one. The Doctor says they aren’t comatose but are in a hyper REM state. He can’t wake them. From all signs, they are simply asleep. The Doctor recommends a drug. Not for the sleepers, because nothing is working, but for everyone else so that they don’t go to sleep.
An Identikit is done on the alien but no-one recognises it. Even the Borg haven’t assimilated any members of their species. They are seemingly under attack, but there are no ships or planets nearby. Chakotay suggest looking for the aliens in their dreams, as that’s the only place they’ve been seen. Using lucid dreaming; Chakotay can do it using a variation on his vision quests. Captain Janeway agrees, but he has to do it in sickbay.
Chakotay has a method of knowing he’s in a dream – seeing the Moon – and a method of waking himself up. He dreams he’s chasing a deer with a spear and ends up in the mess hall where he sees the Moon. The deer becomes the alien. The alien attacks saying that this is more than a dream, it’s the alien’s reality. Chakotay is no different to the others, the waking species, who for years have tried to destroy the aliens in their sleep. Now, when they fall asleep, they will enter the aliens’ reality and be destroyed. They are no threat when they are asleep. Chakotay says he can wake and find them in the waking world.
The aliens live in the realm of dreams and tell Chakotay how to leave their territory. Everything looks like it’s been solved and everyone wakes up. It’s not that easy. For one thing, it’s possible to think you’ve woken up in a dream only to still be asleep. How to tell whether you’re awake or not?