Episode 3 · 18if

18if

Haruto Tsukishiro just wanted some sleep. Instead he wakes in a bedroom that isn't his, inside someone else's dream, and his phone has an app he never installed. He taps it. A woman lunges for him, ready to drag him into her world, and a white-haired girl he's never met cuts the connection like a lifeline. The woman, it turns out, is a witch. So is every other woman trapped in these layered dreamscapes, all of them sunk in a coma the doctors call Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. Something in their real lives broke them, and the only cure is to go in and beat them. In a dream. Haruto isn't alone down there. A talking cat named Katsumi Kanzaki, who happens to be the leading researcher on this place, tags along, and only Haruto can see the white-haired girl. Katsumi thinks she's Lily, a presence that keeps showing up across different dreams. Witches, minions, doors that may or may not lead home: they fight their way to a blue door and finally beat the witch. Goodbyes are said. See you in the real world. Haruto walks through. He opens his eyes in that same strange bedroom. So the witches have their reasons, Lily has her secrets, and Haruto can't leave at all. What exactly is keeping him here?