Moscow, 1952, mid-October, the XIX Congress of the CPSU had just ended. A communal apartment on Bolshaya Pirogovka. In one of the rooms lives the Petkevich family: Ariadna with her husband Boris and her parents, professor of philosophy Peter Kazimirovich and his wife Angelina Fyodorovna. For those few months that remained until Stalin's death, the family experiences a series of dramatic events. But on a background of terrible time, antisemitism, fabricated "case of doctors", denunciations and snitches, there are people who live their lives without losing dignity.
Teenage boy Misha attends hypnosis sessions with psychotherapist Volkov to recover from sleepwalking. As a result, Misha falls under the influence of a hypnologist to such an extent that he ceases to understand where reality is and where illusion is. After the mysterious death of one of Volkov’s patients, Misha decides to conduct an investigation to get to the bottom of the truth. But what if the dream and reality merged into one, and in the end he becomes the main suspect?