Seen it. Seen it. Yeah. Seen it. Seen it. Oh, man. Seen it. Seen it. Geez.
Oh, hey, how’s it going? I’m glad you could give me a moment of your time.
You know, all of us have ambitions. I’m only doing this because I need the work, need to pay the bills. I’m a writer. You’ve not heard of me yet, but one day, hopefully, you will. I was thinking, hey, you know what? The hardest part about writing is finding something to write about. I mean sure, you could write about any old thing, but the key to greatness is finding an idea no one else has ever written anything about.
There’s no money in writing, no fame to be achieved, if all you’re doing is thinking. Especially if, as is the case with me, none of that thinking is of the genuinely original type so far. Hence, this job. Dream monitor. That’s what I do.
What is it? I was hired to observe the dreaming processes of 300 subjects. This company has perfected the technology to translate human dreams onto paper. Those strange stories that our brains tell us each night when we’re asleep, well, we can now read them thanks to the work of scientists here. Being part of the team studying what we dream about might sound pretty wild. I wish it were.
You know how when you’re asleep you’re sort of amazed by the things you see fly through your brain all night? Well, don’t be. Whatever you think about how strange and mystically significant or purposeful those weird pictures and stories are, trust me, they aren’t.
Dreams are, for the most part, trivially insignificant nonsense. You may wow yourself with whatever thoughts you have while you sleep, but you need to disabuse yourself of that idea. We who can read your dreams are not amazed.
On the contrary, folks, your dreams are boring. Worse yet, when you think you’re dreaming about so many bizarre things, you’re not.
The dreams of our 300 test subjects are pretty much the dreary repetition of the same things over and over again.
I thought finding material for my great American novel would be easy here. But everything became the same old story for me pretty much by the end of night two. If you think you’ve had the same dream before, you have. It’s amazing it took you so long to believe that. Each of us has the same dream dozens of times a night.
The dreaming pattern for each of us is simple, the list of subjects short. I’ve been looking at these 300 people for three weeks, and I’ve found that each of them has a set of maybe a dozen dreams that repeat over and over again.
If I read one more story about finding out you have to take a school exam and either you haven’t studied for it or you’re not able to find the classroom to take that exam, I think I’ll jump off a roof. Found yourself standing naked in front of a lot of people? Join the club.
I thought this job, for a writer, would be a dream job. No pun intended. It was such a surprise to find out that the stuff that dreams are made of could actually bore you to tears. A sad, strange thing to discover, but tragically, for my writing ambitions, the sad, strange truth.
Sorry, I gotta get back to work. Thanks for stopping by. I needed a break. If you think of anything original I can write about, please let me know.
Lanning Lee 