Dream-Recording Machine

This story is written 4 months ago but since it is not completed, I did not publish it. The idea was to write a story with a student, piece by piece, in six parts. First part I have written. Then my student wrote the second part. Then I wrote the third etc... After I wrote the 5th, my student gave up on writing the end. It was fun but perhaps it was too much for a beginner. So the story is still incomplete.

I am going to publish it in coming days and finish it by the end of this process. Let's see if I can remember what message I wanted to give at the beginning and if it is still possible to do it after all the deviations caused by the change of writers/perspectives.

Here is the first three parts:

The news of the invention of a dream-recording machine which helps you to watch your dream in the day time spread to the public like the spring wind carrying the sweet smell of flowers right before pouring down a heavy rain on the unprepared citizens of the city. Wealthy housewives giggled incessantly in their never ending tea parties, monks and politicians worried about the future of their privacies, university professors discussed the ethical dilemmas this machine can bring to one’s social network and artists felt extremely excited with the possible avalanche of new inspirations. Everyone was expecting something revolutionary from this machine except for the farmers and workers who easily sleep after a hardworking day and dream nothing most of the times. They simply did not understand the use of dreaming a dream second time and wasting the valuable day time for something very superfluous.

But as it happens in all technological inventions, no matter what people say or think about its harm or uselessness, technology always wins with the help of mass production, mass marketing and of course the comodified values of mass cultures. First they are advertised in newspapers and televisions: “No more hard time to remember your dreams!”. A psychoanalyst who used to sit next to a divan is seen watching a large TV set and taking notes in these commercials. Big companies got in the queue to grab their shares from the market. “Sleep tight in the night and play the fun in the day” became the motto of the multi-national companies. Second by second, every detail of the dreams is put on the recorder’s memory. Some felt depressed when they wake up and see nothing on the screen as if their sleep was a waste of time, some were having a masochistic pleasure to see the frightening nightmares once more, some were happy to watch their extreme fantasies clearly on the screen when they are fully awake and some were quite embarrassed to see how their minds play tricks on them in their most intimate moments.

Things were fine and the huge sales of the sets made big companies bigger, rich men richer, happy women happier till one day a TV channel asked a worker on the street about his opinion on this recorder. He stared at the camera’s objective as if he sees who is watching him at the other side and said “I have no interest in my own dreams but I want to see the dreams of our president. I want them to be broadcasted. He is ruling our country so his dreams cannot be private. I want to see the dreams of the monks too as they guide poor ignorant people, the businesspeople who bid for public services, and the policemen who seek for opportunities to beat protesting wor…” The broadcast was cut at this point but the words were already on air. His offer spread even faster than the machine itself and a few months later, after tens of violent protests on the streets, the president has accepted to his dreams to be broadcasted.

Two days before the president’s acceptance, a master group called LOLLY had come to the final stage of testing a thought recording machine. This project had been launched at exactly the same time as the one on dream recording. The difference was that LOLLY worked under the president’s command—secretly, while the dream freaking stuff, thought the president, was initiated by a group of middle-class students.

LOLLY sent him a letter, trying to explain why their thought recording machine would have to produce things in audio form, not visual form as dream recording machines, already available on the market nationwide, now did. Impatient after reading the first few pages of scientific evidence, he jumped to the last paragraph: “When we dream, we tend to see things, and those images, when controlled, will last long enough on the retinas so that a machine, working like a camera, can capture them. However, when we’re in a mood of ongoing thinking, it’s our inner-voice that reads our own thoughts to us.”

The machine could now follow human thoughts easily unless one faced a long frozen time. In such cases, the machine may lose some data. “But to make it run smoothly is just a matter of days,” said LOLLY at the end of the letter.

“Fuck off,” the president said to himself, afraid that his rudeness would be heard by some potential leisured journalists.

If the thought recording machine had come before the dream stuff, he would have known what was in the minds of those workers and asked the massive media apparatus under his arms to silence them all. Better, though, would be that he had known about the dream recording project and anticipated its consequences right when it got started, so that he could have abandoned it once and for all.

A professional person in all aspects of life that he was, the president quickly had some ideas analysed before his first dream went public.

Bullet point number one, he wrote: Making fabricated dreams—showing people well-directed, eight-hour movies. It won’t work, he thought, for a tiny dream recording machine had been implanted on his left hand and connected to the national TV network and some other networks of neighbouring countries.

Bullet point number two: Writing scripts and taking medicine that helps to cook the scripts into dreams. “Wow,” he cheered himself up, but “it takes science plenty of time to make such a revolution,” he smartly relied on his rationality and scientific background. “But it’s OK, I’ll invest in such a project if I’m still in power,” the calm president tried not to joke, not even to himself, because according to Freud, jokes would just make his dreams more sexually embarrassing.

He would now love to suffer from insomnia and work overnight. As he was waiting for a thick coffee, he remembered, from his university days, that he sometimes got stuck with a mathematical problem, and when his stress turned into a good sleep, he would find the answer there!

That night, perhaps because of the math problem in his head, he dreamed of a war of prime numbers against the composites. He was 19 and at the front line enjoying the initial victories of primes. It was a fierce bloodbath as primes claim that they constitute the noble class and without them composites cannot exist. But at the same time, composites claim that they were the ones filling the spaces in the number line therefore make the whole number system works efficiently. Without composites, there will be no meaning in the nobility of primes at all. Although at the beginning prime numbers were strong as their cardinalities are proportionally high for small sets, as the war dissolved, the composites made great advances in organizing themselves into small groups, then bigger and bigger groups. Once primes understood that they are losing the war they tried to escape from the battle zone but most of them were caught and forced to multiply by each other so that there will be no more primes in the system and all numbers will be treated equally.

He woke up from his dream with the extreme fear in his eyes like a cat staring at the headlights of an approaching car and he asked his advisors to edit his dream and if possible reverse the ending with the victory of primes. The advisors edited the dream by cutting the hidden messages and reversing the end so that the sleeping spectre will not wake up and cause any trouble. After that day he asked help from LOLLY and managed to use the thought-reading machine to analyse his suppressed appetites before he goes to sleep so that his unconscious consternations will not come to the surface while he is asleep. So he achieved to filter his dreams and keep himself away from all sorts of accusations from the public.

President was lucky to handle his dreams before they are being broadcasted. What people usually see on their TVs were happy middle-class families in large clean houses, beautiful youth with their recently developed electronic gadgets and smiling people returning from the morning masses with the monks and priests bless them one by one while the sun rises behind the mountains, promising a happier, more elegant, richer future… None of the dreams included the poor farmers or miserable workers. None mentioned how they live in tough conditions and try very hard to keep alive if not only healthy and happy under the almost obnoxiously named “sufficiency economy”.

But not everybody was as lucky and powerful as the president. The dirty dreams of the abbot did not even give him a chance to apologize. He was forced to resign and no other monk wanted to replace him as none was cleaner than him when all their secrets made them slaves of their unconscious desires. One by one, monks left their temples and started their lives as farmers or workers. Finally they were making their own livings without requiring the alms of the people. The temples are turned to schools where the illiterate people can learn reading and writing, jobless people can learn designing small tools and poor disadvantaged people can learn developing basic technical skills.

The same trouble also made many business persons to avoid bidding for huge investments as their dreams include corrupting the system and cheating people with poor quality of service while receiving extortionate money from the people. And finally the police and the soldiers lost the trust of the people with their dreams showing their brutal acts just to keep their own pockets full with the money from the elites. What people learnt is these so-called armed professionals who are supposed to protect people from the external danger can turn their guns which are bought by the same people’s tax money to anyone who stands against their profit-hungry wills.

Losing the support of the monks, the soldiers, the police and the businesspeople, the president started to feel the danger coming from all directions. His dreams were still calm and surreal as long as they were censored. However, he knew that even though the head looked healthy it was impossible to keep it intact while the tumours were popping up almost everywhere on the body. He was feeling more and more trapped and sometimes because the censorship committee cuts 90% of the dream, there was nothing to show on TV for people to view.