The Dream Economy (fiction)

Nothing is priceless - not even sleep.

My brother cautioned me against this job. He tried it right after graduation, but he didn’t make it past the first week. The sleep cycle disruptions and the vivid dreams were too much for him. He spiraled quickly. Usually he’s smart, creative, and diligent, but as a novelty miner he was…

“Utterly unproductive,” he read through gritted teeth - his termination notice. “How can I be productive when I’m unconscious? When I’m drugged out of my mind for ten hours a day?”

“Isn’t that the point?” I asked. By then, I was already privy to the industry. I was underage, but I knew it was my destiny. I had no talents to offer otherwise.

“Isn’t what the point?” My brother asked. He studied me with narrowed eyes. “Brain rot? Don’t tell me you’re thinking about it. I only did this out of desperation. You still have time to walk a different path.”

I shrugged. “Almost every degree and cert. has machine parity. This is what we’re worth, now. Can’t be that bad, can it?”

He looked away, swallowed like he was repressing a rogue thought, and after a pause he said quietly, “It can.”

The mining industry boomed in the years following. People came up with all sorts of ingenious solutions to the problems my brother had faced in the early days. Circadian regularity supplements, sensory dampeners, etc. The most effective was the Anderson Method, a sleep/wake algorithm which keeps workers in the hypno-zone for hours-long shifts, rather than the few minutes of prior methods. Because of the increased efficiency, the workday was shortened to six hours; any longer risked burning out the worker’s potential. My brother remained skeptical. He said the Anderson Method rots the brain even more than the old way, that we’ll all have dementia in our forties.

I could hardly have cared less about what I’d be like in middle age, or whether I’d even make it so long. All I wanted was an occupation that could pay the rent. They opened a free training camp for underage prospects, and I, age 23 then, was among the first to sign on. That winter I learned to meditate, lucid dream, and navigate fatigue delirium. In the final week, we got to try a limited version of the mining terminal. I couldn’t recall much of the experience, but I remember afterwards I felt… much lighter.

Whatever they had extracted from me was rather valuable, apparently. I was one of the few to leave the camp with a check.

“This is not something you want to get good at,” my brother warned.

He had lost a friend to psychosis. She was a stage actress who sold her talent to the mines in exchange for the highest salary of her career. Did they push her too hard, or did she over-exert herself? In the end, the supplements were helpless to keep her ego intact. I heeded the warning, but it did not deter me. Casualties are inevitable in any industry.

“What is it like spending most of your day, you know… turned off?”

I’m on a second date and she’s asking me about work. That’s how it is these days: work is the thing you forget to discuss on first dates. Most of us have the same job anyway. Not her - she lives off royalties of her pre-parity design work. Now she spends her days wide awake, wandering the city.

“It’s more like standby,” I say. “Not asleep, not awake. Really, I prefer it to waking. And I’d probably prefer it to sleeping if I could remember what it feels like to be asleep.”

“You prefer it.” She smirks. “Even now?” She reaches across the table and grabs my hand, rubs her thumb along my knuckles.

I nod. “In the hypno-zone, this moment will mingle with other moments in my unconscious mind. I’ll make connections I can’t possibly articulate in words. It’s… psychedelic. Every day is a revelation.”

“And those revelations are sold to the highest bidder, yeah?”

“I sure hope so,” I say, laughing. “Otherwise I’m getting jipped.”

Before we could think, we dreamed. Before we could dream, we moved through the world like dispassionate machines - totally uninteresting to ourselves. Totally unaware. Now, released from the burden of rationality - in a sense having won a million-years game - we are thrust halfway back into the dream to see what great wonders we may find there.

“We’ll find what we’ve always found,” my brother says. “Beauty, horror, and eternal dissatisfaction.”

The stim kicks and I awaken again, eager to give my offering.