He said that for now all I had to do was monitor the screens and call him if one of them became snowy.

After one shift I realized it was the easiest job I’ve ever had. That the only challenge it posed was keeping myself awake. I invented all sorts of games to pass the time. I tried to find out things about the customers’ lives through the images that appeared on the screens. For instance, there was this one guy who had to be some kind of technician, because electronic devices appeared in all of his dreams, or this mother who dreamed only about her daughter. There was probably some story there. It was nice, looking at the screens, but what really kept me awake was thinking about Debby. About the breakfast I’d make her when I got home, or how I’d hug that big body of hers before she woke up.

Debby kept asking about my job, but I couldn’t tell her anything.

“At least make something up, so I’ll have something to imagine,” she said, but I explained I didn’t know how to lie. She smiled and stopped asking questions.

The lab was just a small room with a fax machine, a desk, and what looked like a big washing machine. Bruno explained that the daily customer reports were faxed in every evening at seven. Each report contained basic information about every customer, and a detailed description of his day. After reading the report, you’d come up with the idea for the dream, and then draw or write it down on a piece of paper. He said he kept everything in the big pile on his desk, and would choose a random page each morning.

“Aren’t we supposed to build a new dream every day?”

“It’s been years since anyone in the industry did that. Usually I recycle something from ’85 or ’91. They barely remember anything anyway.”

Then Bruno showed me how to feed the page into the “washing machine,” which was actually a big metal contraption that manufactures the dream. The paper spins inside the machine for two hours before spitting out the dream onto a little black disk. After a month, the work became more interesting, once Bruno started teaching me how dreams were built. He advised me not to put my heart into it since the business wouldn’t be around much longer. It was a matter of a few years until the global dream companies took over the market. He said you couldn’t compete with a Chinese factory that had thousands of workers and software that produces dreams in HD. I asked him how he even got customers, since people didn’t know who produced their dreams.

“Most of the transactions are through the HMOs, but there are also a few labor unions that do it. Believe me, this whole industry’s basically like the Wild West.”

2.