Doctor Lady Reverend

Because I’m sleeping without my earring, I can’t access Sweet Dreams – or any BigSky technology. Yet I have to remind myself that this dream is really ‘only a dream’ because it has the heightened vividness of an enhanced dream.

I’m looking down on the Sweet Dreams platform from a balcony in the Dream City. Here the platform is a literal one: a smooth, grey plane transecting the metropolis, a cheesy intrusion of 1980’s-style graphics on the messy, high-resolution splendour of the place. When I pay more attention, I notice that technically Sweet Dreams consists of multiple platforms, several tiers with the largest on top like an upside-down wedding cake. It has been under construction since I can remember, but I have never seen it from this outside perspective – from a bird’s-eye perspective, as it were. It looks so real that I have to keep reminding myself: without the earring, my dream is only my dream and everything in it is purely my own interpretation.

It has to be.

Well, in that case, I’ve become surprisingly fluent in dreaming. Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of all the sessions I’ve been doing for others, because even my own dream is more lucid than before I got sick. I can metacognate even inside the unfolding events. I can control what’s going on.

A bonkers amount of scaffolding surrounds the platform, whose surface is pierced intermittently by cranes and decked with ladders. The infrastructure for the finished construction stretches for kilometres into the distance, so that Sweet Dreams will ultimately transect a great swathe of the Dream City – if it all gets built. The completed regions feature greyscale people wandering around acting out their inner fantasies; I guess these are supposed to be the beta-users, but I can’t forget the other dream in which they were drowning themselves. Here they just wander around aimlessly, having imaginary conversations and performing routine actions that make them look like a drama class doing warm-ups.

That’s when I realise I’m not alone. Meera Bhango is standing on the balcony with me. She’s peering into a telescope trained on the Dream City.

No, wait, it’s not a telescope. It’s a microscope.

The patch of balcony under her feet is unresolved grey, just like the Sweet Dreams platform, as if she’s been transposed here from Sweet Dreams.

A complicated series of emotions threads through me, from hope to shame and back. I want to talk to her, but I’m afraid of how she’ll react. In the video she sounded so positive, so hopeful about the future of technology. Yet listening to her talk made me feel ugly and unwanted, like a shadow or stain. I am ashamed of my condition. People like Dr Bhango are in charge of things, they are important. I am an outsider, a scavenger, a chancer. A fox in a Hampstead rubbish bin.