“The Year our Dreams Went Public”
It was the year our dreams went public and like a lot of people I could no longer sleep at night. I'd keep waking up, opening one eye to see if he was looking at me knowingly, of the dreams I'd never share but now were there for anyone to see: our minds at night available to anyone with an app downloaded for 1.99.
What about privacy? People protested when the whole thing started.
What do you have to hide? Politicians replied, and slept in bunkers with blocked wi-fi.
*
It was the year our dreams left our minds, generating cash for corporations that used them to sell advertising.
I didn't care about the rest of the world and what they thought or would think about me and my dreams. I never had before. But I cared about him, sleeping next to me every night. Sooner or later he would get curious, it was human nature, and then I'd have to explain my unconscious that wasn't always thinking of him.
I tried to preempt. I asked him about it, hypothetically.
"This is nonsense," he said. "We can't control what we dream."
"But what if…? What if I dreamed of other men? Wouldn't you hate me, hypothetically?" I asked and was grateful that he never watched the TV or the newspapers that now streamed our inner worlds for supposed entertainment.
He waved me off. "This will all blow over soon," he said, "you'll see." People will get tired of this."
I didn't dream of other men. It was worse than that. I dreamed of other places, whole lives elsewhere that I led without him. Happy lives. Long detailed dreams filled with them.
"We can't control what we dream," I said back to him.
*
But people tried anyway, to control their dreams. With our Circadian rhythms broken we became tired fragmented versions of our previous selves, with dream recorders in every building, self-censoring machines by our nightstands, the battle more than most could handle. New pills were invented, a lot of them, most of them lousy with side effects.
I should have never started taking them. I know that now.
At first no one considered how dreams contained things often hidden even from our own selves. Things we might not want to know. The pills gave me dreamless sleep at night and made me lethargic when I was awake, so I didn't notice how he changed. I didn't notice the circles around his eyes, the demented smiles. I didn't notice him watching his own dream contents, not until it was too late.
On the TV someone called it the potential end of the human race.
"I know all of the things that you think I don't," I heard him say in his sleep one night. His eyes were open and staring at the ceiling, the retinas moving rapidly, dreaming with his eyes open, trying to hide from himself, but failing.
Ioanna Mavrou
is a writer from Nicosia, Cyprus. Her short stories have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, Necessary Fiction, The Letters Page, and elsewhere. She runs a tiny publishing house called Book Ex Machina and is the editor of Matchbook Stories: a literary magazine in matchbook form.
Twitter: @ioannaonline