Staffan Linzatti – The Silent Dreamers

The Silent Dreamers

We all frequent that world regularly, a world that unites the past, the present, imagination, fears, sorrows, joys and visions of the possible future in a fragmented state of timelessness. The dreamer is normally unaware of the dream being just a dream. While being engaged in this state the dreamer need not make the distinction between what is real, in the traditional sense, and what is not.

In the later half of the 21st century, technology has advanced enough for people to live out their fantasies in a dream-like state.

With these new machines… if reality is what we perceive, then what we perceive must be reality.

We humans have always been fascinated by our dreams and we constantly attempt to rationalize the elusive dream world, seeking to lucidly translate its seemingly chaotic nature and fit it into our cognizant world. While at first, the interest was purely psychological or spiritual, the invention of the first dream machine quickly changed things. The dream machines were used extensively as pure entertainment, where only one’s imagination set the limits of the experience.

There were, however, people who believed that these machines could potentially solve several social dilemmas emerging throughout that century. Most shrugged at the idea of the play-technologies having any sort of impact on human life moving forward. However, it turns out the creation of these machines would reshape or rather, …expand our definition of what is considered “real”.

A conscious ocean of bits, bytes and wires.

Floating DevicesTM, as they are called, sister tech to cryo sleep tubes, enable people to enter a dream-world fueled by their own subconscious mind through real-time electrochemical analysis of individual neurons in the hippocampus, projected back into the player via a network of neural synthesizers. The players inside the machines… asleep. Peaceful and motionless on the outside and completely shut out from common reality, but fully alive and living inside the infinite possibilities of their minds. We call them “The Silent Dreamers”.

As one small step forward in science and technology can very quickly give way to many larger leaps in technological advancements, given the right cultural and market conditions, dream tech was developed and ready as a consumer product in record speed. This of course, was from standing on the shoulders of countless hundreds of thousands of years spent in awe of the mystical dream state, wondering and theorizing.. and in the later years of human culture, mankind could finally create a portal and peek through into the mythic realm of the unconscious mind.

One thing that has not developed as fast as our ability to induce and make dreams a part of people’s wakeless reality, is what dreams actually are. Sure the general consensus is that dreams are a part of our brains’ defragmentation system – optimizing and organizing memories as well as processing input received from all senses throughout our lives.

Am I a part of your dream or you of mine?

Dreams affect us. We have all experienced that one bad dream of the night, the one you remembered waking up. Your coffee doesn’t quite taste the same, your step doesn’t have as much spring in it as it had the day before. Was it simply a randomly appearing memory inserted into a chaotic context that forced an emotive response during REM-sleep? Maybe… most likely. The cause, or rather, the causality here is not that important. It was felt and experienced, and a response was triggered. The unconscious and the conscious world bleeding into each other like waves crashing on a beach. The dreamer is affected by the dreams, but the dreams also affect the dreamer.

One could argue that the major difference between the physical and the dream is that one is “real” while the other is a fragmental atemporal representation of what has previously been “real”, or could be. But what is “real”? A dream while being dreamt is certainly “real”, how could it ever be dreamt otherwise?

A factory of dreams.

A wireless cybernetic implant attached to the player’s upper spine enables the user to feed suggestions or dream altering signals called “path links” into the user’s brain. A patchbay also enables several users to link up their devices creating a shared experience, in hospitals this was a popular way to spend time with a close friend or relative who had chosen to be placed in temporal suspension. A very popular way to spend the final digital eternity in one’s late golden years. The major difference between the two systems is that the floating devices do not halt or slow down the aging process like the temporal beds do, and the temporal suspension technology is a simulation experience, while the Floating Devices more closely resemble reality creation.

“Real-world problems”

Some people claimed this to be an elaborate plan to counter the growing global overpopulation. A way to do away with the less appreciated members of society. This has since been brushed off as a rather paranoid theory. The idea of being able to once more live out a long lost memory or experience that special moment in the past one more time is something we all have thought about and most entities agree, in that the floating devices were merely a casual source of simulation entertainment.

It was indeed true that a large percentage of mankind had chosen to live out the rest of their lives in a Floating Device. Naturally, several large mega corporations took advantage of this new lucrative market of dreams and set up permanent floating banks, some big enough to store millions of players, wherever they found a market. And where they couldn’t find one, they made sure to create it.

What is it like living out the rest of your life without ever waking up?

As more and more people were choosing to become players or “Silent Dreamers” it became clear that for whatever reason, a new start in a completely different world, might be your perfect refuge. This new tabula rasa was ready for you to expand further inward, forming your new reality. A reality written, cast, directed, viewed and enjoyed… exclusively by you.

While the thought of living out your life in a permanent and irreversible slumber, and not in the traditionally “real” sense experiencing the joys, hardships, challenges and other overwhelmingly physical experiences that, in the “real” world shape one’s life… While that might sound unimaginable to some – I think we can agree that we are all dreamers, asleep or not.