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The Future: We Sell Hell (and Suffer Well)

Date: 25-Aug-2008/8:57+3:00

Tags: , , , ,

Characters: friend, me, psychic

A friend took me to a place where you were supposed to get into a sliding bed. It was low to the ground and some sort of machine.
friend: "It's time you saw a real psychic."
My friend slipped a $10 bill to someone buried in the internals of the machine, in a part that was underground. The elderly psychic woman operator had dials and equipment. I panicked and got out of the machine, and bent down to the window where the psychic was.
me: "I'm sorry, I'm claustrophobic. Is it possible to get a reading from outside the machine?"
psychic: "Yes, it will be fine if you...well, keep your head right there."
The psychic twiddled some dials.
psychic: (sighing) "Why are they always bringing the ones who won't even remember what I tell them?"
me: "I can try my best, but I'm probably about to wake up."
psychic: "Well, with your abilities, yes...something might actually stick."
Something was muttered about meters and how my soulmate was 16, but I quickly faded. My point of view switched quickly to where I was looking at several screens floating in midair.
Note
As I was looking at a dial during the conversation, it wasn't clear if '16' was a reading on a meter measuring some non-age quantity, or a human age, or what. Digging back into the last time I was 'metered' we saw a mention of 16 hulls. When I saw the floating screens, they were sort of like Etch-A-Sketches, or the hovering terminals from Invader Zim:
...although I saw them on an all-black background.
Also I had controls where I could rotate and move them superimposed on my field of view, which resembled the interfaces many 3D packages have. I pushed them a bit, they rotated the screens around, but then the controls disappeared and someone took over.
Hovering images began to scold me with warnings about the future, and all the various waves of demands for "real" things and nostalgia for the retro. "Real" things were being cherished and sold at a premium just as "Organic" things are sold today. I saw images of people holding 3.5 floppy disks, which would then be swapped in their hand to a Nintendo cartridge. People were downgrading from something called Plonket to Gmail just because it was old-fashioned and they wanted to talk to old-fashioned type people.
Note I made up Plonket, but it was about like that...started with a 'P' and was some kind of futuristic communications system.
After seeing permutations of this warning theme, the ads stopped. I was lying on my back staring at a blank field of black.
me: "Tell me more!"
I panned around my field of view being attacked by a small helicopter. I grabbed it and fought it off, then there was a missile. When that came for me and exploded I just fended it off. Then I noticed a huge nuclear-class missile flying up into the sky, away from me.
me: (laughing) "Yeah, man. What's scarier than a missile?! A bigger missile, obviously. Well, if a little one doesn't kill me, I'm just going to have to say I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in the idea that a bigger one could. Unless..."
I paused, and thought.
me: "Unless it was like, a universe-destroying missile. But why would anyone destroy the universe just to get rid of me?"
There was a huge explosion.
Note I don't remember if the explosion was before the segment with the ads or after it. I actually did not wake up at that time, but the dream I went into next I will document separately.
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The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction —in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?