An Extraordinary Time in the History of Dreaming

A dream can be a map to unlock reality. Or, at least I was hoping that was the case. This concept, that dreams are trying to tell us something, was why I found myself sitting in the waiting room of The Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal. I felt this was the place for me because whatever I was experiencing fell in between a dream and a nightmare. I wasn’t waking up from a fright, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant either.

Every night for the past six months, which coincidentally was around the time that the pandemic started, I’ve been having the same dream. I am floating in space - there is no sound and nothing much happens. I’m just floating. I am not wearing what you usually see astronauts wearing, but one of those old timey diving suits, like a steampunk kind of thing. There’s a tube running from the chest area of my suit which is attached to a spaceship. And I float, for a very long time. Nothing happens, I just watch the stars and the Earth.

I think that is the nightmare part of the dream - the nothingness. Just me floating by myself in space. So many rich people are trying to figure out how to get into space. Not me. First, I’m not rich. Second, the whole notion kind of terrifies me. Our bodies have been perfectly constructed to function on Earth, and that’s where I would like mine to stay. The movie Gravity? That was a damn horror movie to me!

Again, I didn’t wake up in a fright or anything. But, I would wake up with an incredible sense of loneliness. I wasn’t sad, just a dull sense of melancholy. This melancholy has been increasing and the dullness has infected most of my life. I just don’t feel like doing anything. Even sleep. I’ve tried everything to stop from having this dream. When I am falling asleep, it’s now like that period between when I’m awake and asleep, I am putting on the old timey dive suit and slowly floating up towards the sky to take my place between the moon and the Earth.

So, I decided to travel to Montreal, even during a deadly pandemic, to seek help. I was led from the waiting room into a darkened bedroom-type of area. I was instructed to lay down on the bed and get into the position I normally slept in. The nurse attached electrodes to my temples and along my throat. She told me to sleep. I put on my diving suit and did as I was told.

After three nights, I was sitting across from one of the researchers. She was going through my results, a thick pile of graphs and numbers that I couldn’t possibly understand, but which could be my salvation. She walked out of the office without saying a word to me. As she left, two people - a man and a woman - dressed in suits and missing their white coats sat across from me. They picked up with my research pack where the researcher left off.

Finally, the man looked up, and said: “I have one question for you: do you want to do your part in ensuring the human race continues on?”

What do you say to that?

Here’s what’s going on: the government has become worried that they are losing the battle against this virus. A few months ago, they started dosing the public with a low grade narcotic that influenced the unconsciousness. Basically, they induced us to have isolation dreams. They wanted to see who could handle being isolated for long periods of time. I guess my being a sad, lonely, and solitary person had finally come in handy. Their plan is to launch these people into space until the pandemic is over, could be a few months or years, at which point they will bring us back down to Earth.

There are many blindspots to this plan.

I was so focused on training that I didn’t think of the blindspots, until the countdown to launch started. The blindspots only grew as I broke through the Earth’s atmosphere. But once I saw the immensity of the world in front of me, saw the whole thing, the blindspots disappeared. And I just floated in my suit that looked like an old timey diving suit, attached to a small spaceship.

Everything was timed - sleep, intrusiveness vitamin intake, oxygen. During the training they taught us morse code. We had a light on top of our helmet, and whenever we floated close enough to another Drifter, we could talk to them by using a switch on our wrist that operated the light. It was the only interaction we had besides our own thoughts. There was supposed to be ten thousand of us all around the Earth, waiting for a deadly virus to run its course, so we could return.

And so that’s what my days and nights were, or at least what I thought of as my days and nights, hard to keep track of them. I would just float along and every once in a while say hello to another Drifter. I appreciated the connection to the others, but conversations got shorter with each interaction. I mean, what was there to talk about?

Days turned into months. Months turned into years.