Certain Imagined Futures
Ever since I got one of those smartwatches, I’ve been obsessed with my sleep. How long, how deep, how consistent. While I wander in dreamland, the watch measures my breathing, vitals, and REM cycles, using a five-figure algorithm to score the quality of my rest. Each morning, when my eyes snap open, I rush to check the little digital screen which feeds me a sleep score. Most of the time, my unconscious-self disappoints. The average score for women my age is 70, but mine ranges from 30-50. That’s out of a hundred. Not only am I below average, I am also failing by basic mathematical standards. The other day, my watch took the liberty of setting some sleep targets for me, no doubt out of a sense of AI-engineered alarm. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that this caused me significant distress, but I have noticed a proliferation of nightmares, in recent months.
In one nightmare, I’ve returned to America. I’m sitting in a socially-distanced lecture hall, where each student is hooked up to an over-the-ear headset, like the one professional gamers or telemarketers wear. When we say “hello,” our individual microphones pick it up and feed it to the giant speakers, our voices reverberating throughout the cavernous hall. There is no room for subtlety here, no whispered conferencing with our deskmates, no timid venturing of a half-formed opinion, ready to be retracted at the first flicker in our classmates’ faces. As such, only the originally-confident speak up, their voices booming through the speakers, assaulting us through top-tier surround sound equipment. At the front of the lecture hall, our professor swivels unhappily in her chair, caged in a four-sided, clear plexiglass shield. Her every expression is scanned and magnified on the screen behind her. I want to catch her eye, give her a smile, but I’m too far away, and she can’t see me.
In another, we’ve adapted. The United World Coalition announces that we all have ninety days to decide where we want to put down roots; it’s been agreed that radical change is what’s needed to fight the unknown. With the top-down order, individual choice is limited and actionable. It makes things easier. The long-distance lovers flip a coin and commit to either hemisphere, scattered families arrange to reunite in their ancestral homelands, and those who’ve been sitting on their hands contemplating an application for permanent residency in the country of their dreams are pushed to decision, either way. Hope is methodically scrubbed out of the syllabus, we understand that the golden age of travel is over, we accept the new normal as a way of being, rather than a placeholder phrase in anticipation of a cure. It’s been enough time that we feel no loss. We are happy. I always feel a foggy satisfaction on nights when I have this dream, but when I wake, my watch reports a fitful, anxious sleep.
I’m finding that more and more of my dreams suggest pathways to the future. Very rarely do I dream of the past. There was just one night, two months ago, when I found myself soaking in a communal hot spring, in 2016 Taiwan. In my hands was a wooden bucket of eggs, which I meant to steep in the 70-degree spring water. Twenty minutes of jiggling the eggs about in that water, mired with natural minerals and the dead skin of the other visitors, would be enough to perfectly cook a soft-boiled egg. I laughed so hard that I jerked myself awake.
Last night, my mind telescoped towards the future again. When I entered the dream I was already arguing with a friend over text. Either she, or I, had disastrously misinterpreted the tones in our digital conversation. In the past, I’d have hopped in a cab, knocked on her door, and said, look, let’s clear things up. Within the hour we would be hugging it out. But in my dream, distances were not so easily traversed. The more we typed to each other, the angrier we got. We were whipping up a tornado of fury and neither of us knew how to stop. Our digital avatars only had language at their disposal, but fluency in friendship requires an active interpretation of the unspeakable. Eventually, she, or I, logged off, cutting short the line of communication, and waking me up.
Don’t you think it’s ironic, my girlfriend said, when I called her to recount our dream-quarrel, that you’re using technology to measure your dreams about the horrors of technology? Also, why are you fantasizing about arguing with me?
How could I explain to her that instead of creating a benchmark of anxiety, the poor sleep scores were tiny pinpricks of comfort that prefaced the start of every day? In my dreams, my mind conjures different versions of the future, and my body resists. All night long, I rebel against the compromises of our present, reject the settlements of tomorrow. I wake, tired, to the here and now, that still holds potential and fight. If I should emerge one morning, after submersion in an imaginative dystopia, to an excellent sleep score, what a nightmare that would be.
