I don’t hide out in the bushes late at night for no reason. I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m some creep or something. I have a job to do.
I was hired by Dream It, Inc. about four months back now. It was a bit of a happenstance sort of hiring.
I happened to be miserable at my previous job. They happened to be hiring. Thus happenstance, though I’m sure I’m using that word wrong.
Either way, I found myself as a dream advertiser. Companies got tired of a third of potential customers not thinking about their products for a third of the day, so they partnered up with Dream It to tap into an advertising market with untold potential.
Essentially, I shoot laser beams packed with ads into people’s unconscious brains. I don’t know the exact science behind. And I definitely don’t agree with the ethics of it. But a job is a job, and somebody would be doing if I weren’t.
Plus, I really don’t want to be one of those people sleeping and having their dreams manipulated by someone like me, a desperate, indebted ex-student that is barely getting by and takes precarious and dubious jobs to scrounge enough money to one day, maybe, just maybe, get by.
It’s also not the most glamorous jobs. I have to stealthily go from one household to the next in my assigned quadrant each night, get within ten feet of their door, and shoot an invisible beam into their house with the hopes that it gets to their target.
I guess it’s not all that difficult. I don’t know the science behind how it works, but it’s suppose to transpose an array of suggestive images and even olfactory senses into slumbering brains as they unsuspectingly are fed advertisements on a loop.
There’s no proof, technically, that the transposed brain waves have any lasting health effects. But I think there has been some lawsuits.
Either way, some suit overpaid another suit to make the whole negative aspects go away, and so now I spend my nights stealthily going from house to house to steal people’s dreams and replace them with capitalism.
I’ve always wondered what I would say if anyone ever caught me. Maybe I’d tell them I’m lost. Or perhaps I could make up some story about being a police officer on a stakeout. Either way, I doubt I could tell anyone what I was really doing.
Even my friends and family don’t really approve of my night time activities. Most suggest I find a real job that doesn’t require me to be so shady. To which I reply that I don’t know of any purely ethical company out there, and the one I’m at pays just fine.
It doesn’t, but I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of being smug about my poor life decisions.
If I’m going to be a complete garbage person and invade people’s most sacred time away from the bustle of busy business bullshit, then I’m going to play into the part by not letting busybodies dictate where I can and should and would work.
Anyway, I guess I should get back to work subverting the common man’s dreams and whatnot. If you see me out there at night, though I doubt you will, I’m pretty sneaky, then maybe say hello. It does get pretty lonely working all by myself late at night.
Fred Aiken Writing 