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Generally, when I have dreams, they tend to be streams of consciousness that, during the actual dream, make all the sense in the world. However, when I try to explain it to a less-than-enthusiastic Paul the following morning, they make for some heavy lifting:

“So I’m in this carnival, but it’s not really me. It’s like I’m looking through the eyes of this acrobat, and it’s me, but I’m in his body…”

“Uh-huh.”

“And I show up to start my act, but the carnival left town, and there’s this Nigerian guy with a helicopter who keeps yelling, ‘Get in, let’s go!’ No, wait—before that, I’m in a library and…”

By this time, Paul grunts and starts scrolling. I’ve already lost him.

But last night’s dream was extremely detailed and left my heart hammering when I snapped open my eyes—as dystopian dreams do. Especially if one has the head of a hound sprawled over one’s chest.

“I dreamt I was in a dark, public place,” I began as Paul poured his second coffee. “Like an airport, but with dimmed lights. There was a bank of glass booths that looked like phone boxes, and above each booth were three illuminated, horizontal lines—like the letter E but without the vertical part.”

I waited for Paul to dismiss my rambling and was surprised to find him still listening.

“And the booths were places anyone could go inside and have an argument they wanted to win. Especially, like, a political argument. So you could use a speakerphone inside the booth and artificial intelligence would listen to what the other person was saying on the other end and then feed you immediate information to reply with, either on a screen in front of you that you would read or somehow send it right into your brain. People were lined up, ready and excited to use them and I was running back and forth, trying to stop them from stepping into the booths, yelling, “Don’t do this!! Don’t you see? This is all about them getting you to say whatever they put in your head without you thinking at all! Don’t do it!’ But they just looked at me and laughed.”

“Wow,” said Paul. “That’s like a Sci-fi movie. You should write the script.”

The dream hung over me for most of the day, and the three illuminated horizontal lines bugged me so much that I googled, ‘What company logo has three horizontal lines?’

In a nano-second, up popped Tesla. I must have seen that logo at some point in the past, and my subconscious found it handy to insert Elon Musk into my nightmare. And really, isn’t he the first name anyone might suspect of this sort of creation?

 “What was really freaky was that people were high-fiving their friends and excited that they’d ‘won’ an argument, but they had no idea what they’d just said because their brains couldn’t hold on to the information.”

“Like Stepford Wives.” Paul remarked.

“Or me, after you’ve talked about your Morgan for more than five minutes—“

“Or me, after you’ve talked about dressage for two minutes.”

You know, Elon, maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all…