I'm visiting the future. A long dream, but all I remember is sleeping in a cybernetic bed--"cybed" for short. Everybody has one. They seem to pick up images from your dreams and amp them up, creating hundreds, even thousands of images, in strange "associational sheaves" (so the box says). Possibilities unfold like fans, or hands of cards. A cybed can make extravaganzas out of the simplest core images.

A prosthetic imagination?

I feel stupid because I don't really understand mine.

I'm out to solve a mystery, and the answer appears in my dream. But the bed elaborates it into one of its over-ripe extravaganzas. I need to collapse the association-fans back down to their basic core images to get my original dream-message. But I find it very hard. Only get it down to dozens--triplets and sextuplets of related possibilities.

But then, I'm new to the future. New to cybeds, don't know what I'm doing. The average person of this era no doubt does this without even thinking.

I tell a native Futurian about my dilemma. He laughs "NO ONE understands cybeds! Not even their programmers can predict the crazy stuff they do! We just LIKE them! We USE them, we don't CONTROL them!" He's amazed I got it to focus down to dozens: quite an achievement.

I'm still frustrated--the machine feels like a rowdy mount, familiar and friendly, on the verge of giving me just what I need--and I don't think that's illusion. I just don't understand the basic theory. What ARE all these images? How are they generated? How and why do they fan out like that? I'm not out to halt the proliferation totally--all I want is to limit the associations, have the machine record the original dream plus the first layer of associations to the day's events. The meaning will lie there.

But there's no owner's manual! I ask around. Nobody has one. It's not lost--the manufacturers don't even bother any more. They've given up even pretending consumers will ever program a cybed. Just plug it in and let it free-associate.

But I have to. Or it'll overwhelm me with unnecessary elaborations. My own thoughts are inherently complex enough, thank you! I never ASKED for a prosthetic imagination--it just gets in the way like unneeded crutches.

MORNING NOTES

• Cybeds = my own minds, OOPS, I mean mind! Hmm...
• The tangles and sheaves
  1. When I was a kid, other people's thoughts (especially dreams) impinged on mine so overwhelmingly that "I" often got lost in the shuffle... I still have weak walls against psychic intrusion--if I'm around a passionately focused person, I pick up whole images, but worse yet, get lost in their feelings. Distracting! It's genetic; my sisters do too. Believe me or don't--I don't care. I still have spill-over to deal with.
  2. My dreams are way longer and more complex than the average human's--hundreds of words every night, full of complex shamanic issues.
  3. But also... fever! as I write this, I have the flu. I'm running hot, and free-associating like crazy--temporarily. Cybed fever!
• The cybed's default settings fail me: I think the dream's warning the "default settings" for normal American dreamwork are wrong for me--and maybe even the default psychology of the American mind in general. This culture sees dreaming as a mishmash of images and associations beyond the average person's grasp; no point in trying to interpret them. Channel-surfing! But I want more than emotional fireworks.

Blues. Sorry. Just the bed talking.

IMAGE: Guardian Angels, painted 1946 by surrealist Dorothea Tanning. She suffered from insomnia and when she did get to sleep, bizarre dreams. It shows.

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