World Dream Bank: SORRY WE DRANK ALL THE BEER

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Sorry we Drank all the Beer

Dreamed 1986/6/3 by Chris Wayan

The universe is old now, at an entropic dead end. At least the part we can reach! Humanity's trapped and bored, here in the few star-systems we settled before all energy-sources ran low... Now our resources are so limited there's no way out.

One visionary bullies us into digging up alien archeological sites, despite the energy cost.

We find huge buried letters! They're unlike our alphabet, and hard to assemble in their exact original order, but they seem to spell out a message in an ancient alien tongue that translates roughly as: SORRY WE DRANK ALL THE BEER.

The world grows quiet as this news spreads. A quiet rage. They knew they were stealing our future. And they partied on.

Huge, eroded, alien letters in a desert. Dream sketch by Wayan. Click to enlarge.

When we still had contact with other peoples, we humans were called a reckless, wasteful species because the solar system was so poor in readily usable energy sources. Clearly, our race must have squandered our natural wealth, in adolescence. But now, slowly, it sinks in: we're not wasteful; we were robbed! It wasn't us, or our ancestors, who plundered our worlds. Alien settlers looted the place eons before! The other worlds that mocked us as wasteful may have been the thieves' own kin.

Wasting our energy on archeology paid off! We've tapped a new energy source--the energy of rage.

So I propose a new waste, one even more outrageous: time travel! "Let's go back and change history and DESTROY this dead-end track! Even if we all disappear in a breath, so what? No big loss. We're doomed anyway. Any new time-track HAS to be better than this slow death!"

And it looks like we'll do it. Cheated by time, we'll get revenge--by smashing time itself.

NOTES ON WAKING UP

My energy IS limited, due to environmental illness. The dream seems to be suggesting its cause isn't anything I did, but others' irresponsibility. The industrialists who created the chemicals I'm sensitive to, the doctors who didn't diagnose me, the parents who didn't protect me? They all partied while I sickened...

And as I dig, in therapy, through the archeological record, and face the pattern of neglect... I'm starting to feel I have nothing to lose.

40 YEARS LATER

Seven years of illness (and unhelpful therapy) later, I threw out everything my doctors had told me and started over from scratch, testing myself.

I found a severe allergy my doctors had told me firmly I didn't have. I got better.
I found a serious recurring infection they'd dismissed as "stress" or "unconventional migraine." Convinced a doctor to give me longterm antibiotics. I got better.
Self-diagnosed a genetic syndrome decades of doctors had overlooked (known for a hundred years, and takes two minutes to test, so no excuses!) Adopted the protocols for it. I got better.

But I'd have gotten better decades earlier if certain lazy professionals had done their job. Sorry's not good enough.

LISTS AND LINKS: other worlds - this is the way the world ends - energy - archeology - inheritances - thieves - rage - time travel - EI and other chronic illness - doctors & medicine - digital dream art

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