Extraordinary dream

20Sep10

Last night I dreamt the world was under the rule of a global dictatorship.  One big distopian society, where those who dissent disappear. Democracy was replaced by state institutionalized terror, and the only people who fought back spoke Arabic. In fact, in my dream the Arabic language became outlawed and merely having the ability to read, write and speak this language was enough to get you arrested.

Speaking Arabic was a form of defiance to the system, where English was the only legal language.  All the other languages had disappeared. They were dead, for some reason. And so the only languages known to man were English and Arabic. In my dream, Arabic was the language of the Resistance. Mostly people in their 20s and early 30s. In fact, the majority of the global population was within that age group. Those in government seemed to be 60+ years old.

There was technological equality all across the world. In fact, it was more of technological uniformity. Massive surveillance of the citizenry was a ubiquitous fact of life. Conformity seemed to have been ingrained as a virtue. The only thing that remained the same was the bad guys still were the ones who spoke Arabic. Only, now the media did not just portray them as brown-skinned turban-wearing desert dwellers, anymore. “The Arabs” were now white kids with military-level knowledge in the infiltration of government information systems. Extremely pissed off and scary white kids who’s motto was freedom or death.

The media was everywhere. There were no longer different news channels. Or different movie channels. There was ONE channel. And it incessantly piped the government message into society. And most people believed the government message (another thing that remained the same).

People snitched on you.  The streets were policed by faceless enforcers with cybernetic enhancements. And people snitched you out to them, when they suspected you of being an enemy of the state, for something as ridiculous as saying you did not like the commercial you just saw on the screen in the store window a minute ago. They hauled away a young girl because she did not like the handbags in the commercial. You no longer had rights, you had duties and privileges.

And we all had implants. Government-issued implants that controlled things like deploying vaccinations and medication into your body, identifying you, tracking you, monitoring your brain waves, communication, etc. The government had turned the world into one global wiretap. The implant allowed you to get online and order fast food or check your messages. The implant allowed them to monitor your dinner table conversations. If you spoke Arabic without encrypting your conversation, you had roughly 2 minutes before the enforcers arrived to take you away.

At random, government would tap into your optical nerves to see what you were seeing. There was a blackmarket that provided, for a price, modifications to your implant: Share dreams, hive-mind mode, altered realities, legal drugs, illegal drugs.  Most of these things were not government sanctioned, but government rarely interfered with the blackmarket trade around implants so long as it remained within tolerable parameters. And why wouldnt it? After all, the blackmarket was run by the government.

Things would get dangerous, when the Resistance got involved. When you join the Resistance, someone needs to unlink your implant. Free you from the matrix, as it were. Take you off the grid. You couldn’t remove the implant without killing the individual wearing the implant, but you could hack the implant, given enough skills and resources.

I am not sure exactly how you get to join the Resistance. From what little I saw, they kind of recruit you. Most people who are caught dissenting (brainwaves and whatnot) are disappeared by the government’s security agencies. But sometimes, the Resistance gets to you first, and they disappear you, too. Only this time, you are taken off the global surveillance grid and become a part of the Resistance. Mostly geeks, brilliant hackers, scientists and engineers were Resistance material. You needed to know how the technology that controls society works, in order for you to fight against oppression.

It was one of the most bizarre dreams I have had in quite a while. I stood there and gazed around in sheer bewilderment. A girl, about 24, suddenly stepped from the shadows and handed me a mug and said

“Read it. Hurry.”

I looked down at the white mug in my hand. There was some kind of port, at the bottom, circuitry. The text near the bottom of the mug was ….. Arabic…. and for some reason I was able to read Arabic in my dream. This is something I am not yet capable of in real life. The text read

Your implant will bring them. Your implant will free you.

I turned to my left and looked at the girl who was staring at a group of about six or seven quickly approaching enforcers. Then she took my hand and told me to put my thumb on the circuitry. There was a white flash and the world was dissapearing. I think I was maybe teleporting. She sounded far away when she screamed,

“Now RUN! RUN!”

I couldn’t see a damn thing, everything was white. I couldn’t even really feel my body anymore. The last thought that entered my consciousness in my dream was that I somehow knew where to run to.

And so I ran.

That’s when I woke up.

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