Thoughts on… a dream machine

Last night I had a really nice dream where I was in Wales on holiday. Yeah, even in my dreams I can’t afford to leave the UK. In the dream I also made friends with a Welsh girl who worked on a stall next to a stall that sold honey. Then near the end of the dream we said goodbye, I got on the train and then I woke up. I like dreams where it has a proper ending, because it’s better than waking up half way through the really exciting bit.

When I woke up I was happy, because I’d had this nice dream and felt good. Then later on in the day I was sitting down at work thinking about honey and I thought “That was a really nice dream last night… better than this crap.” Which suddenly made me realise that once again my dream was better than the reality. Now, I’m not saying my life is crap, I just mean the going to Wales and making friends with a nice girl bit. Last time I went to Wales I was heckled by some teenage girls in McDonalds and that was about it.

It was again that I revisited my idea of a dream machine. Wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if you could record your dreams while you were asleep and save them onto a computer. Then you could play it back and watch it like a film. Or even better, you could turn it into a virtual reality, like those games you get in sci-fi films where they put the headset on and they’re in a virtual world. But you wouldn’t be able to control what goes on in the dream, because that’s the fun of dreams, it’s random. Like in the dream I had there was a bit where the girl kept taking me to the stall that sold honey, and I realised later that it was probably because I’d made a Winnie the Pooh joke earlier in the day.

So, how would it work? Because if the dream was too good you wouldn’t want to come back. You’d have to have some way of monitoring how much time you spent using the dream machine. Maybe you have to pay, like £10 an hour. Although, that’s not a lot so I’d end up staying in there for most of the day. Maybe £50 an hour. But that could become quite addictive, and I might end up wasting all my hard earned money on it. Perhaps you’re allowed an hour and then you have to wait for it to charge up, or something like 3 hours a day. Ah, but then there’s the problem of the ending. Like I said, I like my dreams to end properly, so a few hours might not be enough for my brain to think of a good ending, especially doing it over and over. After a while, Sammy Davis Jr* would say “Oh, you’re back again. Can I finish my song this time?”

And talking of cameos, you should be able to pay a bit extra to have a celebrity make a guest appearance in your dream. I’ve had a few famous people in my dreams and I feel like I owe them some sort of royalties now. Also, you should be able to share your dreams with people, so you plug them in and you can both dream the same thing. Then again, that might get a bit tricky cos two people might dream completely different things and the machine would get confused. What if one wants to be in Australia but the other wants to be in Japan? You’d have kangaroos eating sushi and koala bears doing karate. I suppose there would have to be one dominant dreamer who controls what happens and the other one just oversees it all and takes part.

The thing is, would all this playing about with your mind’s imagination damage your brain? If it creates a dream for you and then it ends, but then you keep forcing it to replay the same scenes it might get a bit cranky with you and turn it into a nightmare. Then you’d want a refund. Actually, where is this money going to? Because there’s not many people I’d trust to handle my dreams. Not that there’s anything untoward in them, I’d just be paranoid that someone might tamper with them or there might be a bug in the system which messes up the dream and then it all goes crazy and the virus takes over and you end up with the dream machine fuzed to your head and you’re stuck in the dream and you can’t get out and would you be alive or dead?! I don’t know! Oh god, what have I done?!

*I did once have a dream where Sammy Davis Jr, Mike and I did a whole song and dance routine