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The
first time you argue with yourself it’s kind of weird.
I remember the first time it happened to
me. I didn’t
want to do it. I did everything I could to avoid it. But they made me.
“If
you don’t have the conversation,” she said, “we won’t be able to let you back
in.”
She was talking about the LDN — the Lucid
Dreaming Network. I’d
been expelled. I don’t really want to talk about it. I guess that’s why they
made me.
“Do
you understand?” she looked over the rim of her glasses, past the readout
projected on the inside of the lenses, and her brown eyes gave the question
mark to her words.
“Yeah.”
“Good.
Then we can proceed.” She didn’t wait for more of an affirmation from me. I was
strapped into a chair, what else was I going to do? Her white coat whirled
around her thighs as she turned to the nurse in the room. “Start the drip. Prep
the network. And don’t forget the mouth guard this time.”
The young, skinny nurse shambled about his
tasks. He clearly didn’t
want to be there either. Straps kept me in the room. I wondered what kept him
there. His eyes stayed on either the ground or whatever it was his hands were
working on at the time. They never met mine.
The doctor kept talking as drugs flooded my
system.
“In
the past we had therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and they were the
substitute for us. They stood in for us so that we could argue with ourselves.
Seriously, look it up. It’s trippy. People actually paid other people to
pretend to be them so they could talk. They would set up meetings and get into
rooms. They had all sorts of rules about confidentiality since that therapist
was pretending to be the person they were talking to. They trained, for years,
to get a degree so they could argue with people. Now we do what we were meant
to do and we just have that conversation with ourselves.” She looked at me as
if I cared about her lecture. My vacant stare did very little to dissuade her.
“The
LDN is a difficult place for some of us. Sharing all of those experiences with
all of those people can become overwhelming. We can forget what’s real. We can
forget what’s right. We can forget who we are. So we created this little
program as a reminder.” She didn’t mention that it was compulsory for anyone
who violated the LDN terms of service to go through, and I’m pretty sure she
didn’t mean ‘we’ in the sense that she’d ever done this before.
“When
you go inside you’ll feel like you’re dropping into the LDN, but it’s a solo
dream. There won’t be anyone else in there except you. The only difference is
that we’ve given you medicine that allows the AI to separate your emotions from
your mind. You can talk to yourself in there. You’ll see your emotions as a
person. Just talk through the issues with yourself. Once you get things sorted
we can reauthorize your LDN account. Yes?”
I nodded. She smiled at me with her teeth.
Her eyes were busy reading something on her glasses. She nodded, but not to me.
My world melted away.
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