by FRANCIS GRECOROMACOLLUDEN, Alternate Reality News Service National Politics Writer
Joe-Francisco deGustibus was not impressed with the dream in which he was flying until, about 30 seconds in, he realized that he was flying underground. Wicked! he thought. It's like being in an Iain M. Banks novel - The Wasp Factory, maybe or...or Consider Phlebitis or something like that! Unfortunately, even before he could finish that thought, the dream shifted to a warm pool in which deGustibus swam. After a few seconds, a voice boomed above, "Oh, waiter...!" Disgusted, deGustibus realized that he was really in the soup, that he had become the punchline in a joke so ancient it was first recorded as scratches on stone. Fortunately, the scene changed. Unfortunately, deGustibus was standing on a stage just as the curtain was going up, and he didn't know what his lines were! He breathed deeply. Fortunately, he was ready for this: he tried imagining the people sitting in the audience naked. Unfortunately, he was the one who was naked. Fortunately, he knew he was in the middle of a dream. Unfortunately, when he opened his mouth to explain this to the audience, all of his teeth fell out. "Oh, fwom ow!" he said just before he woke up.
Ordinarily, a dream like this would be a private matter between the dreamer and his psychiatrist, rabbi or yogurt instructor. Unfortunately (an unpaired, naked unfortunately, unfortunately, because there really is no upside to this situation), it was plastered all over the Internet by a hacker group known only as Random.
"You think I could get beyond this embarrassing - no, mortifying situation if I had a sex change?" deGustibus, who, when he's not wasting his time sleeping, is a carbon tax credit marketer, wondered. We tried to distract him with the latest news of earthquakes in Indonesia, but, oddly enough, this did not cheer him up.
When it posted the dream, Random claimed that it had access over seven million dreams that had been recorded without the permission of sleepers across the United States. It threatened to release all of the dreams if the government did not make the differently legalled surveillance programme public and force Jerry Lewis to release The Day the Clown Cried.
"You should always have a condition you're willing to give up in the process of negotiations," a Frequently Unasked Questions file on the Random Ribbit stated. "That way, the odds are better that you can get what you want. And, anyway, why can't we see the Jerry Lewis movie? How bad can it be?"
"Why me?" deGustibus asked, quite reasonably, we thought. According to Random's Ribbit FUQ, "Of the millions of dreams we had at our disposal, we chose this guy's because, frankly, we hate 'There's a fly in my soup' jokes! Oh, and, we weren't impressed with the guy's family motto, either."
"Disputandum non est disputandum?" deGustibus asked. "Really? It's a great motto - been in my family for almost a generation!"
Random claims that as telecommunications companies lay new fibre-optic cables, they are equipping them with sensors that read people's brainwaves while they sleep, giving the companies access to their dreams. And, where telecomm companies go, the government follows. Sneakily. Creepily. Overreachingly.
"I can neither confirm nor deny that the United States has asked telecomms to share their access to Americans' dreams without warrants or, indeed, any oversight whatsoever," said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest. "Not the CIA. Not the Pentagon. Not the Department of Interstate Agriculture. Especially not the Department of Interstate Agriculture, which I have a sneaking suspicion I may have just made up."
"Do we want our government to have the power to snoop on our dreams?" asked whistleblower and America's favourite exile Edward Snowed-Innis. "No, of course we don't! Can you imagine what Hitler could have done with -"
We stopped him right there, invoking Godwin's Law.
"No, sorry, I meant - Big Brother!" Snowed-Innis hastily backtracked. "Big Brother! Can you imagine what Big Brother could have done with this power?"
We sent the issue to a panel of judges, which largely split on ideological lines, but ultimately allowed Snowed-Innis to continue. (Expect a blistering dissent from Scalia long after everybody has moved on to a different issue.)
We were about to ask Snowed-Innison what the implications of government access to Americans' dreams were when an unmarked brown envelop was delivered to our desk. In it was a single sheet of paper that read: "Desist with this line of questioning, or we will make public your dream about the disputed Andy Warhol painting of Elvis on the Moon, the angry otter family and the demon with seventeen p -"
"You wouldn't dare!" we sputtered. "How - how did you even know about - "
A second unmarked brown envelop appeared on our desk. This envelop's single sheet of paper read: "You really don't understand how this whole blackmail thing works, do you? You do what we tell you to do without question, or we do something that will harm you in some way that we can plausibly deny if it's ever made public. Do you get it, now?"
I said that I did.
The single sheet of paper in the third unmarked envelop that appeared on our desk read: "Good. End this story."