The Last Dream

Written 8/28/25

My dreams died. I can still remember the last one- all of us, what were we? Gathered in an empty field, smothered by fog. Our only moon split and oozing from between our hands. We were led here by the government. At least that's what they said they were. Dreaming had been outlawed once brain interfacing became mainstream. Our thoughts were too unpredictable. Not manageable enough, a threat.

I had to breathe in the fog and eat a green yolk. I was coerced. They were holding guns to us flashing red and blue while aggressively narrating the events to a third party to ensure payout compliance. Their lengthy ordinations stained the fog with a black breath wound tightly around our limbs. I tried to let out a yell but it caught my throat and tied my breath to the pulsing lights synchronized to weapon vests and pointed armaments.

The moon fell from the sky, as if to inspect this gruesome retaliation against her kin, and keeping the same size as its distant glare cried into my lap. They raised their weapons at me, but said nothing, bodycams rolling. I sat in crumbling soil on my knees and held the dying moon, cracked open like an egg, its viscous white fluids glimmering down between my thighs into the ground. A vapor rose and everyone stepped back, but I was unable to move. There was blackness.

The ether; void. Sounds; static. Sensations; prickling like a zap. Some kind of device, like a phone, it communicates with me, perpetually moving to leave me astonished. These are not dreams, it reads, you cannot look away now, it reads, now that you are sleeping. I refused to be trapped by a blank screen and struggled to wake up.

I am held down by pale white limbs on a bed that isn't mine, looking up at pasty white faces that aren't their own; faces which all definition had been swallowed by some intractable pit of fear, granting their bodies a very temporary hideous strength. It hurts to watch their faces slide across heads that don't fit, that resist to be in one place. In some cruel joke they had covered the statue of liberty with a tarp, and censored it with a large white screen that plays advertisements nonstop to all in New York. And nobody was allowed to do anything about it, or else they'd be made examples of like me.

They couldn't put us in prisons, we had done no wrong. They couldn't keep up with the traveling circus, that was too expensive and left too many witnesses. So I am imprisoned in my own flesh, unable to dream after being poisoned with jealousy. Who could believe such a thing that didn't see dreams anyway?

Technical indifference subsumed the metabolism by proximities, and I am a machine against my will. It wears their skin and crawls under the table, low, cur and inept. Circling silently, unconvinced, staring distantly above where the moon used to be. There will be new colors, it decides, and casts out from below invisible greys.