the sick twisted gameshow of my dreams

It's not often I remember my dreams, but the dreams I do remember are often ones that seem very real and end up terrifying me to the point of violently jolting up in bed in a cold sweat, which usually happens right before my dreamself dies or something.

The nice thing about these dreams, however, is that, when I do wake up, I'm filled with this overwhelming sense of relief, a surreal gratefulness, which puts the rest of the day into this whole new positive perspective, where anything bad that could possibly happen to me is now framed in this sort of “well at least I'm not trapped in a virtual reality Big Brother-esque gameshow for eight years all to win some huge cash prize while my real body is in a cryostasis chamber and my family is out there living their lives without me in a post-apocalyptic hell world” type way.

It's funny how sometimes dreams load you up with all sorts of imaginary context for the dream itself, like you somehow know the exact time, place, and reasons you're in the surreal dream situation you happen to be in, like you’re plugged via USB into some dream supercomputer that’s transferring data into your brain at very high bits per second.

For this particular dream, the time was like 2099 or something, years after some world-ruining nuclear exchange between all major Earth superpowers. And the place was actually two places, underground and virtual reality. Underground because, after the bombs dropped, the surviving citizens of Earth were forced to move into vast below-surface bunkers, as the face of the planet was irradiated beyond hope, although I personally did not spend any dreamtime there, but I knew, via the dream supercomputer data upload or whatever, that that was where both my physical dreambody and family were located. My physical dreambody was housed in a cryostasis chamber in some sort of underground mega-structure owned by a corporate media conglomerate that ran various televised gameshows, which I got the impression, once again from the dream supercomputer or whatever, that these gameshows were the surviving citizens of Earth’s main source of entertainment, that all they did all day was sit around in cramped pod-like housing units watching these gameshow broadcasts while sustaining themselves off some sort of goopy mystery meat concoction and slightly irradiated water, with the added detail that these nuclear-holocaust survivors were all slightly deformed with extra thumbs, toes, and bubbly skin tags, many of which grew out of their faces. My consciousness was trapped in virtual reality, in a big virtual home, along with about ten other people of all races and genders. The house itself was post-modern in its design, with weird almost incomprehensible geometry and walls made entirely of see-through glass that allowed you to see what everyone was doing in the house at all times and also looked out onto a beautiful green world of tropical flora and fauna. I couldn’t venture outside of the house, however. I was stuck in there with the rest of the gameshow contestants. And I knew, again because of the dream supercomputer or whatever, that I was there because my family was destitute, deformed, and miserable, so I was trying to win the huge cash prize awarded by toughing-it for eight years inside this virtual reality house that also housed ten other people, all of whom I somehow knew were also there for the same reasons I was, to win the cash prize, for fame, fortune, or to make a better life for their horribly deformed families. The kicker here is that, in this virtual world, where your consciousness exists inside a virtual avatar that looks identical to your real body out there in the cryostasis chamber, you can still feel real actual pain, like psychologically I guess, pain somehow amplified beyond real-world pain, as per the rules of the game or something like that, and you could die, but when you died, your avatar was instantly resurrected. And, as you might imagine, no matter how beautiful the house you’re in, ten people in a house together for eight years can and will lead to all sorts of drama, and this drama often turns into flat-out violence, so what ended up happening was, people were just killing each other all the time, be it from petty arguments or romantic competitions or whatever, and of course the gameshow corporation knew this fact about human behavior and encouraged it by leaving all sorts of heinous killing tools all over the house. I distinctly remember a chainsaw being used to cut me in half one time, at which point I was resurrected only for the same guy who had just cut me in half to immediately cut me in half again, at which point I resurrected again, got hold of the chainsaw, and cut that guy in half, at which point he resurrected and I cut him in half again, and so on and so forth, all because I felt like I had to do it, kill this guy, because otherwise he was just going to keep killing me, meaning I was just going to keep killing him, and so on. One time, after some romantic fling gone awry or something, some guy strung up his ex-lover and, using a kitchen knife, poked holes in her skin throughout the day, making sure she stayed alive the whole time so she would feel every little prick, until eventually all the blood drained from her body, at which point she was resurrected only to be strung up and poked full of holes again, and again, and again. You could also smell stuff in there, and, needless to say, it smelled fucking awful. And I got the impression that this gameshow had really high ratings, that viewers back home really enjoyed this whole spectacle, the fact this was happening to virtual people and no real physical people were harmed in the making of the gameshow somehow justifying the perverse pleasure of watching people die in the most gruesome ways possible over and over again. And I remember, at one point, toward the end of the dream, I had texted my wife, because I guess the gameshow rules allowed you to do that sometimes, communicate with your family, and my wife told me that, since it’s been like seven years already, she’s moved on and is now seeing some other man who has taken up the father role for my son, my son who is now eleven and calling this other dude “dada” while sometimes, when he’s been real good and gets television privileges, watching his biological dad get split in two via chainsaw on television every night. And it was at that point when I woke up in a cold sweat, grateful the whole thing was a dream.

What really scared me was not the dream itself per se, although it was terrifying as hell and felt very real at the time, it was the fact that I could see this type of thing actually happening in real life, what with all the recent advances in virtual reality and our willful surrender to technology and all that. I could totally see some mega media company using the false promises of fame, fortune, and feeling good to lure people into some virtual reality hellscape wherein you slowly lose touch with reality and become some twisted monster version of yourself that cares about nothing other than fame, fortune, and the false promise of feeling good.

And, after thinking about all that, I had another really harrowing thought.

I started thinking, what if, when I look down at my phone or tablet or whatever, what if this is already happening?