Paper Dreams
In a future where dreams are monetized, one woman learns that not even her grief is exempt.
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The NeuroSleeve bit when it harvested Meena’s dreams. That’s what Meena called it when she woke with the small red welts behind her ears, circular and tender like insect bites. Three this morning…a record. She prodded them with her fingertip while the coffee maker gurgled its morning hymn, each touch sending sparks down her jaw.
Eight hundred and forty-seven points. Her creativity index blinked at her from the tablet screen, cheerful as a bank balance. She’d been dreaming about Arun again, about the specific way he’d hum off-key while folding her underwear, and the algorithm had tagged it as “Domestic Nostalgia with Underlying Grief Themes.” Premium content. The meditation app Healing in Harmony had already licensed the dream for $127.
Congratulations, she thought, you’re monetizing dead-husband-laundry memories. Peak capitalism achieved.
More bad news, the coffee tasted like pennies. Everything tasted like pennies lately, as if the NeuroSleeve—more like a tech-bro Dream Catcher in her opinion—was slowly replacing her brain chemistry with spare change. The manual called it “minor neurochemical adjustment,” which was corporate speak for “we don’t know why this happens but legally we warned you.” Her doctor had prescribed supplements that turned her piss highlighter yellow and made her dreams so vivid they felt like living in someone else’s fever.
She was chewing cardboard toast when the notification bloomed across her vision, projected directly onto her retina by the household interface: SOMNIUM ESTATE SETTLEMENT: POSTHUMOUS LICENSING AGREEMENT ACTIVATED.
The coffee mug hit the counter harder than she’d meant it to. Brown liquid spread across the formica; a stain she’d never be able to explain.
Arun’s dreams. The ones from his final months, the ones she’d thought were locked away in private storage like love letters or medical records. The email explained, in the gentle voice of a grief counselor who’d been replaced by an algorithm, that his “cognitive estate” had been processed and approved for commercial distribution. A startup called Eternal Garden was now selling guided meditations based on his recurring dream about planting tomatoes.
The package was titled “Finding Peace in Simple Tasks: A Departed Husband’s Gift.”
Really? A gift? As if he’d chosen to leave her his anxiety about aphids and soil pH. As if his subconscious had been some kind of inheritance instead of the last private thing he’d owned.
Her hands trembled as she scrolled through the licensing agreement. The dreams had been extracted without her consent, processed while she’d been choosing coffin linings, monetized while she’d been learning to sleep in a bed that felt too big. The algorithm had identified him as “recently deceased” and automatically transferred his cognitive assets to something called the “bereaved spouse revenue stream.”
She’d been receiving payments for months. Small deposits labeled “Grief Support Dividend” that she’d assumed were insurance, or charity, or some bureaucratic mistake she’d eventually have to return. They’d been paying her with fragments of his sleeping mind, and because she was a Bay Area middle-school teacher, she couldn’t exactly afford to righteously take a stand.
The toast turned to wet paper in her mouth. She swallowed anyway, the way she’d learned to swallow everything else that threatened to come back up. The NeuroSleeve on her nightstand pulsed green, patient as a spider, already hungry for tonight’s harvest.
She pressed her fingers to the welts until they sang with pain.
The first time Meena tried to starve her dreams, she ate nothing but white rice for three days. Plain pasta. Water that tasted like it had been flushed down a toilet. She’d read somewhere that spicy food led to vivid dreams, so she eliminated everything with character, turning meals into a kind of cognitive birth control.
But the NeuroSleeve didn’t give a shit about her dietary rebellion. It sucked up dreams about colorlessness, about the texture of surrender and hunger that felt like forgetting you’d ever been full. The algorithm tagged them as “Minimalist Anxiety with Ascetic Undertones” and flipped them to a fasting app for $89.
Amazing, she thought while choking down another spoonful of nothing. They found a way to weaponize boredom and still make it profitable.
She tried insomnia next. Made it eighteen hours, then twenty-six, then thirty-one before her body gave up and dropped her into sleep so deep it felt like drowning. She dreamed about falling through layers of exhaustion, each level stranger than the last, until she was tumbling through a space that sounded like her own heartbeat played backward.
The dreams themselves sold for $203. “Extreme Fatigue with Dissociative Elements.” Apparently there was a whole market for synthetic sleep deprivation.
She was failing at resistance the way she’d failed at everything else since Arun died. Thoroughly. Accidentally. With increasing creativity.
At school, her students noticed the hollow spaces behind her eyes. During a lesson about the Fourth Amendment—which felt like teaching ancient history to kids who’d never known privacy—thirteen-year-old Matthew raised his hand.
“Mrs. Deshmukh,” he said, “why does the Constitution have a thing against unreasonable searches but not against, you know…” He gestured vaguely at his temple, where his NeuroSleeve sat like a plastic Burger King crown.
The classroom monitoring system would flag that as “potentially subversive educational content.” She could already feel the algorithm parsing her response, weighing each word for signs of sedition.
“Well, Matthew, that’s because dreams weren’t currency when the Constitution was written.” She sighed, immediately wanting to take her words back. “The law doesn’t always keep up with technology, it seems.”
“But shouldn’t the principle be the same?” Priya asked. She was picking at her unicorn-themed NeuroSleeve, a nervous habit that had started around the same time she’d begun asking uncomfortable questions. “If our thoughts are private, shouldn’t our dreams be private, too?”
Our thoughts aren’t private, either, she wanted to claim. Instead, Meena looked at her students. Thirteen-year-olds who’d been wearing brain monitors since kindergarten and never known sleep without an audience. Their devices were designed for growing skulls, cheerful cartoon animals printed on bands that would leave indent marks for life.
“That’s a complex question,” she said carefully. The weight of surveillance pressed against her skull like a migraine. “What do you think?”
“I think,” Priya said, then stopped. Started again. “I think some things should belong to the person who makes them.”
Wow, Meena thought. They’re thirteen and they already understand consent better than most senators.
“That’s an interesting perspective,” she said, which was teacher-speak for you’re right but I can’t say that without getting fired.
That night, she dreamed about her students with their cartoon NeuroSleeves, but in the dream the devices were growing roots into their skulls, flowering with tiny plastic blossoms that smelled like disinfectant. She woke clawing at her own temples, leaving real scratches next to the extraction welts.
The dream sold for $156. “Invasive Technology Anxiety with Protective Parental Overtones.”
She was literally being paid to have nightmares about surveillance capitalism, except she didn’t actually receive any of the money. The absolute irony.
Outstanding, she thought, staring at the payment notification. I’m the world’s most incompetent protestor.
The first “paper dream” appeared during her lunch break, tucked between the pages of a graded essay. It made her feel like a high school freshman finding a note from a secret admirer. Meena almost threw it away, but something about the careful folds made her pause.
She opened it in the supply closet with the door locked, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like trapped insects.
Last night I dreamed I was a bird made of saffron, the note read in Priya’s careful handwriting. Meena would know it anywhere. I flew over the city and every building was a book. When I landed on the library, I could taste the stories through my feet. They tasted like my grandmother’s kitchen and rain and the color blue.
My NeuroSleeve said I dreamed about “Generic Flying Anxiety with Culinary Nostalgia Themes.” It sold for $43 to a meditation app. I know I get almost a dollar for it, but this dream belongs to me.
Meena read it three times, her eyes widening with every repeated word. The dream was beautiful. It was strange and specific in a way that made her chest ache. But it was also evidence. If anyone found it, if the monitoring system detected even a hint of resistance or questioning of the NeuroSleeve…
She folded it carefully and put it in her bag, then spent the rest of the day trying to convince herself she was protecting Priya by confiscating it.
By the end of the week, she had six more. The students just kept slipping these to her.
Matthew had dreamed about being a library book that people kept checking out but never read. Aaliyah had dreamed about a world where colors had flavors and she was a chef who painted with spices. Calvin had written three pages about dreaming he was a tree that grew different languages instead of leaves.
Each one ended the same way: This dream belongs to me.
Meena kept them in a folder marked “Supplemental Materials,” hidden beneath lesson plans and grade sheets. She told herself she was documenting evidence of student creativity, but late at night, alone in her apartment, she read them like little prayers.
The dreams were wrong in all the ways that were right. They were unmarketable, unmonetizable, useless to algorithms that needed clean categories and demographic targeting. They were too strange, too specific, too personal. They were human.
When she found Priya after class, the girl was sitting alone in the hallway, staring at her cartoon unicorn NeuroSleeve with a level of intensity usually reserved for math tests.
“Mrs. Deshmukh,” Priya said without looking up, “can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think it’s stealing? Like, if someone takes your dream and sells it without asking?”
Meena sat down beside her, the linoleum floor cold through her skirt. “What do you think?”
“I think it is. But then I think maybe I’m being selfish, because the apps help people sleep better, and sleep is important, and maybe it’s good that my dreams can help someone else.”
“But?”
“But they’re mine.” Priya’s voice was small, uncertain. “They come from inside me. They’re made of my memories and my fears and my…I don’t know. My self. And when they take them and turn them into something else, something generic, it feels like they’re stealing part of who I am.”
Meena thought about Arun’s tomato dreams. How the algorithm had stripped away his complaints and his patience and his love, leaving only “Wholesome Gardening Vibes.” She thought about her own dreams being sold back to her as content designed to help her process grief.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that you’re not being selfish. I think you’re being you.”
Priya smiled.
“Tell me, Priya. Why are you and the students sharing these paper dreams with me? You know it’s not allowed to write dreams down and share them with others. It’s intellectual property. Remember what we learned about that?”
Priya’s smile faded. “It was Calvin’s idea. He thought…maybe if we shared the dreams with you, we’d have some control over them again. Even though we don’t, really.”
Meena almost threw up.
That night, she dreamed about saffron birds flying through a marble city. She woke before the dream could end, pulled off her NeuroSleeve, and wrote it down on paper in her own handwriting.
This dream belongs to me.
The woman from Somnium had a smile that made you want to check your pockets afterward. Dr. Frida Gains, Educational Compliance Specialist, which was corporate speak for “person who visits you when you’ve been thinking too much.” She folded herself into the plastic chair across from Meena’s desk like she was planning to lay eggs there.
“Routine audit,” she said, placing a tablet between them as some kind of peace offering. “Nothing to worry about.”
Right, Meena thought. Nothing’s more ‘routine’ than an unscheduled visit from the thought police.
“We’re seeing some interesting patterns in your sleep data,” Dr. Gains continued. Her voice had that focus-grouped quality, designed to be soothing but landing somewhere closer to menacing. “Specifically, irregularities in your cognitive output.”
The tablet’s screen showed a graph of Meena’s dreams over the past month with peaks and valleys of extracted content, color-coded by profitability. The dips corresponded exactly to her failed attempts at resistance, the nights she’d tried to starve her subconscious into submission.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” Meena said. “Grief affects dream patterns.”
“Of course. Very sorry for your loss.” Dr. Gains’s sympathy had the tone of a voicemail greeting. “But the data suggests something more specific. On the nights when your output dropped, your REM cycles were completely normal. You were dreaming, but you weren’t sharing those dreams with the system.”
Meena almost laughed at the idea that her unconscious mind wasn’t posting on social media. “I don’t understand how that’s possible.”
“Neither do we. That’s why I’m here.” Dr. Gains leaned forward, her smile sharpening. “We’re also concerned about some of your students. Calvin Morris. His dream patterns have become quite…sophisticated lately.”
The folder of paper dreams sat eighteen inches from Dr. Gains’s manicured hand. If she opened the desk drawer, if she searched the room, if she asked the right questions…
“Sophisticated how?”
“He’s been dreaming about dreams. Meta-narratives. Recursive loops that our algorithms can’t parse effectively. It’s like he’s deliberately trying to confuse our systems.”
Good for him, Meena thought. Kid’s got natural talent for cognitive warfare. “That sounds like a lot of sophistication for a thirteen-year-old.”
“Indeed, unless he’s being influenced by someone.” Dr. Gains’s smile never wavered. “We’ve noticed that students in your classes are 23% more likely to produce unmarketable dream content. Which is statistically significant.”
Meena felt her pulse spike, then forced herself to breathe. Getting defensive would only confirm their suspicions. “I teach civics,” she said. “Constitution, branches of government, electoral process. Very standard curriculum.”
“Of course. But civics can be…interpretive. Depending on how it’s taught.” Dr. Gains’s fingers danced across her tablet. “Tell me, Mrs. Deshmukh, have you noticed any unusual behavior from your students? Discussions about dreams, perhaps? Writing them down? Sharing them through unofficial channels?”
Shoot, Meena thought. They already know. “Kids have active imaginations,” she said carefully. “They talk about all sorts of things.”
“I’m sure they do. But we’re specifically interested in anti-corporate sentiment. Resistance to dream taxation. That sort of thing.”
Dr. Gains stood, her smile returning to its default setting. “We’d like to schedule some additional sessions with a few of your students. Just to ensure they’re not being exposed to content that might be harmful to their development.”
After she left, Meena sat alone in her classroom, staring at the folder that contained her students’ paper dreams. The monitoring system had cameras in every corner, sensors that detected stress hormones through sweat, algorithms that analyzed voice patterns for signs of deception. She’d been teaching her students to resist surveillance without meaning to, and now the system was closing in.
That night, she dreamed about being audited. Dr. Gains was inside her head, moving through her memories like a customs agent searching luggage, opening drawers that contained Arun’s laugh, rifling through boxes of moments she’d thought were private.
She woke with her hands clenched so tightly her nails had left crescents in her palms.
The dream sold for $94. “Authority Anxiety with Invasive Examination Themes.”
The box had been hidden in her closet for eight months, buried beneath winter clothes and the detritus of a life she’d stopped maintaining. Inside, wrapped in lavender-mothball tissue paper, was Arun’s physical dream journal. The one he’d kept in the months before his death, before the NeuroSleeves had become mandatory.
She’d forgotten it existed until the night after Dr. Gains’s visit, when she’d been lying in bed trying to decide whether to keep the paper dreams or burn them. The memory had surfaced like a bubble rising through dark water: Arun, sitting at their kitchen table with a cup of tea, writing in a notebook with precise, meaningful strokes.
“What are you doing?” she’d asked.
“Trying to remember something,” he’d said so casually. “After all, dreams fade so quickly! I want to keep track of the good ones.”
Now, sitting on her kitchen floor at 2 AM, she held the journal in her hands and understood why he’d hidden it. The dreams inside were nothing like the sanitized version being sold by Eternal Garden. They were messy, contradictory, full of anxiety and desire and a mundane strangeness that the algorithm could choke on for all she cared.
March 15th: Dreamed about the tomato plants again, but this time they were growing through the house. Vines came up through the floorboards. Fruit was hanging from the ceiling fixtures. I tried to stop them but I also felt proud of how well they were growing. Then I woke up with my hands dirty but there was no soil. I think I’m losing my mind?
March 16th: Sex dream about the neighbor. Not Carla! The one with the garden. Meena was in the dream too, watching from the window, but she wasn’t angry. She was taking notes. I woke up ashamed and aroused and confused. What kind of person am I?
March 17th: Dreamed I was dead but not gone. I was in the house but Meena couldn’t see me. She was cleaning out my things, crying over my shirts. I tried to comfort her but my hands passed through her like I’d turned into Casper the Fucking Ghost. The worst part was that I was relieved. Death looked like finally being able to rest, even though death was exactly the last thing I wanted.
Meena read through months of entries, each one more raw than the last. Her husband’s mind had been full of guilt and lust and fear and hope, all the messy human shit that the algorithm had processed into “Wholesome Gardening Vibes.” They’d taken his complexity and sanded it down into absolute drivel meant for people who’d never actually know him.
The final entry was dated two days before his heart attack:
I dreamed Meena was teaching but her students were all birds. They kept raising their wings to answer questions about democracy or something, but every time she called on one, it would just sing in response. Weird, right? She was getting frustrated, trying to explain voting rights to a classroom full of sparrows. Then she started singing too? And her voice was so beautiful I woke up crying. I love her so much it hurts. I love her so much I’m afraid to die.
The words blurred as tears filled her eyes. She’d never thought it was possible he could love her enough to dream about her voice. She couldn’t let Dr. Gains find this. Let anyone find this. They would, eventually.
She carried the journal to her kitchen stove, where she kept matches beside the emergency candles. The notebook felt heavier than it should have, dense with the weight of a mind she’d never be able to protect. The first page burned slowly, Arun’s handwriting curling into ash. Then the second, the third. She watched months of dreams disappear into smoke, each page a small act of mercy.
The last page to burn was the dream about teaching birds. She held it until the flames touched her fingers, then let it go.
When it was finished, she sat in her kitchen surrounded by the smell of burned paper and the knowledge that she’d destroyed something irreplaceable. The NeuroSleeve on her nightstand blinked green, waiting for her to go to bed, to feed it more dreams it could process and sell.
Instead, she picked up the device and carried it to the sink. It was so flimsy, made of the same cheap plastic as children’s toys. She turned on the faucet and held it under the water, watching the sensors spark and die. The silence that followed was the deepest she’d experienced in months.
That night, she slept without surveillance for the first time since Arun’s death. She dreamed about him. The real him. The one who’d worried about tomatoes and loved her enough to write down his dreams.
When she woke, she couldn’t remember the details, but she remembered the feeling. Of being held by someone who knew all her contradictions and chose to love her anyway.
The error message appeared on her tablet at 6:30 AM, polite and bureaucratic: SLEEP DATA UNAVAILABLE. DEVICE MALFUNCTION DETECTED. CONTACT TECHNICAL SUPPORT IMMEDIATELY.
Meena stared at the screen while drinking coffee that tasted like actual coffee for the first time in…she couldn’t remember? Her phone rang before she’d finished breakfast. Dr. Gains’s voice held a blissfully strained patience.
“Mrs. Deshmukh, we’re showing a complete system failure on your account. We need to schedule an immediate replacement.”
“Oh, really? Well, I’m not interested in a replacement.”
Silence on the other end. Then, “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said I’m not interested. I’m opting out of sleep monitoring.”
“No you are not. That is not possible. Sleep monitoring is mandatory for all workforce personnel under the Cognitive Transparency Act of 20—”
“Then I guess I’m not workforce personnel anymore.”
The words surprised her as much as they seemed to surprise Dr. Gains. But once they were out, she realized they were true.
“Mrs. Deshmukh, let’s not make any hasty decisions. Perhaps we can find a solution that works for everyone.”
“I don’t think we can,” Meena said. “But thank you for the offer.”
She hung up and finished her coffee, then got dressed for what she knew would be her last day as a teacher.
The school day proceeded with the surreal normalcy of inevitable disaster. But during her final period, something changed. Matthew raised his hand and said, “Mrs. Deshmukh, I got a weird message on my sleep report this morning.”
“Oh? What kind of message?”
“It said ‘data unreadable’ and asked me to contact technical support.”
“Yeah, me too,” said Priya. “And Calvin. And Aaliyah.”
Meena looked around the classroom. Every student was sitting forward, alert in a way that made her nervous. “How many of you got error messages?”
Seventeen hands went up.
“And what did you do about it?”
“Nothing,” said Matthew. “I figured if the system was broken, I didn’t need to fix it.”
“I dropped my NeuroSleeve in the toilet,” said Aaliyah. “Accidentally.”
“I told them I was having night terrors,” Calvin said with a wry grin. “Which was true. I was having night terrors about being watched.”
Meena stared at her students. Apparently, they’d learned something she’d never explicitly taught them. Go figure.
“So none of you submitted dream data last night?”
Blank faces.
“Even though you knew you’d get into trouble?”
Matthew nodded. “To be fair, you did teach us that sometimes the right thing and the legal thing aren’t the same.”
How astute.
After class, Priya approached her desk with a folded paper. “We made something for you,” she said. “It’s a collection. We wanted to give you the first copy.”
The paper was bound with string and decorated with small drawings of birds, books, and gardens made of words. The title read: Dreams Are Not For Sale: A Collection of Unsurveilled Imagination.
Inside, Meena found seventeen sets of dreams written by hand. Dreams about flying through libraries, growing languages in gardens, being trees that had conversations with the wind.
At the bottom of the collection was a note in Priya’s handwriting. We know you’re leaving. We know you’re in trouble because of us. But we want you to know that what you taught us is worth it. Thank you for teaching us.
Meena read the note an excessive amount, then pulled out a piece of paper and began to write her own dream. This one about teaching a classroom full of birds who sang instead of answering questions, finding beauty in the spaces between words, and love that was too complicated to put a dollar sign next to.
She added it to the collection and handed it back to Priya.
“Make a whole bunch of copies,” she said. “If you share it, that means it’s yours. So share it with people who remember what it feels like to do the same.”
The next morning, her tablet showed another error message: SUBJECT NOT FOUND. ACCOUNT TERMINATED. COGNITIVE ASSETS FROZEN.
She’d been deleted from the system. Officially, she no longer existed as a dreaming entity, a source of extractable content, a person whose sleep could be converted into currency. Officially, she was broke and out of a job and out of a life, pretty much. But unofficially, she was finally free.
Yes, such freedom came with costs. The school district terminated her contract. Her health insurance was cancelled, big surprise. The small apartment she’d shared with Arun became instantly unaffordable without her salary.
Eventually, she found work at a community center in the next district over, teaching GED classes to adults who’d never been able to afford NeuroSleeves, and who’d somehow managed to slip through the cracks of the surveillance state. Their dreams were worthless to algorithms. They were too scarred by poverty, too strange with trauma. They were perfect.
Six months later, she received a package with no return address. Inside was a handbound book titled The Saffron Algorithm: Dreams From the Resistance. The pages were filled with handwritten dreams, hundreds of them, each one ending with the same declaration: This dream belongs to me.
On the first page was a note from Priya: We’re still here.
Meena closed the book and held it against her chest, feeling the weight of all those shared dreams, flooding her all at once.
Outside her window, the city hummed with the sound of millions of people sleeping under surveillance, their dreams being extracted and processed and sold as usual. But somewhere in that vast machine, a few hundred kids were dreaming on paper, keeping their inner lives to themselves, returning to a place where they could own their own minds.
Meena opened the book and began to read, mentally tasting saffron and rain and the color of stories that belonged to the people who dreamed them.
This dream belongs to me.
This dream belongs to me.
This dream is not for sale.
Author Notes
I started writing Paper Dreams after someone I work with told me they caught themselves apologizing to an AI chatbot for asking it to do too much. Not joking. They said “sorry” to the thing that wants to replace them. That’s when I knew something had tilted in the brains of so many every day people embracing this technology with nary a thought.
It brings me a quiet sort of panic: if AI can predict what we want, then what happens to the parts of us we don’t want anyone to see? The feelings we don’t curate? The dreams we don’t remember? In a world where everything is monetized, wouldn’t our unconscious be next? (To be fair, I’ve also written a poem about this very subject, i.e. machines coming for our dreams, though I haven’t published it.)
Anyway, I set the story in a future-Silicon-Valley that isn’t even really the future. Most of the tech here already exists. Most of the corporate language I used…well, I barely had to make it up. There are press releases out there right now with more dystopian energy than anything I could invent. The satire basically wrote itself. I just asked: what if someone tried to grieve inside that system?
And Meena’s voice came naturally. She’s anxious, principled, tired. She overthinks everything, and she’s still usually right, albeit too late. She reminds me of Chidi from The Good Place if he’d lost someone and had to teach middle school civics while his dreams were being strip-mined for content. Meena believes in ethics, but also in keeping her job and making toast and not going completely feral. That contradiction felt real to me. So real.
This story’s about surveillance, obviously, but it’s also about exhaustion. About what it costs to hold on to anything real when every part of your interior life can be optimized, taxed, and reduced to ones, zeroes, and dollar signs. It’s about the slow horror of watching your grief get a copyright notice. And how resistance, even when you’re that tired, might look like a piece of paper, rather than a full-blown war.