Dreams & Memories

Aaron dropped his jacket on the floor, his hand suddenly limp with exhaustion. He slumped on his narrow twin-size bed, which he bought because any other size wouldn’t fit in his closet of an apartment. He bought his rose patterned bed clothes because they were on sale at the local Ross. An empty coffee pot sat on his bedside table, still unwashed from this morning’s brew.

It had been a long day at the Imagination Factory. He worked in division A section 15, which was a slight promotion over division A section 18; instead of working on the dreams of the clinically depressed, he was now working on the dreams of juvenile delinquents, who were surprisingly less suicidal than he thought they would be.

Not that it mattered. Aaron didn’t have time to theorize or psychoanalyze every dream that passed through his hands. He just shaped them as per his instructions. A bit of masturbation fantasy stuff here, a bit of career ambition stuff there, and in the case of the delinquents, he would add in a touch of rebellion. Every once in awhile he would get a rather disturbing one where he had to add a dash of blood and gore and dead animals, but it was not his job to question his directive.

He felt around between the covers for the remote, and when he found it, he pressed the button that would bring the television to life. The small 20-inch set flickered. Problems in the Middle East, it seems. Aaron never worked on a dream from the Middle East before, and wondered what their dreams must be like.

“Probably full of hope and hate,” he muttered to himself.

As a low-level worker, Aaron did not have the privilege to know the names of the dreamers. But he at least knew their country of origin, just to properly facilitate the packaging of the dream and avoid cultural confusion. He also knew of racial and sexual orientation markers, but those were less important than memories.

Aaron sometimes wished he could remember.

Aaron does not have a last name. Or at least, he once had a last name. It was lost in the Great Amnesia of 2201, when all the databanks got shuffled by mistake. Even “Aaron” was just a name the man in the blue uniform assigned to him. According to news reports, almost 30% of the population lost their memories. Many of them regained them through families, friends, and existing government records. But Aaron was not one of them.

He figured he was probably a very lonely man who didn’t have anyone, who was probably an unemployed bum living homeless on the streets. His tattered and smelly clothing when they first found him was another such indication.

As Aaron ruminated more about his life, the news anchor suddenly said something very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

“Thanks to the latest information infrastructure developed by Dr. Lineas Smith, and championed by President Rita Mao, the government is finally working on fully recovering the memories of the victims of the Great Amnesia, ten years after that terrible tragedy.”

Aaron sat up, now at full attention. The phone rang. He scrambled over to the floor to get his pocket telephone from his jacket’s pocket. A robot spoke:

“Hello! You have been selected to have your memory recovered from the Great Amnesia! Congratulations! If you don’t wish to have your memory recovered, please fill out online form B43. If you do want your memory recovered, simply do nothing! You will be shipped a miniature chip via Express Download. Installation instructions are included.”

The robot then hung up. Aaron sat there, confused and shocked.

He did not know what to do.