thank you notes 10/18

i'm thankful for the bizarre dream i had last night, in which i was living in a future dystopia where you had to choose whether or not to live your life while wearing a panoptical device on your wrist. i'm thankful that the device looked kind of like a dildo designed by samsung, which is funny in retrospect though wasn't at the time, and thankful for the rules of the dystopia, which were that if you wore the device at at all times you could be a full participant in society, with a job and access to social services, and would not be ostracized and harassed by others, whereas if you didn't, you were condemned to a brutal life on the margins. i'm thankful that families, in order to not be split up, had to make the same choice together. 

i'm thankful for the properties of the device, which were that if you chose to wear it, you could never take it off, and that it was constantly recording everything that was happening to you (video and audio and text) and sharing it with everyone else in the world with a device. i'm thankful that the other feature was that, if you stuck the end of the device it in your mouth and twisted it into your throat, you could access an augmented reality computer inside your brain and see projected into your optic nerve records of everything being recorded at all times for all the people in the world. i'm thankful to have done this in the dream and found that having it press against the back of my throat was very uncomfortable, overriding my general tendency toward voyeurism.

i'm thankful that in the dream, in a sequence perhaps inspired by her orientation at her new job in real life, my mom brought home a pile of the devices to try to convince us that we should all make the choice to use the devices in order to improve our life, that if we took the devices, she could get a new job in another part of the city that would help us to live a better life. i'm thankful for the ominous presence of the devices, which were lying on the coffee table wrapped in condoms (which were the only way to block the signal from transmitting, if you were still trying to decide whether to use the device or not). i'm thankful that this was a difficult decision for our family, but we made it and attached the devices to our wrists (i'm thankful for the velcro strap and the retro.

i'm thankful to have ridden through the grimy future dystopia with my family, first in an electric taxi, then in a train, where we had to cram ourselves into a coach car with a group of abusive droogs. i'm thankful that when we got off the train, we were at a state museum, which my mom told us was the orientation for our new lives. i'm thankful to have entered the museum and walked through wings of terrible totalitarian art, like the official portraits of kim jong il required to hang everywhere in north korea and the history paintings photoshopping him into important moments. 

i'm thankful that at a certain point in the tour, we boarded a disney style tram and were then carried through a series of rooms where people were eating from huge troughs of beautiful iridescent foods. i'm thankful that the implication of this was supposed to be how participating in the surveillance made possible all of these wonderful things and thankful that though i heard the oohs and aahs of others around me, the salivating, in the dream i had a sudden epiphany puncturing my false consciousness, that "the reason we get these things is because we're giving up our freedom and that's not worth it!" 

i'm thankful to know that this is some very basic pumpkin spice wokeness but am thankful that in the dream it felt both meaningful and, as i said it out loud, with increasing conviction, dangerous, as the people on the tram around me started to hush me up and tell me not to rock the boat and etc. i'm thankful, though, that i couldn't stop saying it, that i said it louder and louder and felt i had to, even though i was frightened of the ramifications of it for me and for my family.

i'm thankful that when we got off the tram and i kept telling my parents about this new thing that i learned, that we'd made the wrong choice and we had to get rid of the devices and get out of there, and am thankful my mom smiled at me in a strange knowing way and told me to go look at one of the official paintings of the dictator on the wall. i'm thankful that i was confused, that i told her that she wasn't understanding the gravity of what i was describing, and am thankful she told me that i should go look, that it would explain things. 

i'm thankful to have looked at the painting she pointed me toward and to have realized that the figure pictured in it was shrek. i'm thankful to have gone from painting to painting in the gallery, the paintings i hadn't looked at closely before, and to realize that they all depicted shrek. i'm thankful that in the dream, i knew it wasn't just some strange green man or alien but was the character shrek from the series of dreamworks animated movies. 

i'm thankful, confused, laughing/crying, to have gone back to my parents, who told me this whole exercise was constructed to enlighten me, that we didn't live in a future dystopia, that none of it was real. i'm thankful to have watched a weird visual effects press kit reviewing the trip we had taken through the city, scene by scene, which showed how all of the construction and decay was visual effects and production design, a potemkin city filled with actors and dummies and shrek. 

i'm thankful that i woke up soon after with no idea what any of this meant.