They're branding people's dreams now. Coca-Cola offer you the chance to play football with Beckham, but you're each drinking a Coke, one more perfect than any in the waking world. You can drink Heineken with Daniel Craig, advert cos-playing as Bond. Or relax in a Virgin Atlantic plane while celebrities wander down the aisle.

It's an easy trick - flashes of light embedded on webpages that send the dream's prompts direct to your brain. You can download tools to record them, and I've done this with the Apple ads, because I like the clock tower they've designed, and you're standing right at the top. This tower is impossibly tall, and you can see for miles. I love how the sun has only just crested the horizon, sending the tower's shadow across the flatlands below like a sundial. What I want to do is fling myself off and try to fly.

It's hard to let go - I don't know if they intended this, or if it's just instinct, the body scared of jumping. There's not much information in the dreams, but they do put in guardrails – not least to stop people from trying to fuck the sponsored stars. I once worked with this awful kid who claimed he knew a way that you could do it. He said he'd fucked the world's most famous musician and that he'd teach me the technique if I bought him a slab of beer. But he was fired before I would have had the chance, and I never saw him again.

If I knew how to fuck sponsored celebrities in my dream, then I'd know how to throw myself off this tower, and maybe I could fly. I used to be able to do that when I was a child, but I've not been able to do it since they started putting adverts in my dreams. I don't care about dancing with Taylor, Britney and Beyonce: I want to fly again. If I can't do it from the Apple tower, I won't stand a chance elsewhere. But I can't let go.

I lean close to my right hand, staring at it. I can see brickwork below it, so detailed. I know it's my brain filling in the gaps. I put my left hand in my pocket so that all I need to do is unclench this right hand. I do it, but I'm still not falling. I turn around, look down the tower to the city a mile below, but I'm stuck far above it.

When I head out to work in the morning, I look I people's faces, doing my best not to stare. Everyone looks tired, and angry. I compare them to people in the background of old TV shows, looking for a difference. You should do it too - people's jaws didn't used to be so tightly clenched.

There's a radio mast on my route to work. The fence around it isn't secure. I could easily climb over and get onto the ladder, make my way to the top. I wouldn't let go, of course. But I could practise.

Background

Recently, I’m dreaming more vividly than ever. I’ve never learned to lucid dream though, because it sounds too much like hard work. And I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between lucid dreaming, and dreaming that I was lucid.

It’s theoretically possible to communicate between lucid dreamers. I wrote about this in 2018, and someone made a prototype in 2021. There’s a company called REMSpace who’ve announced recent breakthroughs in this area. Apparently, “77 percent of marketers plan to use dreamtech advertising in the next three years”1.

The thing I like most about dreams is that they’re wild and mysterious. But capitalism has its eyes on that too.

Recommendations

One of the best novels I’ve read so far this year is Róisín Lanigan’s I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There. It’s an odd little ghost story about the housing crisis. A young woman moves with her boyfriend into a flat. It’s her first time living somewhere that’s not the family home or shared accommodation. It doesn’t go as smoothly as expected.

In a Guardian interview, Lanigan said, “I was reading a lot about haunted houses, and thinking about how all haunted house stories are essentially about owning property and the huge burden that places on you psychologically. And then I was thinking, I wonder what the equivalent is for us, as millennials who rent?”

The book is carefully written, so that the everyday indignities of modern life sit alongside the signs of haunting, the two merging together. It’s gripping throughout, without the deflation at the end a lot of horror novels have.