“It’s 2084 — sleeping is keeping you poor!” Garret Glover grinned at the 50 megapixel front camera of his mounted iPhone 27, which he was live-streaming from. He glanced at his personal phone and checked the content brief from NoSleep:
- Catchy opening line. Suggestion: In the year 2084, sleep is for the poor!
- Explain how the unDreamer 3.0 has benefited you. Suggested focus: increased time for productivity at home and on the go, dream + memory tracking benefits.
- Demonstrate the product, highlighting key features: MemoryLock and DreamDecoder.
- Catchy closing line. Suggestion: Don’t let sleep stop you from building your dream life!
- Dress code: business professional. Khakis and polo shirt preferred.
- Target audience: young, ambitious professionals.
- Tone: eager achiever.
Garret looked at the thin, black, yoga-mat-like ‘bed’ on the floor behind him (roll it up and take it on the go!) and the neurofiber silk pillowcase covering his pillow (pillow not included!). He had to admit, they looked cheap. For $999, NoSleep could have at least released a couple of color options. But it synced with the neurochip installed in his hypothalamus, and that was all that mattered. He looked back at the camera. His view counter was at a whopping 7 people.
“I’m telling y’all, I’ve been a NoSleeper from the start. They’ve gotten this bad boy down from 4 hours, to 1 hour, to now…” (he did a little drumroll) “thirty seconds, folks! Thirty seconds, and you get all the benefits of a full night’s sleep! Just think about everything you could accomplish with that extra time. For myself…”
Garret trailed off again. He tried to think about what, exactly, he had accomplished with the extra hour that the UnDreamer 3.0 had given him. Nothing came to mind. Of course, he’d only had it for a couple days. But time added up. That’s what he’d told himself when he got the NoSleep neurochip installed five years ago, back when they released the UnDreamer 1.0 and promised to cut his sleep time in half. Garret had been confident: those four extra hours per day were exactly what he needed to make it big. It was an investment. A $10,000 investment in his future. With an extra 1,460 working hours in the year, he’d make the money back in no time. Plus, NoSleep offered payment plans, and any sales Garret made through his affiliate link counted towards his loan principal. After he paid off the loan, sales would be pure profit. He hadn’t expected to still be paying five years later, but that was life: expensive. The neurochip needed software upgrades, and it only worked with the newest UnDreamer products, so what else was there to do other than add the costs to his loan principal and keep grinding?
The problem, Garret scowled, was that the market was too damn saturated. Everyone and their grandma wanted to be rich. Every time you opened your phone, someone was selling you something. And here he was, selling something. Why would anyone listen to him? He could see himself on the screen: an average white guy, late twenties, round-faced, glasses, a smattering of acne, a patchy brown beard. A notification buzzed on his personal phone. Garret glanced at it, tapped, scrolled. A fit Asian guy wearing running shorts, bare-chested and sculpted, bounced on the balls of his feet as a motivational quote scrawled across the screen. Garret sighed and put the phone down. Tomorrow, he’d use his extra hour to go to the gym. If he was fit, he could be shirtless in his videos, and people would be more likely to buy from him. Maybe he could start selling fitness classes, or personal coaching. He could study how to eat healthy, and he could spend more time cooking. Hell, he could start a whole cooking channel and show people how to eat healthy and transform their lives.
“We all have goals,” Garret told his 3 viewers. “We wanna be fit, and educated, and have creative hobbies, and spend time with friends, and make money doing our side hustles. But how do you fit it all in? You have to go to work, and once you’ve gone to work, you’re tired! Check it out — the UnDreamer 3.0 can solve that.”
Garret unrolled the yoga mat and held it up to the camera. “Just look at that beauty. You can take it with you anywhere. Travel the world, working all day and partying all night — but getting all the benefits of 8 hours of sleep! I’ll be honest, y’all, I don’t know all the nitty gritty science behind how it works. The brainiacs at NoSleep sent me some stuff about REM cycles and neurochips and electrical signals that regulate the cortisol in your hypothalamus, and I’ll flash that on the screen for ya.” Here, Garret tapped a few buttons, split-screening his live stream so that viewers could see him on the top half, and his personal phone screen on the bottom half, which displayed a NoSleep infographic. He continued talking. “But ya’ll don’t care about that! You just wanna know that it works — and it works. Let me show y’all my favorite part.”
Here, Garrett laid the UnDreamer 3.0 bed-mat behind him and held up the neurofiber pillowcase. “This thing, y’all, this thing is crazy. I can’t believe they’re bundling this bad boy with the bed for free. Check it out.” Garret opened the NoSleep app on his personal phone. “Obviously, you’ve got your standard neurodata — you know how sometimes you get so sucked into whatever you’re doing that you don’t realize you’re feeling off? Well, the app is constantly getting data from your NoSleep neurochip, and if your levels start to waver, it just sends you an alert, you lay down, then BAM, you’re back, baby. But these new features, the MemoryLock and DreamDecoder? Well, it’ll be easier if I just show you.”
Garrett laid down and hit the “Rest Now” button on the app. He vaguely remembered sleep before the UnDreamer: the relief when racing thoughts slowed and he slipped into soothing nothingness, like wading out into a vast, cool lake. The UnDreamer 1.0 and 2.0 had plunged him into the waters of sleep, like a cliff diver leaping from the edge of awake into black nothing. But at least there had been nothingness. For the 30 seconds Garret laid on the UnDreamer 3.0, he was in perpetual free-fall, the gears of his mind whirring, buzzing, his body locked in place, and just as the watery nothingness rose to meet him, the timer buzzed, and Garret sat up.
“Yah, baby! So, you can see all my levels are looking good, but here’s the best part. He pressed the “DreamDecoder” button, and a chart popped up with three columns: one for the date, one with a brief description of that night’s ‘dream’, and column labeled ‘interpretation’. He clicked into the description at the top of the chart.
You are running very fast, but you are stuck in place. You pump your legs and arms harder and harder, but you cannot move. The ground is cracking. The cracks reach you. You fall.
Garret laughed, awkwardly. He clicked on ‘interpretation.’
Your life is collapsing around you, and you are doing nothing. You feel like you are doing a lot. You are doing nothing.
Garret read it. “What the fuck does that mean?” he muttered. He felt uneasy. Garret did not enjoy self-reflection, and he especially did not enjoy some NoSleep AI chatbot reading him for filth while he live streamed to a shocking…1 person.
“that sux bro” Eagleturd42 commented.
“Yah,” Garret said. “It does.”
The view counter dropped to zero as Eagleturd42 left the livestream.
Garret ended the video feed. He felt an overwhelming, crushing sense of defeat. He had to go to work in four hours. He thought about going to the gym, or going to the grocery store and coming home and meal prepping something. He could film it. It could be the start of his big fitness journey. People love a transformation, Garret thought.
He sat on the couch and turned on the TV. He didn’t feel like leaving the apartment. He didn’t want to have to work. He was tired. He turned up the volume on the TV, just loud enough to drown out the whirring in his mind. It was there: a persistent, irritating buzz. It was the buzz from the UnDreamer 3.0. He was sure the buzz was trying to tell him something. He didn’t want to listen. He turned up the volume again. He picked up his phone and opened Instagram. A thin, nerdy-looking white guy in a suit was holding a mic on stage. The audience was laughing. I’m funny, Garret thought. I could write stand-up comedy. I could sell out a whole stadium, I bet. I could get a Netflix special made about me, once I’m fit and my acne clears up. Acne always clears up when you eat healthy, he thought.
With 15 minutes before he needed to leave for work, Garrett dressed in his khakis and a red polo. He laid down on the UnDreamer 3.0 and opened the NoSleep app. He pressed the “MemoryLock” button. A menu appeared.
“Which time slots would you like to save to memory?” the app asked him. Descriptions of the past four hours were listed in 30-minute increments. Garrett didn’t need to read them to feel the disappointment rising like bile in his throat.
He tapped two buttons: “Delete all.” “Rest now.”
Thanks to Reedsy.com for providing the prompt that inspired this story! You can follow them at https://reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/.
This story was written in response to: “Write about a character who wakes up in the middle of the night, or is unable to sleep.“ as part of What Keeps You Up at Night. It was the winner of the weekly prompts contest #372!
