Taste fully of the sorrows of this life and then, at last, at long last, at the bitter end, when all is lost beyond all hope, you will know these sorrows! Surely you will know them, surely you will. Beyond a doubt, beyond a doubt. Most certainly you will, most certainly you will. Taste most fully of them, drink the glass down to the very dregs, aye – the very dregs, grossly repugnant as they may be. Drink ye the glass of sorrow my children, drink deep and savour the taste for then you shall be wise. Thus reads the sacred Scriptures, as well you know, but who amongst us wants to be wise? That’s the big question at the end of the day – who amongst us wants to be wise?

It’s a bit of a poser that one. A hot potato, to be juggled from one hand to the other as fast as you can. It’s actually a rather embarrassing question if the truth be told. Which it never is, needless to say. We don’t like to hear it spoken aloud – it’s not something we wish to discuss, naturally enough. Wisdom is a heavy burden and we are unwilling to shoulder it. Folk like to talk, as is well known, but never will they talk sense – most certainly they won’t. You’ll be waiting a long time for that to happen…

‘We anal-yse your dreams as you sleep’ – did you ever hear that one? That’s the slogan proudly proclaimed by the mighty Dream Corporation who have taken over from now defunct League of Nations. The road to the future is a corporate one you see, you’ll have to pay to travel on it, you’ll have to pay the toll. No more governments, no more nation-states, no more organised religion, no more political parties – all has been subsumed within the mighty Dream Corps, the biggest corporation of them all. The last corporation on earth: the biggest and the best. The ultimate doomed extrapolation of a fatally flawed ideology.  The last vomiting forth of a deeply perverse experiment – an experiment that should never have got past the ethics committee, some say.

‘We’ll feed them to the Pest’ – did you ever hear that line before? I warrant you didn’t, I warrant you didn’t. This is from the future you see. Or was it the past? Scientists are doing advanced research on the human race  – the single greatest research project ever initiated – grand in conception, elegant in execution. Humanity, all eighty five billion of them, have become a single vast protoplasmic computer, its output is our dreams, its input our humdrum daily lives. Each dream we produce, no matter how inconsequential, is anal-ysed down to the very last detail by the latest generation AI dream investigators. Instead of the police and the army we have the Dream-Keepers and their task is to make sure that everything continues to go smoothly. Humanity’s dreams must not be interfered with, not by anything, not for anything. Cue the Dream-Keepers, who flitter at will from one dream to another, policing our sleep. They can appear in any form, just as dreams can. They can be monsters or angels. Their power is absolute.

We are like the geese that lay the golden eggs. We lay our golden eggs every night, one unique, each one precious. Only all is not well in the World of Dreams. Strange stories circulate, dark rumours abound. They say that new things have come into existence, things that have no names but which are real all the same. Maybe more real than those things that do have names. Uncanny sights have been seen – small wizened people who speak in riddles and drink tea from tiny teacups. New people have been seen, so it is said, new people who are free from all the corruption and deceit that has gone on before them. Other folk have been spotted too it seems – frightening folk, folk who have no reflection and do not appear in our dreams. We can’t dream about them but they are there all the same. They are an evil that threatens to overrun the New World before it has even been born. No one knows how it’s all going to pan out…