Author: Majoki

To dream is the dream. Anyone thinking that we need to sleep to live is missing the real payoff. We should be living to sleep. Snow White had it right for the wrong reasons. She didn’t bite a poisoned apple, she micro-dosed from the forbidden fruit of the real tree of knowledge: somna.

Why would anyone want to wake up to our messy reality when you can now literally sleep your life away? Actually, more like twenty lives. Maybe no one is ready to go all Methuselah with biosuspension fields yet, but after decades of successful manned missions to and beyond the Kuiper Belt the groundbreaking stasis technology appears to be extremely stable.

Biosuspension fields are an amazing and necessary technological achievement for deep space travel, but it’s somna that makes it psychologically possible for humans to endure stasis for years on end. Somna is the juice that makes the squeeze worth it. And there are a lot of folks that wish somna was actually a juice or serum or pill, something you could just ingest or inject. Unfortunately, it’s not as straightforward as biting into Snow White’s doctored apple.

Somna is an idea. A thought worm. Not quite a meme or memory, and more like a mom’s “gentle reminder” to get your act together. Because that’s what you have to do with somna: put your act together. Or acts. You have to basically stage your dreams before you go into stasis. In your mind, you set the scene, the players, the actions. And the somna technique trains the brain to follow that neural pathway into heavy, sustained R.E.M. The more elaborately and authentically you somna, the more likely that you’ll have a positive dream experience that can make stasis feel like well lived years. Some say it’s more entertaining, edifying, and exciting than real life.

Sounds great, right? That’s the catch. Somna techniques have gotten so good at preparing deep space crews for amazing years-long dream experiences that increasingly, many crew members have become irate or depressed or mutinous upon being awakened from stasis. They don’t want to deal with the cold, hard reality of actually living and working in deep space. Hard to blame them.

Hard to blame anyone. Because the word is out and endless blissful sleep is in. Somna parties have become a thing. Biosuspension bootleggers are bringing lala land to the masses. And the masses are turning on and dropping out of reality. Crafting your dreamland ala Sophocles, Murasaki, Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy, Hammet, Ibsen, Marquez, Asimov, Achebe, Rowling, etc. is a temptation few can resist. Fewer and fewer do.

Soon we may be holding wakes for wakefulness. Simultaneously mourning and celebrating the end of conscious living. Is this the final battle for humanity? Have we lost the will to struggle and push forward?
Tough to know what lies ahead, but when you can invite the likes of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Confucius, Attila the Hun, Saladin, Leonard Da Vinci, Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman, Mother Teresa, Malcolm X and Taylor Swift into your mind for a dreamy sleepover, you know the pillow fights will be epic.