Dream Premium

A couple years ago, an advertisement began playing in my dreams for a product that doesn’t exist.

I know it wasn’t a fake ad that my brain constructed using a conglomeration of glimpses and memories from my waking life because it was the same ad every time. No dream logic nonsense and no alterations to its organization. Every night when I entered REM sleep, I’d start dreaming, and midway through—no matter if I was leaping across a blazing forest or vomiting teeth onto a public bathroom floor—a pop-up screen would appear, like the ones that might open a new tab on your computer and download malware if you click the wrong “X” option. Centered on the pop-up were the same two sentences in 8-bit font:

Don’t Just Dream. Dream Premium!

Then, the dream would blackout and end. I always woke up cold, my sheets a sweaty mess, with five minutes to spare before my alarm went off.

I was working as a “Diligent and Professional Team Energy Service Technician” at the time for a small tech company named Sublimental Enterprises that, according to Google Maps last time I checked, is now permanently closed. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the time you’re reading this, any mention of Sublimental Enterprises is completely missing from the Internet. They seemed like the type of company that could disappear at a moment’s notice. Despite the job description’s vague details and their store’s location being in a mostly abandoned strip mall on the rough side of my hometown, I applied. Financial desperation will get people into the oddest of situations, I guess.

My responsibilities varied daily. Sometimes I’d greet customers at the door for the entire shift, which lasted from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Sometimes I worked the register and polished the display screens of Sublimental-brand phones. Sometimes I cleaned the bathroom, although I never handled restock.

I wasn’t the only employee, of course. Todd’s shift overlapped with mine, and I didn’t see the other employees until it was their clock-in time or unless our manager, Brie, decided to emerge from the back office to check on us. Todd was a comic book’s equivalent of the quintessential nerd archetype. Thick horn-rimmed glasses, patchy stubble, and a Beatles-style haircut the same color as a turned-off phone screen. He never stopped smiling. What confused me about him was how he looked out of place in the uniform, like he was meant to be wearing a suit and tie instead of a collared shirt and khakis. Brie, on the other hand, looked exactly like an athletic, working mom with her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and an expression of disapproval plastered to her face every time she spoke to me. She was destined to wear that uniform, as if her job was a play and the part of “manager” was created just for her.

A few months into my employment, I finally decided to bring up the advertisements to Todd in hopes he might know something—or, potentially, be experiencing the same thing himself. I kept my voice low while we polished phone screens together in case Brie might overhear and scold us for talking crazy on company time.

“It’s weird,” I told him. “It’s been happening every night since I started working here. I haven’t woken up well-rested in months. I’ll be dreaming normally for a while, and then—boom. Don’t Just Dream. Dream Premium! It even pops up during my nightmares.”

Todd’s constant grin turned taut. He slowed his polishing and glanced around the store as if searching for someone who had put me up to this chatter.

I said, “I’m not joking.”

“Dream Premium, huh?” he asked. He laughed a little, but it sounded like a mask for whatever panic must’ve been brewing inside him. “Never heard of it.”

He stepped away from the row of phones nearest us and, his eyes darting around the store, lurched toward a locked display case. He fumbled for a ring of keys in his pocket.

“But have you heard,” he said, frantic, “of the SE-Tablet Subli-model 2.0 Plus? It’s our newest design, and it’s got all sorts of great features! Such as…”

I listened to him recite Sublimental Enterprises’ tablet ad pitch as if he was going off-script and needed to save face somehow. It took him a few tries to unlock the display case and grab a packaged SE-Tablet without dropping the box or the keys. I didn’t bother cutting him off with a “never mind,” instead just walking away to go polish devices on the other side of the store. He trailed off into silence soon after. We didn’t talk for the remainder of our shared shift.

The next time I mentioned Dream Premium to anyone, it was during my lunch break a few months later. The dream advertisements had become increasingly invasive. My dreams barely began before a pop-up interrupted, and I’d wake up every two hours, forced out of sleep and struggling to fall back into unconsciousness. The ads’ resolution was improving, too. Instead of a pixelated font, Dream Premium was scrawled in pristine Helvetica, a blue pastel glow surrounding each letter that made the ad seem like a portal to another, more computerized dreamscape.

Brie walked into the breakroom for a noontime cup of coffee as I sat down with my lasagna microwave meal. There was only one chair at the folding table, so she remained standing when she turned to talk to me. The coffee machine gurgled and hissed beside her.

“You look awful,” she said.

I nearly forgot to set my plastic fork down before touching the shadows sagging beneath my eyes and almost poked myself. No amount of concealer could counteract this much exhaustion.

“I think my blood is seventy percent energy drink,” I replied. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

She raised a manicured eyebrow at me. The coffee machine gave a final screech to indicate its job’s completion.

“Tired employees aren’t good for business.”

“I’d be less tired if I wasn’t getting ads in my sleep.” I prodded the cheesy top of my lasagna, its surface generally indifferent to my fork’s prongs. “Don’t Just Dream. Dream Premium! What even is that? The ads don’t tell me what Dream Premium does, by the way. I bet it’s not even a good product or subscription or whatever.”

Brie sipped her coffee and stared for a long while at me. Then, she asked, “Have you told Tom about this?”

“Tom? You mean… Todd?”

“Todd. Right. I meant Todd. You’ve told him?”

“Yeah, but he clearly didn’t believe me.” I sighed and shoved a forkful of lasagna into my mouth.

Brie lifted her phone out of her back pocket and appeared to answer a text with one hand, still holding her coffee cup in the other. She said, “I’ve heard of this thing called lucid dreaming. Maybe you should try that? Dismiss the advertisement that way?”

Before I could remark upon the simple genius of her suggestion, she strolled out of the breakroom and retreated to her office. After lunch, I lingered by her office door and listened as best as I could. She was talking no louder than a murmur to someone—on her phone, I assumed—so I didn’t catch much. What I did hear was a single fragment:

“—faster than expected… Prepare for—”

I spent the rest of my afternoon and evening after clock-out researching lucid dreaming: methods on how to train yourself to do it, estimates on how long it takes to do it consistently, advice on how to remain lucid once you awaken inside your dream, stuff like that. These preparations took me a solid month before I managed to succeed. That success was short-lived.

My dream began like any other dream might. I was crawling through some sort of funhouse-style space that slightly resembled my childhood doctor’s office, motivated by a vague notion that I was being chased but couldn’t look behind me. Then, the pop-up appeared:

Don’t Just Dream. Dream Premium!

It was more recognizable as a part of the dreamscape than anything else surrounding me, and this recognition shifted my perception of the environment into awareness that it was, in fact, a dream. I became lucid. I could feel the weight of my own body inside the dreamscape, could touch the pop-up screen and feel that, too: warm, like a gaming laptop left running for too long. I traced my index finger up to the ad’s “X” button and clicked it.

The pop-up disappeared.

My triumph lasted a mere three seconds before the dreamscape glitched. Everything around me red-blue shifted and then transitioned into stark whiteness. I heard what sounded like a bubble forming and knew another pop-up was waiting for me to turn around and acknowledge it. I did.

Three sentences hovered in front of me, white text on a royal blue error screen:

Uh oh!

It looks like you’re using an ad blocker.

Please refresh your consciousness.

My lucidity shot away from me in a blast of static screaming. I woke up, sweat-soaked once again, my eyes dry and stinging.

I arrived late to my shift that morning and ran into the 6 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. employee who I never learned the name of. She wasn’t wearing a name tag on her uniform and looked stunned that I had approached her in the first place. I stopped her in the parking lot outside the store.

“Hey, listen, I know this is going to sound crazy, but do you get ads in your sleep, too? Dream Premium? Have you tried refreshing your consciousness?”

She stared at me with horrified eyes. I waited for her to speak. She glanced back at the storefront, then over my shoulder at what I assumed was her car, and resumed looking at me.

She whispered, “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” and brushed past me, car keys in hand.

“Wait, what?”

I followed her to her vehicle; she got into the driver’s seat, slammed the door shut, and stared up at me through the closed window, putting the key into the ignition but not twisting it.

I raised my voice so she could hear me through the glass, asking, “What do you mean you can’t talk to me? What’s going on?”

As if remembering she had the option to drive her car—that it was functional at all—she started the engine and put the car in reverse. I stepped back as she pulled out of her parking space and drove off, aware that she was watching me in her rear-view mirror until I was out of sight.

Sublimental Enterprises had the most amount of customers I had ever seen enter the store during my shift that day, so Todd and I were too busy to converse with each other except for when I had to borrow his keys to unlock a display case. The customer wanted that Subli-model tablet Todd had talked about before. I reached for the same box he had shown me. It was empty.

“Um, sorry,” I said, “let me—let me get a different one from backstock. I don’t know what’s wrong with this one…”

I hurried to the storage room adjacent to the breakroom and made a beeline for the shelves labeled “TABLETS, ETC.” None of the cardboard compartments had been opened; their shipping labels were blacked out. I slit the tape open on one using my thumbnail and reached in to grab a new tablet box. Empty. I checked the other compartments. Empty. Whatever was going on, surely my manager would be able to explain. Brie was the type of woman who could handle anything thrown her way, I thought, and after concluding that she wasn’t in her office, I marched to the checkout counter to use the store’s personal phone by the register. Brie’s number was written on a notecard taped beside the phone stand.

Todd watched me from across the store, even as he showed off Sublimental Enterprises’ new wireless earbud model to a small group of customers. The other customers milled around like actors who never learned how to improvise. The one who was waiting for me to return with the correct tablet box was gone.

I called Brie. She answered at the first ring. The anxiety in my chest swelled closer to an all-out attack.

“Hello?”

“Brie! Brie, listen, something really weird is happening and I need you to come in as fast as possible, please, I—I don’t know what’s going on! Inventory’s fake! And that early morning shift girl wouldn’t talk to me, and Todd won’t stop smiling, and I don’t know how to refresh my consciousness! Please, Brie—”

“You’re just tired. You’re not thinking clearly. Go home early.”

“What? But it’s so busy here! I can’t leave Todd by himself—”

“Go home early,” she repeated. “Get some rest. Dream.”

I didn’t have the chance to reply before she ended the call. In a paranoid haze, I clocked out, grabbed my lunchbox from the breakroom, and left without giving the display case keys back to Todd.

What happened after that was told to me by paramedics. I have no memory of the car accident I got into on the way home, nor of my ramblings about my restlessness, my coworkers being planted actors, and my personal ad-induced hell. The emergency medical hospital soon transferred me to a mental institution where I spent several weeks on low-dose sedatives and antipsychotics until I was able to convince myself that I hadn’t been an unknowing participant in an elaborate dream tech advertisement experiment. The Dream Premium pop-ups stopped. After I was discharged, I went to live with my parents and searched for a new job. Sublimental Enterprises never inquired after me, but I did receive one final paycheck via direct deposit.

My life has been relatively normal these past couple years since that incident. I don’t work in retail anymore. I quit energy drinks. I sleep eight hours every night, uninterrupted.

I’m telling you all this now because of what occurred this morning. I’m afraid. My time at that mental institution was comparable to the emotional experience of working at Sublimental Enterprises, and I don’t want to go back to either. But if what I think is happening is, in fact, happening, I just might have to walk through those hospital doors again. Someone please tell me: Am I living in a nightmare?

Over breakfast, I was scrolling through my phone, catching up on my new job’s workplace group chat to see if anyone needs their shift covered next week. A new text loaded in from my manager, Ray: Hey all. Have you seen this yet? Looks pretty cool!

He sent a YouTube link. The username was generic; randomly generated. When the video started, I dropped my phone onto my plate of pancakes and screamed. It was a fifteen-second still frame of my dreamscape from last night, Helvetica text stamped center overtop:

Don’t Just Dream. Dream Premium!

Coming Soon