“Dreamland” is a story about insomnia, a marriage falling apart, the Internet, and desire. More than anything it's a story about the desires we repress–the ones we have, but consciously reject, because we can't consciously allow ourselves to have them.
The woman in the story can't sleep because the neighbor's dog won't stop barking. She goes downstairs to the living room, and on the way we learn she's a mother of one, she has a complex dream life, her son has moved out, and she resents her husband Ed for the fact that he's a sound sleeper. We soon also learn that she doubts her own sanity, possibly with good reason.
When she gets downstairs she gets on her phone and starts scrolling Facebook–not necessarily because she wants to, but because she has this vague feeling that she might miss something if she didn't. (The neighbor's dog continues barking throughout all this.) We get a few more snapshots of the inside of this woman's mind, and it starts to look like a slightly scary place.
And that's when the mouse shows up. The computer mouse. The one that rolls on its own across the coffee table and asks her if she wants the neighbor’s dog to stop barking.
Which is where the real fun begins.
I won't spill the details, but let's just say there's plenty of lacerations around the neck, late-night phone calls, rumors of satanists, and even some talk of golf clubs. We even learn that our leading lady has a pet cat named Lovecraft. Which might not mean anything, I mean a cat has to have some name, doesn't it?
There were a lot of things in my mind when I wrote this story, but one of them was the rise of AI, which has only gotten more topical in the time since. The computer mouse, or whatever drives it, claims at one point to be whatever the woman desires.
Which you can connect back to AI or social media, saying that's basically what technology does–making us what we already were, only more so. Although if recent developments in AI are any indication, what we really want or what we really are is something a little more tame and boring than the exquisite horror I'd imagined.
But then again, the story isn't really about AI or the Internet. It's really about a woman in a fragile state of mind who encounters an entity that claims it's giving her exactly what she wants. Not the first or last time I've ever written about that particular constellation of ideas.
Give it a read and tell me what you think.
And one last, parting thing, before you go. What I particularly enjoy about this story is the way it leans into the cringe. It's not a safe story, and it doesn't hesitate to make the reader's skin crawl. There are a number of stories in The Invisible Woman and Other Stories that get into some very psychically uncomfortable territory, and this one manages it with some grace and a little tongue in cheek humor. Check it out.
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