“Waking Up from the Dreamt-Up Life”

In 2020, the humans woke up and learned that their lives were imagined. Everything that they had valued as crucial had no consequence.

They had invented a world with jobs, cars, roads, homes, businesses, and it was all for naught. Some of them had even developed home units called Families. When they awoke from their shared dream, those ‘Families’ were constant nuisances. And the shops, the jobs, the cars, the roads were no longer used.

They longed to use the Language, which was also one of their inventions, to utter greetings to one another. The word ‘Hello’ had been developed to break silences between strangers. Yet, even it had no meaning anymore.

They wanted to return to their shared dream, where they believed everything mattered—that Time was a thing, and getting places according to it was important. The only one of their inventions that mattered after they awoke was Money.

Unfortunately, the humans had invented Money. Once awake, the humans succumbed to the infinite power that they had given money.

Now food. Food was real. It grew on Earth. It didn’t go away after the humans were awake. Well, it was still growing.

But because Money had so much power, food was only there for the humans who kept believing in their dreams.

The humans who continued to devote to their jobs, to their cars, to wander the roads that led to nowhere, to spend Money at the businesses that stocked made-up products, those humans ate Food.

The rest of the humans—the rest could not believe any longer. They starved.

These starving humans knew that the world where they once ‘lived,’ or made-believed they lived, was a construct of their dreamt-up values. And they could no longer believe in make-believe.

Soon, the starving humans disappeared from their own dreams, yet the dream continued for the Daydream Believers.

And every decade or so after the starving died out, another batch of humans would awake and realize that they too had been dreaming all along. These humans would, too, stop believing and die out.

Eventually, after several cycles of dreaming and waking, Food and Earth and Plants lived without humans, who had all died out and no longer infested the planet with their dreams.