Yumemiru

Lying in bed, waiting for dreams. The fantasies come first—space pirates, money, actually getting into bed with people you have absolutely no business wanting. You’re already grinning at the thought.

Then you wake up. The dreams that actually happened were all nonsense. Forgetting poems in front of assholes, piles of bottles, the usual weight of being stuck exactly where you are. You get out of bed pissed.

There’s an app called Yumemiru—it means see your dream—that says it can fix this. You pick what you want to dream about. Before bed, you set it up. The app watches for your REM sleep, then plays some music into your brain that’s supposed to remind you what you told it to want. Flying, being loaded, finally closing the gap with someone way out of reach. Just select it and sleep.

It sounds almost believable. The mechanism’s simple enough: sleep tracking, audio cues at the right moment, some neuroscience you don’t understand. It’s free. It’s from Japan. Nothing to lose.

I never bothered. Feels like the whole point of dreams is that they don’t take orders. That’s where your actual self lives, not the version that has to make sense or behave. I figure if you could schedule your fantasies, they’d just feel like commercials for what you already wanted. Worse than useless.

But every morning someone wakes up disappointed in their own brain, and that’s why they’d try it. That’s the whole thing, right? You’re always hoping the next thing—the next app, the next girl, the next whatever—will finally give you what you can’t make yourself feel. Even your dreams won’t cooperate.