The Dream Loom

I have jury duty today, but please enjoy this piece that randomly came into my head a while ago.

The Dream Loom weaves tapestries from your dreams. Nobody believed it at first, it sounded too fanciful. But then its creator, Dr. Oneiros went on the Today Show and explained how it worked. NBC hyped it up for weeks, planting giant billboards in Times Square and buying ad spots on every possible website. I first saw an ad for the segment while watching a YouTube video on how to fix a GE front-loading washer-dryer combo. Mine had broken suddenly and I really didn’t want to pay those marked-up prices common with appliance maintenance. Besides, my dad always instilled in me that it’s easy to fix anything: just look it up on YouTube.

The episode was a big success: the biggest single-day ratings since they found that gorilla who knew how to paint or covered the trial of ▇▇ live. I always thought it was a shame what happened to ▇▇ and I still don’t believe that gorilla could actually paint. The Dream Loom is big and bulky. It has lots of bells and whistles and fibers and pulleys and knobs. It looked a lot like what a loom should look like, but where you’d usually put the spot you’d usually place the spooled thread was blank, except for a funny-looking white helmet and some wires.

Dr. Oneiros, the doctor who invented the Dream Loom, explained to the audience at home how it worked. First, he said you need to “clear your mind of non-dreams.” These were the type of things you shouldn’t dream about, the sort of everyday bad experiences you have at work, anxieties, or lunch orders that keep your head full and achy. Then, you have to place the helmet on your head and close your eyes. “This is important,” he said. “Keeping the eyes shut tight would prevent the conscious mind from seeing what’s around you.” Without that, you might accidentally end up making a tapestry out of something boring like the Today Show set or the pile of laundry piling up on your kitchen table.

▇▇ was the first to try it out. He was new to the show after, ▇▇ left because he was found guilty in that big trial. They needed someone that was young and spry but also good on the eyes so that women (age 40 - 55) would start watching again. He laughed a lot then put the helmet on and sat in the chair and closed his eyes. Dr. Oneiros fiddled with some buttons and knobs and then the loom came to life: purring and whirring as it started spinning a beautiful mix of colorful translucent threads straight from ▇▇’s helmet.

At first, the threads were hard to see. You had to really squint and get closer to the TV to see them. They looked flimsy and transparent, but soon they got brighter: beautiful gleaming golds and purples and reds. To me, it looked like a mirage, which is something I had read about but never witnessed firsthand. The first time you looked at the tapestry you saw nothing and then the next time, after being in dire need of of something stimulating, you could notice the brilliant wavering fibers of it. The tapestry took a while to make. The process was about the length of a typical Today Show episode—commercials included. The other hosts moved through their segments while ▇▇ sat in his chair and kept his eyes closed. Each time they cut back after commercial the tapestry was nearer to completion. It was a fun game to play at home and on social media to guess what the completed tapestry was going to be. Some said it was a house, others said it was a castle or a mansion. Some said it was a dream about being king of the world and a few others said it was about being president, though most people agreed nobody wanted that job anymore. It didn’t look like much to me. I didn’t think you could tell somebody’s dream when it was half-finished anyway.

When the tapestry finished, they pulled it out from the loom and hung it up in the studio. Everyone took a step back and the camera focused on the full thing, showing that ▇▇ had in fact dreamed of the Today Show set. At first, the hosts thought he must have opened his eyes for just a bit and messed up his dreams, but after looking closer they realized the positions were all different, and ▇▇ was in the lead chair seat while [] sat beside him. That made [] a bit angry but she laughed it off anyway. ▇▇ looked nervous but then the doctor asked him what he was holding in the tapestry and they both realized it was a baby boy which made ▇▇ start sobbing as he told all of America how he and his partner Marcus had been trying for a baby for months now.

We all found the Dream Loom pretty fascinating. It went on a tour around the country after its appearance on the Today Show. There were lots of articles about it written in the New York Times and the Washington Post. I devoured them all; curious about how it worked because I could never remember my own dreams. Because it was an election year, they all demanded that the two candidates hook themselves up to the Dream Loom on live TV, in place of a debate. One of the candidates produced a fiery red tapestry, showing himself grinning on a throne positioned high above the world. The other showed our current America but with slightly better access to trains and other forms of public transportation. It made choosing pretty easy because while trains and public transportation are really nice, they’re not the types of things you’d want someone dreaming about. It showed a real lack of imagination.