Competitive dreaming
Competitive dreaming is an umbrella term for slightly different but related disciplines and sports of dreaming for competition, and not for necessity or pleasure.
Another meaning is related to the commercial competition within a dream market.
It is contrasted with casual dreaming.
Dreaming competitions[edit | edit source]
Types[edit | edit source]
Informal[edit | edit source]
Although dreaming competitions can be held informally with participants describing their dreams after the fact, this is subject to much cheating. Given that judges will need to rate dreams, this is also very subjective. A lie detector can be used on the participants but this is also widely considered unfair as it just records how nervous a person is.
Activity[edit | edit source]
Another way of dreaming competitions can be done with the use of electronic monitoring of brain activity. The easiest way to objetively determine a winner is to crown the person that has held the most intense total dream-related brain activity during the perios, as defined by neurological science.
The disadvantage of this method is the lack of importance and register of the imagery and narrative associated to dreaming.
Rendering[edit | edit source]
A speculative way to hold dreaming competitions is to attach machines capable of interpreting dream activity and not only measuring it. This requires great leaps in brain-machine interfacing. Theoretically, it would be possible to map the involved synapses in a person or being and to translate the dreams into sensations. This would allow to register dreams and then rate them (either by judges or by a collective). The most immersive and accurate the experience in the "reproduction" of the dream (probably by another brain-machine interface), the more accurately it can also be rated.
Prizes[edit | edit source]
All the dreaming competitions can have prizes and a competitive scene alalogue to the one in other sports. With sufficient advancement in the area, competitive dreaming could be added as an Olympic Sport with the associated Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.
Professional dreamers could be adored worldwide much as other athletes.
Controversies[edit | edit source]
Although many Olympic sports are judge-rated (such as artistic gymnastics and ice skating), some may believe that a panel of judges rating dreams may be too subjective. Perhaps "objective measurements" could be used, such as lucid dreaming, adressing the audience, and the ability to fly or utilize other such "powers" in the dream.
Although memory of one's dreams and lucid dreaming can (allegedly) be trained, it is not clear that professional dedication to dreaming should bring "better results" for the dreams as compared to casual dreaming. It may very well be that the pressure and stress of competition would often counter any "gains" in dream training.
Commercial competitive dreams[edit | edit source]
Origins[edit | edit source]
Some experiencial dreams, after being recorded, entered the black market. Despite the warns of danger, they became a more and more popular form of entertainment. Some competitive dreamers started to sell their dream experiences. This generated new parameters to optimize the dreams for niche, then mass commercial appeal. Eventually dream could be "re-dreamed" and edited experientially, with the right software and hardware.
Mass commercialization[edit | edit source]
With the growth of the black market and "pirate leaked dreams", corporations slowly but surely started to realize more and more the huge market potential of dream experiences. Soon they started to lobby governments to regulate the dream market, to "make it safe for fair competitition" and so forth. Eventually a sludge of regulations came about, including ascribing copyright to dreams and the capacity to sell it, as well as dream licensing rights, reproduction and duplication of dream files and so on. Commercial entertainment companies such as Disney, Sony and Warner Media began to sell their "own" dreams, and soon enough dream experiences had replaced traditional movies as the main surce of entertainment. Some time on, when dream recording became accessible and common, dream sharing platforms such as DreamTube came about.
Stricter regulation[edit | edit source]
After brief stints of freedom these online platforms also became heavily censored and curated by the all powerful Algorithm. Some dreams became illegal and removed, and people started getting arrested and/or demonetized for live-streaming illegal dreams, or dreams including copyrighted content such as known songs and characters. Increasingly, dream streamers started becoming shadowbanned if their "values" and political orientation —as displayed through their dreams— didn't align with corporate company policy.
The Moebius Principle defined our physical reality and the digital dream metaverse as a "single-sided strip" with no clear demarcation. Since relevant regulation applying this principle came into effect, crimes committed in dreams carry the same sentences as crimes committed in the now so-called "physical subrealm".
Permanent emergency measures[edit | edit source]
The strictest package of emergency measures began during the DreamVid-49 digital pandemic. Digital tracking of all dreams and permanent connection to State and corporate databases for validation became mandatory at all times. This was done due to the possibility that unauthorized reproduction of infected digital dreams may be the vector for contagion of digital cognitive computer viruses. Brainapps were required to be installed by each user in their brain-machine interface in order to track the infection rates of dreams and to "cut off" infected nodes from the connected digital metaverse, thus effectively quarantining the virtual infection.
Law enforcement specialization[edit | edit source]
Illegal dreamers that continuedly insisted in uploading their content despite their sanctions became a danger to society. As such, a new professional kind of law enforcement was needed to hunt them down in both the oniric metaverse and the physical realms, in order to bring those terrorist rogues and their dreams to justice. These agents are known as Dreamrunners.
