It comes from my mother

I had an even better dream last night. I think it was a reality show, or an elaborate hoax where all the contestants are convinced they’re on a reality show. It was an academic reality show, so the challenges were all feats of the mind and not, like, how long you could stand on a pole without falling. There were a lot of people there I recognized from elementary, high school, and undergrad. Elimination was based on test scores and there was no voting. The people with the two lowest scores would be identified and then everyone else would go back to the dorms where we lived. I got the impression it was a huge competition, there seemed to be a lot of people around.

Of the two people left, the non looser would be released, and I’m not sure if they knew what happened next, because none of the contestants knew what happened when you lost. But because it was my dream, I got to see. The looser was strung up with ropes at their wrists and ankles and they were ripped apart. That’s way more symbolic than putting out their flame or turning off the light in their fridge (or whatever). It turns out that the producer of the show had a really horrible adolescent school experience and was taking revenge on smart people.

And before you go thinking that my dreams are oddly violent, I would like to point out that it’s genetic. After I told my mom about this dream, she told me about what she calls her “Sniper dream.”

“My sniper dream, surprisingly, predated all the reality shows. It was about a show called Skate For Your Life. They locked 100 roller skaters in a roller rink and put a sniper in a balcony. The last one alive was the winner. It's very much like The Long Walk.”

The Long Walk was written by Stephen King back when he was pretending to be Richard Bachman, and before he started sucking. I would argue that her dream was more like the story Running Man. Hey, remember that movie? I should totally watch that again.