My subconscious is repressed enough for me generally not to remember my dreams when I wake up, but lately there was an exception.

The dream started with me being home (a long time ago, still the grocery store) from university for lunch, just finishing up and about to walk back to school. As dream logic goes: apparently, a 16 km walk wasn’t about to deter me from saving a few quarters on bus fare.

Along the way I cut through an alley and passed the computer lab of my elementary school. As entirely opposed to reality, here the lab was on the first floor, enclosed in glass walls and I could clearly see what was going on inside. All the kids were working hard in front of Apple IIGs. Entrances to the lab were all keypad locked doors, but on the wall opposite those doors across the alley way, there were coin exchange machines, each one guarded by very short men in sunglasses and suits. Kids darted out with dollar bills in hand, exchanged them for quarters, and scurried back inside. I thought to myself, “well, these students must be sitting in front of coin operated computers, and there wasn’t enough room to install coin exchange machines in the lab, so they put them across the alley and hired dwarfish security guards so as to not intimidate the schoolkids. Yes, this all makes sense.”

A few minutes later I arrived at my class at UBC. It seems I was taking some sort of media class on doing your own television commercials, and I had arrived just to see my particular project be screened to the rest of my classmates.

Narrator: “Have you ever found yourself suffering.. from uncontrolled sarcasm?”
Woman in a boardroom, commenting on a coworker’s presentation: “Yeah, this is SUCH a brilliant marketing pitch. I’m sure the CEO would LOVE to know that our profits will rise by a WHOPPING 3% with that AMAZING advertising campaign”.
Everyone else in room: nervous stares, uncomfortable shuffling.
Narrator: “Now, with Sarcastaid, you can treat your once uncontrollable sarcasm! A once a day pill attacks sarcasm right at the source – your tongue!”
Animated cutaway graphic of tongue, showing red glowing arrows of sarcasm flowing from bloodstream upwards through tongue pores, then showing suppressive effect of Sarcastaid: white arrows pointing back down through tongue pores, countering red arrows and reducing sarcasm by 85%.
Repeat of same scene in boardroom, same woman presumably after taking drug: “Who designed the color scheme of your slides, your mom?”
Everyone else in boardroom: easy grins, benign chuckles.

Commercial over. Silence. Classmates looked around, a little shocked at the sheer inanity just on display. Some student, “You know, that wasn’t really all that less sarcastic.” Various mutterings of concordance. Then the professor: “For the rest of the year, ‘your mom’ will be one of those viral memes that comes up after every project is screened. It will be disruptive, and not even that funny. And who will we blame?” Accusing, unison answer: “Julian”.

And then I woke up in a cold sweat.