- Hey! Long time no see. What have you been up to?
- Dream surfing mostly.
- Oh, yeah? Me, too!
- Well, duh! What else is there to do when one does not have enough money to buy one's own dream space, and not enough prospects to do much else?
- True, but I tend to look at it with a positive spin. It's fun and it's free!
- So what's your technique?
- Well, I start out in the first available non-password protected dream I find. Usually a love story. People love to dream of love stories. And as they say, love makes one blind and forgetful, so usually no security measures. Then I look for the next available dream to hop to from that, usually a pregnancy dream, since love stories often lead right up to pregnancy dreams, so it's in the same neighborhood.
- Yuck! Prego dreams, seriously, are you kidding? I'd never enter that territory even if you paid me to. Plus it's a chick dream! I always seek out dreams of manly men, the kind of men who never got bullied at school, self assured, and sometimes too self assured to think their dreams could get invaded.
- Oh, Prego dreams are not that bad. And you'd be surprised by the number of men who actually dream of being pregnant - weird stuff! Nonlucid nightmares of course, but those are easier to invade anyway. Plus it's not like I linger in those kinds of dreams! I try to dream hop as quickly as I can, ideally before the dreamer notices their dream got invaded, while they still think I am one of their DCs.
- Sounds tiring all that dream hoping of yours. Me, I try to stay in one dream as long as I can get away with it. I try to blend in, become close to invisible, stay in the dreamer's blind spot, or transform into a wall with ears. I stick around in the hope of picking up something I can use for insider trading or such. Of course, I always need to keep an eye out for emergency exits to other dreams in case I get detected.
- That sounds like no fun and really stressful, plus too much risk of it being boring with no results to show for it, if the dude you target has nothing useful to share in his dream. See, I always succeed in my dream goals because prego dreams are always a short hop away from kid's dreams, and there are always lots of unsecured kid's dreams to choose from, no matter how often the parents remind them to password protect, a lot of them don't. And kid's dreams are fun and exciting. Sure, scary at times, because there are no rules and often break social expectations, not having learned yet how to dream. However, there are so many superhero dreams and just fun stuff. Before I dream surfed into kid's dreams I forgot how exciting those used to be. Plus with so many kids dreaming of superheroes for example, it's easy to dream surf along without loosing a sense of common plot despite switching dreamers.
- Yea, I suppose. But what's the point? You can't make any money off of kids dreams, and it's kind of lame too - childish, and a bit of a regression - no future in it for you, too past oriented.
- Can't always be dreaming of the future! Besides kids got lots of future ahead of them, lots of potential. If I want future dreams, I got lots of easy dream hops to choose from. Some of them are really bizarre too, the kind of dreams that I cannot really describe, the kind that most of us do not know exist: dreams of other universes, spiritual dreams of pure goodness that is blinding, dreams of mythical creatures and never-never lands. Most of those dreams are too scary for me to enter because part of me wonders whether I could get sucked in there and have trouble coming back.
- Do you think that's what happened to the ones who disappeared?
- What do you mean?
- Ah, I forgot, that's something I overheard in the dream of a DreamCorp employee. He was commenting on how many teenagers disappear every year, and the number is climbing, and it's usually when they are supposed to be dreaming.
- So that was you? Ha, got you! You are under arrest for breaking into a DreamCorp staff member's dream space.
- What?! Have you gone completely mad?
- Surely you did not think your friend would last that long without getting his identity stolen, given how naive he was. And besides, you are much more like him than you thought you were. Huh, what the ... where did he go? Darn it, he dream hopped into a prego dream, after saying he'd never. Darn those teens nowadays, can't even tell the truth to their own friends!
