Revelation

When I was laying out one night looking up at the stars I happened to see a shooting star--some say a falling star. As it fell down and disappeared beyond the horizon I was overcome by a heavy sleep and dreamt a dream that was so lucid, so vivid, that I could hardly forget it. It was cut up and disorganized but it seemed to be some sort of message. At times I got the sense that the story told, if you could call it that, was recent, and at other times a series of events that took place long ago. There was narration and at times it was almost as if someone were lying next to me in the grass sharing their story. I can't claim to make much sense of this dream but it left such an impression that I feel a need to share it. What is odd is that the narrator claimed the same thing—that he was sending me a message and that he too felt a need to share it.


The Dream

"Would you say that you like to waste money?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Money, particularly your client's money, would you say that you like to waste it?"

"Of course not."

"So the court may assume then that you intended this ad campaign to be effective?"

"It wasn't meant to be taken literally! It was sim~"

"Sir, please just answer the question. Did you intend to make this ad campaign effective? Or did you just want to produce an ineffective series of commercials while ripping off your client?"

"It's not like that. If by effective you mean that I wanted them to increase their sales, then yes."

"No matter what the message was?"

"This is absurd!"

"What's absurd? I beg you. I'll tell you what's absurd! That a corporation such as Toys 'R Us can send seditious and pernicious messages to the youth of our nation for years and not expect to face up to it! That's what's ridiculous!"

At this point the judge stopped the plaintiff's lawyer. Court had just reconvened and after the judge's reprimand the courtroom erupted. I could go on with all the small details but the main gist of the lawsuit was that a Mr. Lat had claimed the reason he couldn't keep a job or manage his finances was because he was the victim of the "seditious and pernicious messages" his lawyer spoke of. I couldn't tell you how many times the court had to listen to the jingle over and over: I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys 'R Us kid! I don't wanna grow up, 'cuz baby if I did, I wouldn't be a a Toys 'R Us kid!

Experts were brought in who pointed out that the ad was heard by millions of children and if the message really was that influential, why hadn't the country suffered an epidemic of laziness and unwillingness to work? To this the plaintiff's lawyer said that the country was suffering from this exact condition. He pointed out how in poll after poll a high percentage of people were unhappy with work. And then he went on about how arrogant Toys R Us must be to bring this up and that they must think those in the courtroom were all morons by trying to pretend as if this wasn't a problem the country was facing. I could go on but it'd do no good. What's important is that from this point forward the defense was defeated.

Press conferences were held and Toys 'R Us was already working on making up with the public by trying to distance themselves from, well, themselves. They fired their CEO even though he hadn't been in charge during the years of that particular ad campaign. They even had a new jingle they said they were going to start using the very next week. While no one ever got a chance to hear it, it was claimed to have been written to inspire good citizenship and a desire to grow into responsible adults. This ended up being a confession of guilt in the public's eyes and Toys R' Us stores around the country were looted and burned to the ground.

Mr. Lat was awarded a mighty sum. He ended up losing it in bad investments and loose spending, but before long he was back in the courts. This time he would claim that all the ad campaigns for all the products he bought, in essence, wanted him to go bankrupt. The ads had turned him into a mindless consumer of their products and not once in any of their ads did they tell him that he didn't need their products. Through some odd steps in logic that someone of importance found reasonable he was granted another large sum of money. Some companies went out of business this time, including Ferrari, which oddly enough had never created a commercial that Mr. Lat, nor anyone, had seen. Lat's lawyers assured the court that this was simply fancy trickery on the part of Ferrari.

The tyranny of Lat eventually led to an acceptance of this sort of thinking. Any industry worth a damn was lost or hid away. Artists stopped writing love songs because couples going through divorces were claiming to have been duped into thinking their spouse really was "the one". If, they claimed, they hadn't heard the song when they started dating then they wouldn't have been wooed over and intoxicated by the song's amorous effects and would've realized they weren't meant to be together. Restaurants were sued for making people fat, gyms sued for making people feel bad about being fat. State lotteries were sued for preying on the stupid while public schools were sued for opening up students' eyes to the atrocities of our past: undue suffering resulted in realizing we humans had such a brutal past. Politicians who were convicted of fraud and unethical conduct were released when they argued that the voters were responsible since they wouldn't have been in office if it weren't for the voting public.

What prevented all of this from stopping was the unspoken agreement that it wouldn't be nice to tell another person that they were full of shit. As you can guess, someone finally argued that it wasn't nice to let someone think they weren't full of shit when they in fact were. This, in turn, ended up leading the beast to bite its own tail and eventually the phenomenon self-destructed.

"I was allowed to think I wasn't full of shit when I truly was."

The defense was desperate—it was obvious to them but how to make it obvious to the public?

"So you're telling the court you're full of shit?"

"Yes, and that's why I should get money. This unspoken agreement amongst all of us in society has led to my immense embarrassment when I discovered that I was really full of shit. If someone had told me sooner I could’ve avoided the added embarrassment of going on all these years behaving the way I did.”

"We rest our case your Honor. This man's full of shit."

The case was made that society as a whole had allowed someone to suffer the shame of not knowing they were full of shit. Since the courts decided that a people could not sue themselves they threw out the case and all like it that arrived in the future. A haze was lifted. People began to realize that unspoken agreements weren't really saving anyone. In fact, they were quite harmful. Lat's name, which had graced our nation's money for years, but not always, was removed and the name became synonymous with laziness and later became defined as "a state of being full of shit". No longer was his name recited during morning mantras by sleepy eyed students. The strategy of arguing with an asinine assumption and unspoken agreement, which had been so effective earlier, had even gotten his name a place in the courts of law, but that had now changed.

Let us pray no society ever suffers from this or anything similar.

Conclusion

That was the end of the dream. Like I said, I can't claim to make much, if any, sense of it. The voice told me that he was from a parallel universe and that he traveled from reality to reality warning all who would listen not to fall into the trap that he and his kind had fallen into. Upon discussing this with friends some concluded that I had had a revelation. I put it off to bad diet and drug use.