Lucid Dreaming Democracy

poem

When the election rolls around again, you realize it’s your own lucid dream. All the words the candidates are using on the campaign trail and in the debates, including the words of the candidates you’d sooner die than vote for, are originating in your subconscious. By concentrating on a candidate’s face, you can change their language, projecting the finest speech you can think of into the mouth of the worthiest candidate, and projecting the most self-defeating speech into the mouth of the worst. You do this until the candidate you prefer assumes the office in a landslide. The cretinous candidates whose campaigns you prayed would fail are humbled and humiliated beyond all hope of comeback, and their various movements disperse. Caught up in the pleasure of victory, you decide to remain in the dream as long as you can despite the real world creeping in like muddy water at the edges of the dream. Through sheer force of will, you remain in the dream through the winner’s first term, and then their second term, and then, eager not to surrender control of the country to the villains and reprobates waiting in the wings, you stick around to orchestrate the next election too, involving all new candidates you’ve also invented, even viler ones going head-to-head with even nobler ones, watching the dreamt country inexorably improve, gathering behind itself a history so wonderful that to wake would be impossible.