All their drug ultimately did was cut people off from experiencing their dreams. Living them out or remembering them. It couldn’t prevent dreams entirely, of course. Dreams are the mind trying to make sense of all the information a person has to process in a manner that’s more efficient but non-linear in a way that can’t make logical sense consciously. Sort of like defragmentation mode on a personal computer from the Nineties. Shuffling data around so it fits together well, creating space for novel experience and knowledge. Everyone has to dream or we’d go even crazier than usual. But Ressitol allowed you to not experience it, not remember, cleaving the conscious from the unconscious, shutting one off from all the white noise. Converting sleep to a stark blankness.
Ressitol quickly became the most popular drug on Earth. More ubiquitous than alcohol, caffeine or Aspirin, more necessary than food or sex. To need not endure every night reviewing your life, like a thousand film reels chopped up into random frames and dumped onto your head in a mass of uncontrolled hallucinations, it was revelatory to our human experiences. To not wake up from every eight hours of slumber even more tired from a cavalcade of surreal adventures? Just sleep.
Ressitol changed the world. No more sleeping nightmares. Weren’t all these waking nightmares enough? No more labyrinths of confusion for a third of our lives, just a temporary death instead. There were downsides, of course, always are. For the artists, there was a dulling of inspirational drive, it didn’t take them away but they had to be processed while waking, no more background processes during sleep to arise from the sea like Venus on the half-shell upon first morning light but it just meant having to work harder. Visionaries of all stripes, artistic, political and scientific needed to be more disciplined. Hell, it slowed down the demagogues and business exploiters as well. Their dreams of blood and avarice had to be minted inside waking lives, slowing cruelties down just the same. And there’s nothing lazier than a business prick trying to crib others’ works.
Without engaging with or remembering these nightmares and dreams, those grim and grandiose harbingers of irrational action, the highs of life were not nearly as high but the lows of life were not nearly as low, and if history taught the human race anything, the highs are always worth the shaving down if it meant excising some of those horrible despairing lows. We had to all get real.
But realistic people are much harder to control with impossible promises of glory and pleasure. There were always would-be despots and idols trying to figure out how to get us back on those insane rollercoasters of dreaming, to make us sheep for their sacrificial slaughter all over again.
Still, as long as I can get it in my hands, I’ll keep up with my Ressitol until whatever day I die.
An end to the nightmares is entirely worth it.
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