An immigration parable
Last night I woke up on a couch in a strange room. I was at the top of a tall tower, and outside the window I saw an object that looked something like a kite or a para-glider, albeit one with many different sails. It was hanging slowly over a city so tall that beneath us I could see the clouds obscuring my view of the ground.
Well, I've read Chaucer, and I've played Assassin's Creed, so I knew—this was obviously a dream vision.
Looking around, I saw a tablet computer that roughly explained the parameters of this future, and the reasons I'd been brought to this place. I thought this betrayed a startling lack of respect—they were going to yank me away from my own bed and take me to this strange world and they couldn't even spare a real person to talk to me?
Anyway, the text struck me as kind of a spiel: after I’d passed some introductory courses, I'd be inducted into a society that promised infinite wealth, opportunity, and riches, and whatever knowledge I managed to gain could be carried home with me after I awoke. If I studied hard in this world, I might wake up with shattering insights that would make me wealthy and renowned and respected in my own world.
The building wasn't empty. It had a few other human beings, walking through its corridors and gardens and pavilions, holding their own tablets or scrolls or books of instruction. But they spoke their own languages—I wasn’t able to understand or talk to them.
The dream-vision computer directed me to take online courses. Learn this planet’s language. Pass tests. All before I could speak to another person. Just many weeks of this bland, provisional existence. Which I definitely could describe (corridors, computer terminals, meal-trays appearing from behind wall-panels, etc). But why bother? The experience sucked. It was banal and, honestly, very disrespectful. I was a human being. I'd been brought here. I hadn't asked to come!
At one point I heard someone speaking English, so I knocked on her door.
“One second,” I heard. The panel slid open. The woman was white-skinned, wearing one of the cream-colored shifts that we’d all found in our dream-vision closets.
"I speak English too!" I said.
"Oh!" she said. "Oh! Are you...?"
"I don't work here," I said. "Where are you from?"
She was from Texas. Red-haired, college-educated. I'd come from 2024—she was from 2051 (i.e. she was from my future).
We went for a walk in the nearby hanging-gardens: you know, one of those places with a high ceiling and grass growing on the wall, and lots of vines, all meant to obscure the fact that you’re still fundamentally indoors.
The place had no staff. Not even AI. Only these wordless robots that obeyed typed commands. The tablets claimed everyone here was pre-screened for violent tendencies. We were all rule-followers, safe people.
"I guess it's right," she said. "I've seen some men here—no offense intended—who seem pretty—"
"Pretty rough," I said.
"Yes, some very rough types," she said. "But none have hurt me or anything..."
Her accent—I have no idea if Texans talk this way, or if it was a speech impediment or what—was very broad. For 'rough types' she said 'roff topps.'
We made an appointment to see each other the next day. There was a lot of stepping gingerly around each other, trying to figure out if the other person was comfortable. She seemed like quite a dull woman—talked a lot about her kids. She would say, "You don't know what it's like, for a mother to be away from her children!"
I kept reminding her, "I have a daughter too!"
She was too polite to say it, but I think she felt her connection to her kids was much deeper, because she'd born them out of her body—an essential bond that I could never understand.
Supposedly we’d be returned back to the same instant we'd left, kinda like the kids when they left Narnia, so it’s not like my daughter would miss me. Personally I was looking forward to having an entire lifetime in this world. Clarissa wasn't. But she was an ace with languages. She raced ahead, scoring the highest marks in test after test on this strange script.
Perhaps you're wondering—what am I reading? What point is this dream-vision trying to make about immigration? Do we like it or do we hate it?
I have no idea! Believe me, this dream-vision world was not exactly like anything that exists in real life. I guess it resembles a displaced person's camp, but those seem like crowded, filthy prisons for unwanted groups of human beings, where the inmates often brutalize themselves and each other.
This wasn't that. Everything was clean. We had plenty of food and water and clothing. And the tablets offered lots of entertainment. And we could even leave whenever we wanted—although once outside, we couldn’t communicate with anyone, since we didn’t yet speak the language.
This was more like a system designed in response to the existence of the refugee camp—as if people were saying, "We definitely don’t want to create a refugee camp scenario."
It wasn't totally unpleasant. I had food and water, and the tablets offered some amount of entertainment. I do think the dream-vision program made some design decisions that, while understandable, caused me a lot of psychological distress. I would've liked to have more friends, more people I could talk to.
But the solitude also incentivized you to learn. Clarissa picked up the language, and she was chatting away. One day I saw her in new clothes—she said her friends had gotten them for her.
I said, "Why?"
"Just to be nice! It's great out there. They're gonna teach me how to get home."
Getting home was a very simple process. Lots of outsiders (i.e. people who lived in other skyscrapers) thought the dream-vision program was morally wrong, and they were willing to help people like us. You sent them a message (in their own language), scheduled an appointment, and boom.
You could also just kill yourself. This was not an Inception scenario: if you died in this dream, you'd just wake up in real life, totally unharmed. But these other people claimed they could terminate the dream vision without killing you. Kinda makes you think, maybe these would-be humanitarians would actually just put you to sleep and kill you.
But I'm sure it wasn't really like that. This whole society was very well-meaning and loved fine distinctions like that between killing a person and harmlessly ending their dream-vision.
After Clarissa left, I studied harder and eventually attained a proficiency in this language. Once I knew the language, there were lots of non-dreamers who wanted to learn English and wanted to practice their English proficiency with me. Folks who wanted to study people like me. But I was like...fuck you guys! You could've come to my skyscraper and talked to me—you could've put in a modicum of effort instead of waiting for me to learn your language and then use it to search, "Does anyone here care about Americans?"
This was so typical of the people in this time and place, by the way. They had precisely that mix of high aims, high ambitions, and little concrete willingness to get their hands dirty.
I wanted to talk to a real alien, so I got in touch with a group dedicated to exploring the culture and society of these graceful creatures—the kite-folk—in the sky. These creatures were not the natives of this planet by the way—both human beings and the kite people had colonized it separately. Because human beings are so extremely annoying, the aliens evidently wanted little to do with us, but so what? I've talked to lots of people in my life who didn't want to talk to me.
However, the meetings of this alien-communication society were rather disappointing. They just endlessly reiterated this first-contact protocol stuff about how we needed to avoid making the aliens mad, and how they'd talk to us when they were ready.
At one meeting, I said, "Is anyone actually talking to them?"
"We have a communication outpost."
"I know about the outpost," I said. "But...do the aliens come?"
"The outpost transmits their messages to us."
The aliens communicated using smells, so they couldn't send us messages directly. This man, at this meeting, was just describing a piece of technology that the aliens could use to communicate with us! A piece of technology that, although he insisted it had no learning curve, was (to my mind) obviously something the aliens would need to be taught about. Like, they'd been informed of it, but it was unclear if they, as a people, retained that information.
"Is there anyone here who has an actual relationship with an alien?" I said.
"They don't form relationships in the same way that human beings do. Their kinship networks are..."
Just another spiel. Which was fine. But I was like, guys...whatever it is these aliens do, whatever consciousness they have, if you want to talk to them, you have to actively cultivate one specific individual.
Of course they were like blah blah it doesn't work that way. Okay, great, so...what. How does it work? Please teach me.
They had nothing.
I realized the irony of what I was saying—I was not cultivating a relationship with these people. I was not understanding their aims, their desires. They studied these aliens as their passion. They had considerable attainments in terms of how to use the resources of their culture—they understood how to program and maintain the robots that powered everything around there. These were things most parents taught their kids from a young age. To be considered self-sufficient, you needed that basic knowledge. These guys were being very generous in opening their meetings to outsiders like me.
But the fact is...none of these individuals had themselves built any of these robots, built any of these skyscrapers—all those things were built by the people who came before. The people I was speaking to—they seemed very ineffectual. Maybe somewhere, someplace in this society, there were people who could actually accomplish things. But these weren't those people.
Of course the folks in this alien-contact group had a very different view of things. From their perspective, all this discussion was simply how their society worked. Eventually you came to consensus, and only then did you actually do stuff. Since I actively hampered that consensus-formation, I think they found me very annoying (though they were usually too polite to say so).
I spent a lot of time learning about these robots, learning how to commandeer and maintain my own automatons. I learned how to develop my own homestead within a skyscraper (you basically just found an empty space you were willing to maintain and take responsibility for), and although my standard of living became quite high, I found myself very resentful of non-dreamers—the folks born into this society, and how they'd effortlessly graduated into control of these sprawling skyscrapers and hordes of robots and networks of kin- and friendship-relations.
I was one of the few “graduates” of my home skyscraper, but the people running the dream-vision program didn’t seem to care. Their only outreach was a mass-message inviting 'any interested parties' to go to their monthly meeting.
Finally, I did. The dream-vision institute was run by a small group of maybe twenty people. They looked at me fearfully, worried I was here to disrupt their society, to protest them and vent anger for bringing me here.
This had definitely happened before—the dream-vision program was the locus of massive protests, not just from graduates but from society at large. But...again...in this place, what was the point of protesting? There was no government or anything. You could protest all day long, but if people wanted to keep doing the bad thing, then they would.
"I'm not mad," I said. "I just want to watch."
It took a while for them to believe me. But I took the time, I sat and observed their proceedings. They'd brought me to this place intending to teach me something about their society. Well...I was here, ready to learn it—I didn't put things in quite those terms, because it would've made them very defensive, but I'm sure my hostility was apparent in my body language.
They had a lot of business to conduct. Nothing happened at the meetings—just a lot of tedious arguing about priorities. But they divided up into committees. They tried to put me into outreach or publicity, but I said I'd prefer operations.
After many, many meetings, I was finally given some maintenance responsibilities. They gave me access to logs. And I saw the history of their various initiatives to re-design the dream-vision experience.
Apparently, when they'd put dreamers of the same language group together, it'd often resulted either in the resurrection of old hatreds or in just extreme, uncontrolled cultural interactions of a type that seem superficially interesting, but actually are quite miserable for the participants (think WASPy finance guy trapped in a room with, say, their cleaning lady).
In truth, the dream-vision system was the product of a lot of testing. The fact that it seemed to work poorly was a function mostly of the underlying difficulty of doing this task in a safe and ethical manner.
Of course, ninety percent of the people involved in running the dream-vision program were in extreme denial about the psychological toll their experiment took on the participants. "We have every safeguard!"—that kind of thing. I mean, the program was composed of people who thought it was good. Whereas most people on this world thought the dream-vision program was a terrible idea! But the folks running it just...didn't listen to those people.
Finally I found one guy who I could actually talk to. I'll call him Peter, which is a totally made-up name, nothing like his real name. Just easier to have something to call him.
"Yes, we know...things happen," Peter said. "There are suicides. We tell ourselves that to the participant it's only a dream. And I suppose it's right. Let me ask...when you wake up, will this have been a good dream or a bad dream?"
"I don't know," I said. "I think this sense of alienation and failure, of being taken somewhere and just feeling like nobody wants or needs me...That's a bad feeling! But I realize now your whole society seems kind of...I don't know. It seems to work for you, but...the alienation I experienced just seems to be an integral part of living in this world where people have so much ambition and so much ability to enact that ambition, but so little desire to actually understand each other. I dunno—so much effort here is spent trying to prevent conflict. It seems to work! It really does. So who am I to judge?"
They have theorists and thinkers who've elaborated in more detail upon how their society breeds this sense of disconnection. But the problem, again, was so what? Most people didn't even perceive what I was saying as a problem. And there was no government or anything—so there was really no lever anyone could use to change society.
"Well, we really appreciate your labor on this project!" Peter said. "You have been a great contributor. I genuinely don't know if the building would still be standing without you. If you can find any way of getting other dream-vision graduates to participate, that would be ideal. I understand exactly what you are saying—you find the messaging of our program to be condescending and something of a put-off. My understanding is that when we've had more inviting messaging, it's resulting in a flood of graduates coming to us, needing our help, before they were ready to function in our society. This strained our own emotional and logistical capacities in ways that were ultimately harmful to the program's sustainability. But if you can think of a way to alter that messaging without resulting in that downside, please let us know. As I said, we really need more people like you who are willing to contribute."
Despite all my efforts, I could never convince any other dreamers that it was worth staying around and investing in this thing—the project that'd brought them here. They had a lot of other objectives of their own! Most of them also felt a lot of anger towards this initiative. They did not want to spend their time keeping it from collapsing.
But I did end up thinking, wow, it is impressive that this ludicrous dream-vision initiative even exists at all! Having experienced for myself how difficult it was to do things in this society. It was just nice that anything existed. Like...that alien-contact initiative was well-intentioned, but mostly it operated out of vanity—it didn't really exist. It didn't really talk to aliens.
The dream-vision initiative wasn't like that. It existed. It was pretty coercive and maybe it was morally wrong. But...these people thought it was good. They thought they were teaching the people of the multiverse about the principles of this society and its cooperative values. I'm not sure the dream-vision initiative really did that. But...they believed it! And that belief was valuable.
At the same time, it did make them very hard to talk to (as you saw with Peter), because so much of their psychology was built around this kind of defensiveness—this instinctive rejection of anything that'd make them understand how dumb their initiative was. Peter asked "How can we change the messaging?", but the truth was—the message itself was pretty suspect! And if you were to tell the truth to the dreamers, "Yes, this experience will likely be very unpleasant for you, but it won't harm you in the long run”, well...what would happen then? I dunno, maybe some dreamers would've liked the honesty. I have no idea. I definitely would've preferred that messaging, but...if you used that message, then the people involved in running the dream-vision enterprise itself would've thought, "Do most people actually experience this as a nightmare? If that's true, why are we doing this? What's the gain?"
If I'd wanted to, I probably could've ended the entire dream-vision initiative, because I was maybe their one and only experience of genuinely forming a connection with one of the dreamers. I could've built up a rapport with them, and then given them a dose of real talk that probably would've destroyed the whole org.
But...I didn't want to.
I stayed. I talked to my one friend, Peter. I read about this marvelous society and about its far-ranging exploits. I was thankful to be here. I tried to make a few reforms in the functioning of this system, but...ultimately I didn't believe strongly in my own ideas. I kind of, more or less, was willing to defer to the wisdom of the people who had designed the processes of the dream-vision skyscraper. They had actually built it—an act astounding in its hubris—it was something I probably never would've done myself. But I was thankful that they had.
Eventually I died, and all that I retain from this dream is what I've written here. I definitely could fill out this account with some additional details (I'm a novelist after all), but...why bother? Those details would be fiction, whereas what I've related is the fullest reality.
Afterword
I read a recent Substack post about Amanda Gorman’s DNC poem, and this post made the point that a lot of the critique of that poem (“a poem should surprise us”) could just as easily apply to much of the poetry that has existed in history, outside the current academic creative-writing sphere.1
Personally, I find that a lot of dogmas tend to take root in creative writing circles, and that these dictums, although they’re good at teaching you how to write one kind of interesting work, tend to discount all the other possible ways of being interesting.
For instance, you’re not supposed to write a story that’s a dream or a vision or a hallucination, because…it has no stakes. It doesn’t really matter. It’s basically not a story at all, because the character can’t change or progress over the course of the piece.
But…the dream-vision is an extremely popular genre in English literature. Two of my favorite works of medieval literature, “The Pearl” and “Dream of the Rood”, are both dream visions. Chaucer also wrote four dream-visions. Piers Plowman is a dream visions. Generally speaking, what makes a dream vision effective is that it’s an attempt to rigorously imagine a real place (Heaven or the after-life) that both the reader and the audience believes exists, but that it’s impossible to get to. The dream vision functions as a device for getting to Heaven and taking a look around.
Similarly, the far future is a place that you and I believe exists, but…we can’t really get there.
I considered very strongly trying to sell this story to traditional sci-fi magazines, but my experience submitting off-beat stories to sci-fi journals is that usually they say “This would be great if it was an actual story.” In contrast, on Substack there is little appetite for traditional fiction, but I think there’s some appetite for political parables and polemics. The piece isn’t exactly that either, but it fits better into that tradition than it does into the sci-fi tradition.
Further Reading
If you want to read “The Pearl Poem”, Penguin Classics puts out a middle-English version for a very affordable price. It’s so great. Most Middle English texts are very expensive, so this one is a major outlier. Definitely get the paperback—I cannot imagine the Kindle version is very readable.
If you want to know how to read Middle English, maybe the Pearl Poet isn’t the best place to start. Chaucer is probably better, since the language is closer to modern English than the Midlands dialect used by the Pearl Poet. Personally, I found the easiest way of learning Middle English (which is not at all hard) is by downloading this incredible app called General Prologue. One of the guys from Monty Python, Terry Jones, was somehow involved in it. Anyway, there’s a web app, there’s an iOS app, I think there’s an Android app. You download this app, and you just listen over and over to the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, and eventually you get the hang of it!
Middle English is really just two things: pronunciations and vocabulary. The pronunciations are rather simple, because really it’s only the long vowel sounds that are different—they’re closer to the French and Spanish vowel sounds than to modern English ones (so, for instance, the ‘i’ in ‘wif’ is pronounced ‘weef’).2 You just listen over and over, and eventually you can hear the differences.
In terms of spelling and pronunciation, Middle English is different in that it basically makes sense? Things are pronounced how they’re spelled! If you see cnicht (knight) then you pronounce it ka-neecht. You just have to train yourself to un-see the nonsense of modern English spelling. There was no standardization of spelling back then, so everyone just spelled words how they thought they ought to be pronounced. Which means different authors often spelled the same word quite differently—differences that often reflected differences in how they pronounced them.
With regards to the vocab, you just get it eventually. It’s basically not a different language at all—you can learn it with a few weeks of work. There’s a Penguin Chaucer Middle English text that’s also very good.
The blogger is
, who I haven’t been reading long, but I’ve liked what I’ve seen so far. As she puts it: “Historically I suspect the vast majority of poems are versifications of a set message of one kind or another, and the beauty and satisfaction of the best of them derives in large part from recognition and agreement, rather than a sense of discovery; from hearing, as Pope put it, ‘What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’.”‘Wif’ is ‘wife’—often the there’s no trailing ‘e’ in Middle English words, but, as I said, spelling varies considerably from text to text, and even from usage to usage within a given text.
Rules tend to get in the way of creativity, in more ways than one. It took me too long to realize there actually are no rules.
This reminded me a little bit of https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/review-conor-moretons-civilization?publication_id=1642926&post_id=144789378&isFreemail=true 🙂