I watched the movie “INCPETION” for the first time last week, and it reminded me what funny things dreams are. Everyone knows two things about dreams, namely that: 1) other people's dreams are dull, 2) how much Steven Moffat ripped it off for last years "DOCTOR WHO" Christmas special, and 3) how everyone who has unusual ones are going to tell you about them anyway.
And as they burble on and on about how they dreamt they were trying to build a windmill with Chuck Norris, but his hands were made of biscuits, or the time you and Superman had a fight on a space station, it's hard not to fall asleep and start dreaming yourself: dreaming of a future in which the anecdote has finished and their face has stopped talking and their body's gone away …
But maybe in future they won't have to tell you about it at all. They'll just play it to you on their iPhone. Surely it will soon be possible to create a device or an app that records our dreams and plays them back later at your own leisure.
Obviously, the reality is 99% less exciting than it initially appears. It certainly won't be a magic pipe you stick in your ear that etches your wildest imaginings directly onto a Blu-Ray disc for you to enjoy boring your friends with later.
First, there’s the business of capturing them, which all boils down to neurons. After studying the brains of people with electronic implants buried deep in their noggins, a group of boffins at New York University** discovered that certain groups of neurons 'lit up' when he asked his subjects to think about specific things, such as Marilyn Monroe or the Eiffel Tower.
Therefore, by studying the patterns generated, it should be possible to work out whether they were dreaming about 1950's movie starlets or global landmarks. In other words, the stuff that dreams are made of.
And it probably turns out to be a few blips on a chart.
So the 'dream recordings' will probably come in the form of an underwhelming visual transcript - a graph with a bunch of squiggly lines on it. Brilliant if, like James May from "TOP GEAR", you dream about nothing but graphs - but hardly "Avatar II", not that I actually want to see that film ever get made, by the way.
Mind you, real dreams wouldn’t make great movies anyway. For one thing, the continuity is all over the shop. One minute you're helping the cast of "21 JUMP STREET" battle a giant robotic Charlton Heston in a barn with an old CB radio, the next you're trying to impress a half-naked Jenna Coleman by climbing Everest using nothing but your teeth.
Even the weirdest episode of "DOCTOR WHO" makes more sense than that.
And most of the time, dreams are not even that interesting. The majority of my dreams are unbelievably, boringly pedestrian. Samuel Coleridge famously dreamt the epic poem "KUBLA KHAN" in its entirety, and upon awakening, immediately began scribbling it down line by line, only to be interrupted by a man from the nearby village of Porlock, who detained him with some mundane, petty chore for an hour, after which he could no longer remember the words.
That one might have been worth recording. But right now the best we'd probably get is an ITV pay-per-view channel on which Peter Andre dreams about his favourite sandwich fillings, Kerry Katona re-records all her old Atomic Kitten songs in G-minor, or Jedward take turns to sneeze inside a terrifying, hairy-walled cave.
Perhaps more worryingly, it would only be a matter of time until Simon Cowell hooked up the dream recorder to Twitter or Facebook, making it possible to enjoy live dream-tweets from Olly Miurs in which he makes approximately 50% less sense than he does while he's awake.
And from there, it's surely only a short step to some kind of reverse-engineering system via which ideas and suggestions can be planted inside your dreams while you're still asleep, which probably means in-dream product placement. So next time you try to climb Everest with your teeth, you'll have the great minty taste of Colgate in your mouth as you do so. And Jenna Coleman will be fully clothed with the latest knitwear line from NEXT.
Or maybe the advertising won't even be that subtle. Maybe all your future dreams will simply consist of a gigantic mouth shouting the words DIET COKE over and over until you wake up in a cold sweat with tears streaming down your face, and you immediately find yourself buying a can of Diet Coke from the shop in your slippers and dressing gown, hands quivering and trembling, without really understanding why.
In fact, yes.
That's PRECISELY what's going to happen.