The Dream Controller - a new novel by Roger Frederick

The Dream Controller - a novel in progress by Roger Frederick

The central character in The Dream Controller has lucid dreams (dreams in which he can control - or at least influence to some extent - his dreamscape and make decisions about what actions he takes). Discovering that his girlfriend is pregnant he has to leave his job at a local care home and find a better paid job. Despite a bizarre interview he gets a position as a database inputer at a madcap marketing company (Cloud Spider) that uses virtual worlds to analyse customer behaviour. The company also uses customer feedback forms for advanced customer profiling, including dream analysis. The premis is that in a wired world in which consumers are constantly bombarded with messages and images, dreams are the only place that their brains have time and space to make sense of this. The idea of the dreambase is to correlate people's behaviour in the virutal world with their dreams to profile customers by their subconscious impulses. It's bullshit of course. But when the boss of the company discovers that the central character can control his dreams he puts him in charge of interpreting the feedback questionnaires. Trouble is - the participants can't remember their dreams, so they write down any old nonsense (rather like this plot!) just to get free vouchers for games and MP3s. Worried about losing his job with offspring in the offing, he starts to make up dreams and invent his own cast of customers. He runs out of ideas. But a mysterious cleaner at the company guides him to a derelict psychiatric hospital where patient notes are scattered across the corridors and the overgrown grounds (their dreams tangled in the brambles). Hence he has a never ending supply of dreams to type into the dreambase. All he has to do is invent people to attribute the dreams to. It ends in a pursuit and violence and a multi-million pound fraud, in which no one is quite who they seem. The baby-to-be also has a few problems in the womb. But its all OK in the end...well, kind of. If only life was as easy to control as our dreams, eh?