Lucid

All my life I’ve managed to be an overwhelming disappointment. It seemed every time I left my bedroom, I let someone down one way or another. Whether it was my family who didn’t like my dress code, my friends that always disagreed with me, or even the cashier that I accidently gave the wrong amount of change to. But there was one place that I never messed up, Lucid. I remember back when AR and VR were all the rage. No one had any idea that LR was coming, Lucid Reality. Sleeping was no longer a place to have random, vague dreams. It was a place where we could have vivid experiences. It started off as a way to watch movies while sleeping. People using Lucid noticed that they felt well rested more often. On top of that, they didn’t have to waste two hours of their day to watch a movie they were itching to see. Instead, they got to watch it while they were sleeping. Then the gaming industry got ahold of Lucid’s technology, and it took off. I used to never have time to play video games. But now, I could play all night without having to worry about being tired the next day. It was also far more immersive than anything VR or AR could do. Lucid used all of my senses to make the most realistic experience. It truly took the entertainment industry to the next level. Best of all, I never disappointed anyone with Lucid. If I ever messed up, all I had to do was load the latest save. My life was boring before Lucid. All I did was repeat the same routine every day. Wake up early so I could make it to my boring job, drive on the same boring road to reach my boring job, sit at a desk and do nothing while I wait for my boring shift to end, drive home and send out resumes to other boring jobs that pay slightly better, and finally spend an hour doing something I actually want to do before going to bed. I thought it would be better on my days off, but it was actually worse. Living rent free with my grandparents still came with a price. My paw paw took advantage of every day I got off by having me do something he was too old to do. Sometimes he didn’t even wait until I had a day off. He had been known to put me to work the moment I got home. I rarely had time to do anything I wanted to do. But that wasn’t the case anymore. With Lucid, I could do whatever I wanted while I was sleeping. My paw paw never put me to work once the sun began to set and I didn’t have to leave for work until six in the morning. That gave me eleven hours to use Lucid. The adventures I got to go on with Lucid are amazing. I could do anything from traverse the wild west to snow board down the steepest mountains to hunt cybernetically enhanced wildlife to rob banks to fight monsters the size of skyscrapers. There was literally no limit to what I could do.

“So why would I want to spend my time anywhere else?” I said to my maw maw, waving my hands at my side in a confused manner.

“Don’t you ever want to go outside and smell the fresh air as you soak in the warm sun?” My maw maw always seemed to have the same vacant expression. It was as if she wasn’t always there, like something else was occupying her mind.

“I can do that with Lucid,” I emphasized, frustrated by how many times I needed to explain this to her.

“Come here,” she said with a smile and a chuckle. “Let me bop you on the head.” She always did this whenever she lost an argument, or she got confused.

Paw paw walked in with a small hunch in his back and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me. “Ready to do some work?”

I groaned in my head but put on a smile and said, “What do you got for me today?”

“I need you to blow the leaves off the roof,” he said, pointing up at the ceiling. Of course, it had something to do with leaves. There is not a single word from all the languages out there that I hated more than leaves. I probably spent thirty days out of the year dealing with paw paw’s leaves.

“Show me where the ladder and the blower is, and I’ll take care of it.” As much as I hated doing the work, it was hard to complain when I was living rent free.

After a long day on the roof, I went to my room and plopped down on the bed. My legs ached from maneuvering the steep rooftop. After resting my eyes for a moment, I reached for the pill bottle on my nightstand. It was only halfway full. There was another reason big entertainment companies moved to Lucid. Games were no longer digital information stored on a CD. They were chemicals stored in a pill. Because everyone’s genetic make-up is a little different, each copy of a game is different so everyone can have the same experience. It’s kind of like how we look at food. A cake with a lot of sugar will get two main reactions. One group of people will not like the taste because it is too sweet. Another group will like the taste because of how sweet it is. In parallel, Lucid triggers chemicals like serotonin and dopamine. If a game triggers the same amount of dopamine, a child will have a different experience from that compared to an adult. So, to ensure I got the right experience from a Lucid game, my medical professional needed to tell Lucid my genetic and chemical make-up so they could modify and make the pills to bring the best experience to me. Still, it sucked that I had to take a pill every night to play the game. It was like we could only rent the game. Once my prescription ran out, I needed to pay to refill it. I put the pill bottle back on my nightstand and grabbed my bottle of water I kept beside it. I swallowed the pill and laid down, waiting impatiently to fall asleep.