the book of daniel

the second time as farce

woman leaving psychoanalyst’s office, remedios varo

the nightmare had upset her so much she was threatening to leave the discord if someone in the dream channel didn’t tell her what it meant. he didn’t want her to, it’s very important to maintain gender ratios in a discord, especially if you want to maintain any kind of intellectual pretension. & she had more density, as it were, as a discord girl, because her ratty nature had recently been complicated by a slight tradward turn, which added some weight and seriousness to the network of fantasies around her, & made people try even harder to impress her. but the conversation had already been going on for a while before he saw it & was currently in a tangle that he knew he would find it difficult to undo. the mixup was such that it took him a while to realize that she did not even remember the upsetting dream.

nonetheless he had faith in himself, & his knowledge of her & of the general state of discourse, to give it a try.

“you dreamed that you went into your grandmother’s house to copy the family pictures there. you started painstakingly redrawing them in pencil, but before you finished even one, the printer started printing out page after page of detailed copies. at first this made you happy but as you looked at them closer you noticed more and more details that weren’t quite right, the way it happens in dreams, and the pictures were increasingly uncanny & inhuman despite a human surface. but that’s also how ai art looks right now, so you thought an ai was doing it, and that scared you very badly. obv the painstaking copies of family portraits you were working on are the children you want to raise & the printer pictures are like ais that you’re afraid will crowd them out. that’s why it scared you so bad.”

she accepted this enough to stop her talk of leaving the discord, but it wasn’t what he believed. they say a dream is a wish. and he sensed in her a little apocalyptic thrill, a little silent wish to be among the last generation, that there would be no woman younger than her.