i_dream_of_monsters ovenbird I dream that I’m dreaming and in the dream I dream I can breathe under water, and I watch a family of sea turtles make their way to wherever sea turtles go, their malachite shells smoothed in the rock tumbler of the sea. The two youngest fight over an eel, their beaks snapping, meeting in the middle of its tortured body like a deranged interpretation of the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp. A voiceover says something about the brutality of nature, and then the entire turtle family swims, oblivious, into the open mouth of another turtle, this one the size of my first apartment, and they disappear into its stomach where they will die terrible deaths in a pool of digestive juices. But the show is not over yet! A creature from hell arrives from the depths, its body like a plesiosaur with a long neck ending in a head like a Chinese dragon, with one huge eye perched in the center of its furred skull. The monster thrusts its face down the gullet of the giant turtle and eats the contents of its stomach, leaving the turtle alive but ravaged, leaving the ocean strewn with bits of half digested meat. In the dream I wake, confused and panicked, not because of the dream’s violent content but because the dragon creature isn’t real, which means (my dreaming self is certain) that AI planted those final dream images and not even my mind is safe from machines who now generate content in my subconscious without ever being prompted to do so. AI is now so insidious that I can’t even tell if my dreams are human. 260919 what's it to you? who go blather from