I found a post from 1994 on the antediluvian Usenet newsgroup alt.dreams where I often interpreted dreams under the name of Quentin. When I was first on the Internet, I’d been “cyber raped” several times and found using a male pseudonym was safer. I could actually have conversations with people, as opposed to men typing out text or double-colon commands pretending that they were raping me. It even happened once in the beta testing of a graphical virtual world called The Palace. Several male users simultaneously hacked my avatar and made it look like I was asking them to rape me, which they obliged through dialog from their own avatars like, “I jam my dick in Maria’s mouth and slam it into her throat repeatedly.”

Neat, huh? I couldn’t even be a woman online without some kind of assault from evil jackasses.

Anyway, I was apparently such an active and effective interpreter, people emailed me from all over the world asking for dream interpretations, which I did gratis. Eventually, the best interpreters on the newsgroup asked me to join a special dream experimentation group. We were like the Navy SEALS of dreaming. We interpreted each other’s dreams and performed little tests to see if we could connect in the nighttime ether. This was all fine and good until we did an experiment where I had a parallel dream with a guy in our group named Bob, who refused to comment on our “success” — probably because it freaked the jeebies out of his heebies.

Shortly after I joined, I came out to my dream team as a woman. Nobody was angry, but a couple of people were surprised. One guy said he’d figured I was gay. They were great people. And no one wanted to jam their virtual dick in my throat! Amazing!

We’ve come a long way, baby*.

“Sleep well, dream often.”

*Not really.