What happens when our deepest subconscious thoughts are no longer private, and a machine is allowed to act upon them?
Content warning
Attempted murder
The short story
The conference room was filled with hundreds of human voices, and agitated steps fell silent when Prof. Mithra Chatterjee strode in regally with his measured steps and a cohort of research assistants nervously trailing behind him. As he approached the dais, everyone took their seats and the anticipation weighed thick in the air. Standing at the dais, his intense gaze swept over the crowd and his imposing six-foot figure clad in a majestic black suit exuded an aura of unassailable power. He began “I welcome the leaders from all five hundred sectors of the Unified Front of Earth. I thank everyone for coming on such short notice. You are all well aware of the gravity that brings us together today. Every period in our history, we humans have been drawn to seek advice from the ones who can see past the horizon of now and glean into the depths of the future. In myth and life, oracles, soothsayers, astrologers, and seers have satiated our desire to make the unknowable future known.” And with a dramatic flourish, Prof. Mithra drew back the curtain, revealing a sleek machine at the centre of the stage. He paused, letting the crowd take in the sight, a proud smile lighting up his face.
“Allow me to introduce you to Jung”, he began, his voice carrying an edge of reverence. “Named after the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who believed that our dreams are a portal to the collective unconscious. Each individual’s dreams are not mere fragments of personal experience—they also capture world events. Dreams are not merely used for consolidating, sense-making and forecasting individual experiences but also for the world. The oncoming of major world events is reflected in the aggregate of everyone’s dream.”
He paced slowly, his gaze sweeping the room. “This is not just a machine; it’s the Oracle of our age. Jung analyses millions of dreams, drawn from neural data collected from countless individuals, sifting through them to detect recurring patterns shared across our collective subconscious. It doesn’t just study dreams—it predicts the future by assigning probabilities to these patterns. The riots in Sector 451? Jung identified their likelihood three months in advance, long before anyone was aware. Even when most residents couldn’t consciously recall their dreams, Jung used their neural signals collected while they were sleeping to infer their overall common pattern. Dreams, after all, sift through layers of thought far deeper and more complex than our fragile conscious awareness can grasp. So far, Jung has successfully predicted fifteen major catastrophes and three significant political upheavals across our sectors. Only one false prediction. It has exceeded every expectation.”
He let his words linger, basking in the stunned silence of his audience. “Jung feeds on our dreams to glimpse into the future, offering us a tool not merely for survival, but for understanding the tides of time that shape our world.”
Mingwei rolled and whimpered in his bed and suddenly woke up with a jolt, the horrors of the dream still clawing him. “Damn! That was one horrible dream”, he muttered wiping his sweat.
“Again?” asked his boyfriend concerned, pulling Mingwei into a comforting embrace.
“Yeah. I keep getting this dream where this guy in a white lab coat follows me in a dark alley … and he … just wouldn’t stop chasing me and he eventually turns into a monster just before biting me” said Mingwei shuddering.
“It is just a dream Mi, it’s all going to be fine. I haven’t gone yet” replied his boyfriend, tightening his embrace.
Mingwei, still feeling tense, looked out of the window into the dark and felt perplexed by the sadness his dream had left him with. It lingered long after he closed his eyes.
The next day Mingwei continued feeling gloomy. As he walked across the bustling campus, past a group of chattering students, into a parking lot, a short girl with curly blonde hair appeared beside him and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Mingwei! Your paper on ‘A Neural Approach to Predicting Events through the Collective Unconscious’ was just brilliant. I heard you are moving out soon, I wish you well with your post-doctoral research“ said the student.
“Thanks” Mingwei replied with a smile which morphed into remorse the moment the student passed by.
On his way back home he knew what was in store for him. He did not want to go home. He knew it was all going to change. When he entered his apartment, he knew his boyfriend had left him to attend his marriage back home. With minuscule energy left in his body, he dragged himself to the lonely living room. As he sat on the couch, his hand brushed against the long brown coat draped over the armrest—he realised that he loved the coat’s owner more than he should have.
In Prof. Mithra’s lab, the top three research assistants rushed into the control room to see the afternoon results from Jung. Their eyes darted all over the terminal screen, “Shit, it is the same as in the morning. I have never seen anything in the last 30 years with Jung like this” remarked Chris, the tallest of them all. “Should we inform Prof. Mithra or hand it over to the UEF officials to take over? It is the fifth day in a row and according to the protocol we have to give it to the Department of Homeland Security immediately and the probability of the event happening increases every day,” asked Chris. The other two had no response but looked like their whole life collapsed in front of them.
That evening, while the assistants debated their next steps, Prof. Mithra was in a completely different world. He beamed with joy when his son told him the news—he was going to be a father soon. Ecstatic, Mithra immediately arranged a grand party that very night. He invited colleagues, friends, and top officials from the Unified Earth Front to celebrate the arrival of his grandchild. The party was lavish, the air buzzing with laughter and toasts, but it felt more like a UEF convention than a family gathering. There were very few close friends or family members present, and work-talk dominated every conversation.
The three research assistants arrived reluctantly, hoping to keep their heads down and avoid too much interaction. They sat at an isolated table, nursing their drinks and trying to blend into the background.
“I don’t think this is the right time to tell him”, Chris muttered, his voice low. “I thought it would be a close-knit party, but it feels like a damn UEF convocation in here. Do you even see any actual family? It’s always about work for him, isn’t it?”
His rant was interrupted by a gentle voice from behind. “Hey, You should try out these muffins, we just baked them today.”
Chris looked up to see Mrs. Anita Chatterjee, Prof. Mithra’s daughter-in-law, glowing and heavily pregnant, offering a plate of muffins with a warm smile.
“Ahh Than… Thank you, Mrs. Chatterjee. And congratulations on your child” said Chris, stammering with every word while the other two assistants’ eyes darted nervously between the plate of muffins and her full-term pregnant belly.
Turning back, Mrs. Chatterjee thought to herself “What a weird bunch of kids, staring at me like that.”
As soon as she was out of earshot, the assistants exchanged horrified glances. Chris shrieked “What the hell! What do we do now? I thought she just got pregnant, but look at her. She is at least nine months pregnant, that baby is going to pop out any time and that will be the end of it all?”
“Shut up! Keep your voice down, idiot", one of the others muttered, his throat dry, gulping down water from his glass as if trying to swallow the fear that had taken root in his chest.
The three of them fell silent, their eyes fixed on the table, unsure of how much time they had left before everything unravelled.
The next morning the three research assistants rushed to Prof. Mithra’s office, “Sir we are sorry. We had never seen anything like this from Jung. When it was reported that there was an imminent danger to it from your first grandchild with 96% probability. We didn’t know what to do.” stammered Chris.
There was silence so heavy in the room, that the research assistants could feel their bodies being smashed by the weight of it.
“Well, this is too late. You should have brought it to me immediately. And who else knows about this?”
“No one sir!” muttered Chris.
“Let it remain that way. Now you all may get back to work” said Prof. Mithra.
That evening, Prof. Mithra gathered his entire family around the dining table. “I’m so happy to see you all together as a family” said Prof. Mithra. Mithra looked around at his children and their spouses, who sat in varying degrees of confusion and unease. It had been years—decades, even—since they had all been in the same room.
“Please enjoy your meals”, Mithra said, his smile broad but calculated.
Chandan Chatterjee, Mithra’s eldest son, leaned toward his wife Anita and whispered, “Who would’ve thought that a grandchild could make all the difference.” He smiled, but behind his pride of impending fatherhood was a hint of childish joy—the joy of finally earning his own father’s attention.
But as the family enjoyed their dinner, in a dimly lit lab, the three research assistants were frozen in disbelief. The latest Jung report had arrived on their terminals, and it pointed to something no one could have predicted.
“The probability has shifted…” one of the assistants muttered, blinking at the screen. “It’s saying that Prof. Mithra himself is going to bring it down.”
“What on earth?” Chris said, his voice hollow. “Jung is blaming its creator.”
After the dinner, Prof. Mithra came back to his study room and took a plastic bottle out of his white coat which had one less pill in it. The constituent molecules of that one missing pill which was skillfully dropped into Anita’s wine by his butler had already entered her bloodstream by then. He hurriedly threw the bottle in a squared box which incinerated it with a soft hiss and that’s when he heard the knock outside.
Four UEF officials burst into the room, their laser guns raised, the bright beams casting cold, sharp shadows across the walls. “Professor Mithra, you are hereby placed under the custody of the Unified Earth Front”, one of them declared in a flat, mechanical tone. “You have been red-flagged by Jung.” The room fell into stunned silence. Mithra’s heart pounded in his chest as the realization hit him. His creation had turned against him.
One Sunday morning, the silence of the prison was interrupted by the arrival of the warden. He handed Mithra a small electronic device, which lit up with a faint blue glow. Upon touching it, the holographic message unfolded in midair, its words spoken aloud in a soft, familiar voice.
“Hi Mithra,
on the day you left for your marriage to India, I knew I had made a grave mistake of falling in love with you and an even graver mistake of confiding my ideas of Jung to you. I never thought I’d reach out to you after all these years. I’m compelled to write to you by my guilty conscience.
Have you ever wondered what’s the effect of bringing Jung into this world? Have you paused to notice the pain and misery you have brought on this world through my ghastly creation and call it your own? Thousands of people have been taken away from their families by the United Earth Front because of that horrendous machine. They have reduced human beings into nothing more than red flags, ghosts whose fates are sealed, and whose whereabouts remain unknown. My brother was taken away this morning. Jung is turning paranoid and red-flagging everyone because of the paranoia that it inflicts on the people which creeps into their dreams and back into Jung. It’s getting consumed by itself like a dragon which gets burned by its fire.
As a wise man once said, “Your own reason is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable for, not the rightness, but the uprightness of the decision”. At least now I hope you stop chasing after other people’s dreams and chase something of your own.
Mingwei”
The three research assistants stood in shock when it red-flagged one of them and without warning, the hum of the machine faltered, and then it fell completely silent. The screen flickered once, twice, and then—darkness. Jung had shut down on its own. They stood there frozen, exchanging terrified glances in front of the hollow echo of the machine that had fallen silent—an oracle, now mute.
This story was originally written in English and without any help of AI.
The paper
Fu, Y., Gao, J., Yang, B., & Feng, J. (2025). Making your dreams a reality: Decoding the dreams into a coherent video story from fMRI signals. arXiv Preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2501.09350
Connection between story and paper
The preprint (a study that has not been reviewed by other peers in the field yet) aims to decode the subjective contents of dreams through the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected while dreaming, and further use a large language model to weave the decoded visuals into a video narrative. Dreams have always remained an object of awe and mystery by virtue of their subjective nature. And the latest advancement in brain imaging techniques and advancement in artificial intelligence is slowly allowing us to finally peer into an another person’s dream. Previous research in decoding dreams through brain imaging techniques such as fMRI and machine learning has decoded the visual contents of dreams.
The study by Yanwei Fu and colleagues further extends the scope of this line of research by extending it to video narrative form as dreams are more than disjointed dream images but a visual narrative experience. The dream images were derived through an fMRI to image reconstruction technique which enables decoding the image from the brain activity collected during dreaming at different points in the sleep cycle. These disjointed images are then turned into a video story using an large language model. The results from the study show that the reconstructed dream narratives of the three participants are similar to their ground truth descriptions.
As remarkable as these studies are for enabling us to study and reconstructing subjective experiences, it also a time for us to pause and ponder our relations with machines as the lines between the machines we create and us continue to blur. The short story is inspired by studies such as this one and others attempting to decode dreams. I also owe it to the 1957 BBC interview with the psychologist Carl Jung on collective conscious when I first got the idea of machine called “Jung” which taps into collective consciousness. It explores what happens when we create an ultimate machine which can decode people’s dreams from brain signals and give it decision-making power.
The author
Ram Priyadharshini Ramachandran is a cognitive science researcher and a data analyst who is passionate about bridging data science and cognitive science. She loves to read and write fiction.
