Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
Where have you been? It's alright we know where you've been
You've been in the pipeline, filling in time
Provided with toys and Scouting for Boys
You bought a guitar to punish your ma,
And you didn't like school, and you know you're nobody's fool
So welcome to the machine
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
What did you dream? It's alright we told you what to dream
You dreamed of a big star, he played a mean guitar
He always ate in the steak bar
He loved to drive in his Jaguar
So welcome to the machine

These are the words I hear as I open my eyes. I look around and I find myself in a sort of lab. 'So, 25693, there you are. Nice to finally meet you.' 'Where am I? Who are you!?' 'Calm down, you find yourself in your own subconscious.' 'If I, right now, am in a part of my own mind, how come I can't recall being here?' 'That's because we're your subconscious. That basically means we're the stealth department of your mind. It doesn't happen that often that the subconscious part of a mind lets the main subject in. That's also why you are registered as a number, related to your birthday.' 'Ok... So, if it's such a rare occasion that somebody finds himself in his subconscious, to what do I owe the pleasure?' 'Well, first of all, you need to know what we do here.' 'Ok, so what might that be?' 'What we basically do here, is telling you what is wrong or right, even though it doesn't make sense in a rational way. So say you have to make a hard decision to make, and you make a list of pros and cons, and the cons overshadow the pros, but you choose to do it anyway because it feels right, well in that case you're listening to us.' 'Ah.' 'Yep, but we also have a more important job here.' 'And that might be?'

'We create dreams. That's our number one priority.' 'And how do you do that?' 'We work together with your conscious. They observe what you observe, and give us information about things that you've observed and liked, or disliked. After we received the information, we conclude what you like the most, and we add a dash of desiring. What you desire is often what you're going to chase, this is also called a dream if the thing that you desire is hard to realize. You might have noticed that your dreams have changed quite a bit over the course of your life. That's because we start off with absolutely nothing. The day you first hear about fire fighters is probably the day you think a fire fighter is cool, and we turn that into your dream. So dreams keep evolving during your life according to what you know, what you like, and your passion. Sometimes we also drop a dream of somebody. As an example: your dream to become a professional baseball player...' 'Yeah, I remember, that was when I was about 11 years old, and part of the talent program of the Dutch baseball association.' 'Exactly, and is that still your dream?' 'No, I realized I would never become a professional player after they kicked me out of that program.' 'That's a fine example of a dream we would have liked to support longer than we did.' 'So why didn't you?' 'Your conscious talked us out of it. They saw that you were to convinced that you would fail, that they persuaded us to drop the dream. We did this to prevent you from getting bitter, and wasting your time while you have so many other things going for you that could be turned into a dream.' 'So you went with me being a chef?' 'No, there you confuse a career idea with a dream. Your real dream at that time was to become a pilot. But also here your conscious played a big role. We decided to drop the dream after you convinced yourself of not being good enough in physics. After that we were kind of out of ideas for a while. That's no problem, as long as it doesn't take too long, and as long as you have enough to do. But then, when you were thinking and talking about what study to do, we heard a couple of people suggesting that you would take a gap year, to straighten everything out. And that we liked. The next questions that we asked your conscious were what kind of passion you had, what you wanted to learn, and where you feel good. The answers were as follows: Baseball, Italian, Italy. When we asked why they could just explain the Italian answer. You wanted to learn Italian because you wanted to be able to talk to your cousins. So we created the short term dream of living in Italy and learning Italian, just like your mom did.' 'That was a good one, you two work together in a very good way. You really know me.' 'Of course we know you! We're your subconscious and conscious combined! Stay with me will you.' 'I'm sorry, but it's late, I'll try to pay more attention.' 'Good.'

'So, we three, and your parents were able to realize that dream.' 'Yeah, and I love living it.' 'That's one thing we also know. See, our salary here is basically happiness. We also feel that you aren't quite done living your dream. Am I right there?' 'Yeah, now is great, but I feel that it could be even better.' 'We agree there as well. That's why we would like to prolong it. But we would also like to set a long term dream for you.' 'And that is?' 'Finding the right girl, fall in love, and have a couple of kids. But please note that this is the real long term deal. You don't have to meet the girl right now, or in two years, or even ten. But important is that you follow your hart on choosing the right girl.' 'But, following my heart, isn't that about the same as listening to you?' 'Exactly, you start getting the picture. But what we say doesn't always have to do with the long term deal.' 'I think I get it...' 'Great! And to finish it off, we've also come up with a career idea.' 'And what might that be?' 'It's basically you becoming a journalist. To prolong the dream that you're living, we suggest that you do your university degree here in Italy. As is logical you would take classes in journalism, and you could be happy.' 'And if for some reason that doesn't work out? Let's say the language barrier is too big.' 'Then you go back to Holland, study Italian, with a minor in journalism, and after do a master in journalism. That way you could be a correspondent for a Dutch paper in Italy, or for an Italian paper in Holland, or both in either country. Does that sound like a reasonable compromise?' 'Yeah, that sounds actually quite good as well.' 'In that case we now have established two possibilities for the next four years, and partially after that.' 'So that's it? That's why you've brought me here?' 'Yeah, I just wanted to show you our entire idea, and see how you would react to it. Since you seem to agree with it, I will now send you back home.'

As I open my eyes, and see the light outside, I wonder what the hell just happened. Was it just a dream? Or was it more than that? Was it really what I want to do, but just presented in a weird wicked way? As I turn on my music, one of the first phrases I hear is: 'And I know you're gonna have, your wicked way with me.' That can't be a coincidence right? Or can it?