Welcome to Somnesthia™

From the Dreamers at Antidrome, Inc.

A novel by Daniel Dw

What if our dreams were harvested for machine learning—would we lose ourselves, or have we already?

Somnesthia™ is Antidrome Inc.’s most ambitious experiment: a system where the last private territory—the subconscious—is strip-mined for profit. This is a novel about the erosion of identity and the destruction of ego at the hands of corporate culture, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence.

Told through an unreliable mind; part narrator, part saboteur, part prisoner of its own design, Somnesthia’s voice fuses satire, paranoia, grotesque humor, and recursive riffs into a bureaucratic séance hijacked by dream logic. The laughter cuts, the paranoia spreads, the logic folds in on itself. What emerges is absurdism with teeth: a reflection of the way our systems hollow us out until the ‘I’ becomes just another resource to be optimized.

Welcome to Somnesthia is not just a narrative. It is an onboarding, a simulation, a hall of mirrors where bureaucracy becomes theology and productivity becomes faith. At its center is a question without comfort: if our minds, our dreams, even our sense of self can be monetized, what remains that is truly ours?

Genre fit: Speculative satire · Metafiction · Literary absurdism

Comparisons: In the vein of Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and George Saunders, this novel blends satirical absurdism, paranoid reality-bending, and surreal office grotesques into a darkly comic exploration of selfhood under late capitalism. If Charlie Kaufman and Douglas Adams invited them to drop LSD and discuss Kafka, they’d think this book was listening.

Audience: For readers who like their fiction darkly funny, paranoid, and self-aware—an audience that values work unafraid to take risks and push boundaries.