Reading Tea Leaves to Explain Our Dreams

I recently picked up a bottle of Moby's Teany Energizing Tea with Guarana. The tea was delightful and refreshing but the label was covered in cloying marketing copy that explained how Teany is changing the world one plastic bottle of fair trade tea at a time.

Then there was this quirky little line: "Someday they will make a drug that will keep us awake forever and ever without needing any sleep. Until that time we have caffeine."

If you think of advertising as a mirror onto our own cultural wants and desires, this line seems truly eye-opening: Apparently we find it acceptable to wish for a drug that does away with our natural need for sleep, we assume that this drug will inevitably be invented, and perhaps we even hope that this drug will be as innocuous as a bottle of tea.

And to this I say, dream on.