This article is classified "Fictional"
The first dream recorded to sensa-tape was actually quite boring -- an un-named psychology student at a back-water university (front-water universities require their students to have names) dreamt of walking around their home and finding it empty. Subjects who later had this dream played back to them found it so boring that they all fell asleep, and promptly began dreaming of walking around their homes and finding them empty. Fortunately for the galactic system of moderately-priced enterprise, the researcher on that project was a graduate student, poorly paid, on the edge of starvation, and given to bouts of fantasy about chucking the whole university scene and going to make his living as a sex-toy on Erotica-VI -- in other words, a perfectly average graduate student. The student looked at the sensa-tapes that the project had generated, and saw not merely data that would lead to an unimportant thesis followed by a career in a dull but life-sustaining faculty position, but recognized the potential that lurked there: to be a mind-bogglingly dull and stupid thesis that would not even get him his degree, let alone a faculty position. He immediately quit the university and set out for Erotica-VI, tossing the sensa-tapes into the trash on the way, whence they were rescued by an enterprise consultant, who convinced a passing business-being that, with a few touch-ups, the tapes could be a gold-mine. The consultant sold the tapes for $1200 Altairian, and laughed about it to his buddies for weeks. Then the re-touched dreams came out. The first run of 50,000 copies sold out in hours at $79.95 Altairian apiece. Each of the previously empty rooms had been filled with models from Play-Being magazine who performed strip-teases and/or get-dressed-teases (depending on the species of the model and the target market involved). A brief message appeared in the last room to the effect that the dreamer should keep an eye out for the next series of dreams, in which the dreamer would "get to know the models better." The consultant saw one tape and then killed himself. The spectacular success of the first series was followed by the even more spectacular successes of the second, third and fourth series, and by the somewhat less successful fifth and sixth series (by which time the models and dreamers knew each other so well that the models were telling the dreamers to take out the trash and walk the cyberdog). Of course this success spawned imitators -- it being estimated that the number of original thoughts that occur in a given business being over a given time period is on average somewhat less than the number of compliments handed out by a particularly unpleasant Vogon captain on the occasion of his crew getting his ship caught in a traffic jam while the weapons systems are off-line. Among these imitators were those that sold their wares through the mail. This was not terribly successful at first, since so many packages arrived marked "opened by customs" when the only customs between the vendor and the purchaser were of the sort that anthropologists write of. More often than not there was a slip of paper inside saying that "customs" had seized some material (the sensa-tape), and that it would be returned once "customs" was sure that it didn't contain any secret messages that might be harmful to the security of the state and/or the purchaser or once "customs" went blind (whichever came first). This pilferage only ended when J.J. Lipo Ligantis found one postal employee guilty of theft and ordered them promoted to supervisor in charge of firing superfluous postal employees. As for the poor graduate student who invented the process, he never did make it to Erotica-VI. He made a stop-over on Niuork -- the planet that never sleeps -- and was promptly offered a faculty position at the University of Niuork, on the theory that, if anyone on the planet did ever manage to fall asleep, it would be nice to get a record of what they dreamt for posterity. He's still waiting for something useful to do, but hey, aren't all professors?