“It’s a waste!” the consultant said, “All those brain cycles that could be doing useful work, improving our productivity statistics, participating in cloudsourced computing, and so on. When people are asleep they’re not using their minds, when their government could be using them. What a waste of a national resource.”
“And they’d never know they were – improving our productivity statistics and so on? They wouldn’t miss these ‘brain cycles’?”
“Not at all. If they wake up or start dreaming, the cycle-capture program immediately goes into standby. People need to dream, you know, although perhaps not as much as they actually do.”
“And how would we find a use for all those brain cycles?”
“Not our problem. There would be open bidding for bandwidth. Let the IT and telecom industries figure out how to exploit this new resource; we just rake in the money.”
“By ‘we,’ of course you mean the American public.”
“Well yes – mostly,” said the consultant.
“I like it!” beamed the Senator.
Memorable Fancies 
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