The Seed of a New Dream
Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James R. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.
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For July’s second, free to read and share, story, Marissa Lingen brings us a new kind of dream job. ~ Julian and Fran, July 12, 2026
The Seed of a New Dream
by Marissa Lingen
I wasn’t stupid. I knew they wouldn’t like me right away.
Fitting into a tightly knit group of co-workers is always tricky. When they’ve been together since day one, even more so; when you’re the outsider from the corporate world brought into the nonprofit sphere, well . . . I just hoped they would be mature enough professionals not to hide the stapler, refuse to tell me the wireless password, or steal my lunch.
And they were. Everyone was impeccably polite at all times. Kelsey, Rodri, Anibal, and Lise: the times they undermined me in meetings were entirely sincere, not pointless jabs. They really weren’t sure that someone like me, someone who had used my skill as a dream-planter to sell snack food, could understand what it took to turn my talents to good for their clean water nonprofit.
That was okay. I wouldn’t trust me, either. I didn’t; that was why I had quit my corporate job in the first place. Looking in the mirror and knowing that I couldn’t trust myself had gotten to be a problem that therapy and sleep-smoothing could no longer solve. I knew I had to change my life, and this was me changing it. It would take time. I’d have to prove myself to everyone, including me. I was ready.
I thought.
But three months in, Anibal was still saying, “I’m just not sure you understand what we’re trying to do here, Xandra. This latest dream storyboard . . . it feels more like it’s going to get them to buy a package at a water park than volunteer for our cleanup days. Do you get what I’m saying?”
“I do get what you’re saying, but I think you’re wrong,” I said. “Part of the reason the board hired me is that your dreams were, frankly, forgettable.” Anibal stiffened, and Kelsey let out an offended squeak.
“But if we give people something memorable but not on-mission . . .” Lise had a tendency to let all her sentences trail off as though there was a question coming, or as though we could all fill in the rest. In this case we could.
I sighed. “Isn’t this why we have focus groups? Let’s test my proposed dream seed. See whether the focus group picks up on the river cleanup action item.”
“We can’t focus-group every half-assed idea you have, Xandra,” said Kelsey, but this one wasn’t half-assed, and she knew it. The focus group was the right answer to the group’s disagreement about direction.
I’d worked with them before in my days with corporate. Even when you have a target market for a breakfast cereal, it’s hard to get a truly representative focus group; how much worse for a clean water action group, whose goal is to reach every possible person. But they pulled in as wide a range of ages, genders, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds as they could. I had no complaints about that. The board was supporting me, and my co-workers might not believe in my work, but their sincerity meant that they expected a focus group would show that I was going the wrong way.
The focus group was the usual mix of tentative/polite, random/incoherent, and downright cranky. They all seemed to have gotten the river cleanup message, which made me smug and Kelsey sour. But there was something flat about all the responses, something uninspired. Something lacking. Everyone else was busy being miffed that my design had done so well that they didn’t catch the problem. I was convinced we could do better.
One interview haunted me, a twenty-two-year-old nursing student. When I watched the feed of her discussion, her eyes kept wandering up and away, like she was counting every item on her massive, overwhelming to-do list even as she was talking about dreaming of a clean-flowing river, of deep personal satisfaction. How could I give her that dream, and not give her any joy from it? What was I doing wrong? What could I do to never, ever hear someone say “personal satisfaction” in a flat monotone again?
I didn’t sleep well that night. I woke up sweaty and tangled in the sheets. I remembered a few flashes of my own dreams—if I started the day with a bowl of Healthy Bran Loops, that would get me settled—ugh, a commercial dream-plant. Well, it was homemade toast with raspberry jam for me, thanks. But the rest of my dreams were—a ship on a stormy sea? And my old co-worker Olaf riding a unicycle? That was barely any better than the Healthy Bran Loops. As a professional in the field I knew that most of the meaning in people’s dreams was what they assigned to them, but this kind of assignment was above even my pay grade.
I could have used a little clearer direction from the old subconscious. Inspiration would have been useful. I’d take perspiration if I had to. I sweated out three new variations to make my dream-plant sing more, make it more vivid and real. No one else seemed to care about the differences, since they resented my presence on the project in the first place. Undaunted, I tried to get their input anyway.
“Do you ever try any of our dreams, or are you dreaming natural?” I asked Rodri as he pondered tea bags.
He reared back, glaring at me like I’d grabbed him. “That’s extremely personal, Xandra.”
I blinked. “And yet relevant to our work.”
“I guess.” He finished making his tea. I had never seen someone stir in honey so angrily. He left the break room without answering my question. I stared after him. How was I supposed to find my way to making this project work if I wasn’t working with anybody? Dream-planting was not a one-person job.
I fidgeted with some of the parameters in my design, but I couldn’t fool myself that I was actually working toward something. I was stuck in the almost-right, the nearly-there. With conflicting data from the focus group and no one willing to talk it through with me, the best I could do was fiddle around in hope that something would jump out at me.
It didn’t work. I finished the day frustrated. At least there was the weekend, and my old co-worker Olaf had asked me to try a new wine bar with him. He had always been the best of the corporate crew, wry and funny and ready to turn the conversation away from shoptalk when one or both of us had had too much.
“Ready to rejoin the rat race?” he greeted me, and then grimaced at my reaction. “Ouch, I meant that to be a joke. The nonprofit sphere isn’t all petting puppies and saving the world, huh?”
I slung my jacket over the back of my chair and accepted his pour of a local rosé. “If I could see that I was doing either of those, the rest wouldn’t be so bad. It’s just . . . ugh. My co-workers did not start out ready to see my considerable charms—”
“You? Not charming? Inconceivable.”
I flapped at him to shut him up, this was serious. “And it has not really improved yet. Which would be okay if the work was going well. But it’s all kind of . . . flat. Getting where we want to go, but—” It was my turn to grimace; I took a sip of my wine to cover it.
Olaf was not fooled. “I thought you were going to get your sparkle back in this new job.”
“So did I!” I slumped in my chair. “I don’t know what’s wrong. The focus groups are all testing . . . fine, I guess.”
“And you were never one to settle for fine, I guess. Not even when you were selling a new shape of pretzels.”
“This is important, Olaf.”
He handed me the menu, which had a selection of tapas that would probably all taste . . . fine, I guess. “I know it’s important to you, Xan. I also know that it’s exactly what you were saying when we worked together, and I didn’t manage to fix it then, either, so . . . pick out some bites and I’ll catch you up on The Deathy Deathy Doom Show, because I know you didn’t watch it yourself.”
I groaned. “There’s a reason I didn’t.” But at least eating an uninspired flatbread and gently poking fun at Olaf’s favorite show took my mind off work for a few hours.
Only a few, though. It kept nagging at me: the flatness, the disconnection. This was exactly what I’d left the corporate sector to avoid, and here it was again. I went over and over the water, the laughter, everything I’d seeded in the dream, trying to make it as warm and welcoming as possible. But I was still packaging up a dream for them instead of letting them dream their own. And maybe . . . maybe the problem wasn’t just who was dictating dreams to people. Maybe it was doing it at all.
Which was not a great thought to have, since it was my main marketable skill.
But the more I listened to the responses of the next focus group, the more familiar it sounded. These people’s dreams were small, stifled. They were being stifled in the direction we said we wanted, dutiful answers about river cleanup—but it still left me faintly nauseated, not wanting to meet their eyes.
I tried to find out if any co-workers had experienced any similar doubts, but Kelsey had had it with me. “If you don’t believe in our mission, Xandra, maybe it’s time you go back to peddling potato chips.”
I flushed, and Anibal said, “Kels. Take it down a notch.”
“Well, she can’t stop trying to tell us how to run our outreach!”
“I’m trying to—” I stopped. I couldn’t honestly say I was trying to do my job. I was wondering if anyone should do my job, which was . . . by definition sort of the opposite of doing my job. But I still wanted to do what I considered the more important job: the outreach itself. In some form. Whatever worked.
They hadn’t hired me to do “whatever worked,” though. They’d hired a dream-planter. I had been going forward with the grim determination that it didn’t matter if all my co-workers resented me as long as I was the best dream-planter they could get. But if dream-planting was the wrong way to accomplish our mission, I couldn’t actually guarantee that. Could I really tell them to go back to email outreach and posters? Halfway through the twenty-first century, was that truly the best I could do for a cause I believed in?
I had another hybrid dream the next night: I was trying to find something in the apartment building I’d grown up in. Each unit had been repainted plain white and refurnished with gray furniture. They gleamed with shiny fixtures, and everything was new. “This is exactly how I remember it,” I said in my best friend’s kitchen, “and totally different.”
My childhood best friend’s father smiled at me, the same clunky fashion glasses he’d had back then, the same thinning hair that was now completely gone. I yearned for one of his goofy jokes, or maybe warm wisdom from my subconscious. He said, “Booking vacations myself used to be such a hassle, remember?” I hummed agreement. “We never really went anywhere. Now we have great trips, and I feel like it’s a friend helping me. Thank goodness we found such a wonderful booking service.”
I woke up feeling cheap and disgusted, with the urge to have a beach vacation as soon as possible. Instead I sat down and wrote my resignation letter.
Our boss was out for the day, so Lise was the one I handed it to. Which meant that I got a very predictable “So now you’re going to . . .”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have a plan. But I can’t do dream-planting anymore. I’ll”—I shrugged—“go back to school, probably. Find some other way to do the same things. A better way.”
She made a little disgusted face. “I always thought you’d return to the corporate world.”
“Well, you thought wrong.”
“I don’t understand.”
I shook my head. “Release the dreams I wrote for you if you want to. I don’t think you’re going to find better. I just . . . don’t really believe in dream-planting anymore. I need to get out of people’s heads. I need to get out of my own head.”
“I wish you the best,” she said sadly, and I could see she believed she meant it. There was whispering behind me as I packed up my few possessions and left the office.
I was telling the truth: I didn’t have a plan. I was almost certainly too late to apply for the next semester, so I’d need to find some kind of work in the interval. Like most people, I didn’t have vast riches to live on just because I’d walked out of a job. I was sure most of my family and friends would think I was a fool, probably try to talk me into getting one of my old jobs back—the better-paying one, no doubt.
In the meantime, I did have one thing I wanted to do. I convinced Olaf to come with me, and we showed up bright and early on river cleanup day. I was up to my knees in muck, pulling tattered plastic out of my net, when I came upon my old team.
“I can’t believe you’d show your face at this,” said Kelsey. Anibal put a hand on her arm, which made me want to laugh—it’s not like we were on the verge of throwing down; it was just a snarky remark.
“I told you when I left, I believe in the project,” I said patiently. “I just don’t believe in the tools you were using for it anymore.”
Kelsey rolled her eyes and said, “You would say that.”
“Yeah. I would say that if that’s what I believe, Kelsey,” I said, and turned back to my assigned work group. Kelsey was saying something behind me, but Anibal was also saying, “Just let it go, Kels. She’s not worth it.”
I couldn’t say it didn’t sting. We were supposed to be on the same team—working in the sunlight, on the river, everybody with the same goal. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be, everyone putting aside their differences for a common goal, for the good of the community or the river or both? But our differences were bigger than that—or maybe they weren’t. Kelsey was moving along—if not letting it go, not letting it stop her from working on the cleanup project, and neither was I.
And there were lots of other projects that weren’t this one, and maybe next time I’d just go find one of them. And keep trying until something fit. Was it a dream? It was a plan of sorts, which might have been worse or might have been better, but for the moment it would do.
“The absolute worst part of other people’s autonomy is that they keep using it,” I told Olaf, yanking the biodegradable mesh into place.
“Leave it, Xan,” said Olaf softly.
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t be making it your problem.” That much, if nothing else, I knew was true. And it was a sunny day, and the river was not perfect, not going to be perfect, but better than when we’d started. That much we could all try to dream our own dreams about.
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Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer who lives in the Minneapolis suburbs with her family. She is the author of over three hundred works of short science fiction and fantasy and has no intention of stopping any time soon. She also writes essays, poetry, and whatever comes to her next. Her debut novella, A Dubious Clamor, is coming in September 2026 from Horned Lark Press.
“The Seed of a New Dream,” © Marissa Lingen, 2026.
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