I found an extremely bizarre internet survey

One time I was browsing a normal, mainstream website and saw an ad for a survey, nothing unusual. It was one of those deals where they’ll pay you $30 for 5-10 minutes of your time, you know, the kind where it’s probably a scam but you’re Idly curious about what they’re peddling. <br><br>Anyway, this was a few months ago and I forgot about it, but I still got the survey in my email. It was from a company I’d never heard of, and they just stated that they were doing market research. <br><br>I’m sure you see where this is going: it wasn’t normal market research. The first few questions were normal enough: age, occupation, that kind of thing, with one notable exception that stuck out. They asked my gender and included the “rather not say” option, but they tacked on an additional option for “I am a completely different gender in my dreams.“ What? No idea what that means or how it would even work. Am I a guy in my dreams? I mean, I usually remember myself as acting like myself, but I’m pretty sure I’m still a woman. <br><br>I moved on, mostly just curious to see if the questions were going to get any weirder. The next few questions were even more normal, asking about my income and my preferred brands for all kinds of things. Then they started mixing in more bizarre questions, such as “How many identical twins do you know?” And “do you have nightmares about teeth falling out or shedding?” I thought maybe it was for some kind of medical study, but that second question was part of a series of different nightmare themes that made it seem like they were specifically looking for people who had nightmares about cosplay: animals, teeth, paralysis, and flying. Weird. But I still wasn’t done yet. <br><br>Then they started asking about my opinions on different images, kind of like an ink blot test I guess. Each question was just a picture with a caption like “one friend is seriously ill, another is injured” or “incandescent forest firelight flickers in the trees”. There were like 20 of these, and I started to feel like I was losing my mind. I didn’t recognize any of the pictures, presumably they were AI generated. I started saving them in case anyone in here wants to see them, but I think I’m going to have to send them to people individually, probably via PM.<br><br>The questions at the end were where things go really off the rails, though. The first was “how would you react if you realized the flora in your neighborhood was infesting your dreams?” They offered a few different choices, but I’m pretty sure I just marked “nah I’m good” and moved on. Then they asked “How would you respond to meeting a shadowy figure in your dreams who offered to switch your waking and dreaming selves? Which one would be ‘you’?” I’m like, what the actual hell? Is this for some special effects company or something? Which one would be me? I’m going to be my real waking self, obviously. <br><br>Anyway, that was the end of the survey, and it just showed the $30 payment to my PayPal. It was real, and I was pretty stoked to have been paid for basically testing out something that seemed to be aimed at schizoid psychopaths or something, but after a few days of being distracted by work stuff and forgetting about it, I’m more and more feeling uneasy about the whole thing. <br><br>I don’t know what kind of research they’re doing, but I don’t think I’d want to be in control of my “dream self”, because God knows what the hell that thing would do.