There is an image file that circulates through email, sometimes called smile.jpg, sometimes smile.dog. It shows a husky — or something shaped like a husky — photographed in low light, in what appears to be a living room. The dog is facing the camera. It is smiling. Not in the way dogs smile, mouth open, panting. In the way that something smiles when it knows exactly what effect the smile will have.
The first documented account of the image comes from a journalist named Mary E. who received it as an email attachment in 1992 — before widespread internet, which is the first impossible thing about the image's history. She opened it. She described the dog's teeth as too numerous and too long and arranged in an expression no dog's face should be capable of making. She described the eyes as lit from within.
She began having the dream that night.
The dream is consistent across every documented recipient. You are in a dark place. The dog is there. It speaks to you — not in words, in a transmission that arrives fully formed in your understanding. It tells you to spread the word. It tells you that this is the only way to make the dream stop.
Mary refused. She had the dream for six months. She was hospitalized twice for sleep deprivation-related psychosis. When she finally forwarded the image to five people, the dream stopped the same night.
The image propagates slowly, which is why it hasn't consumed the internet entirely. Recipients sit with it. They try to resist. They research. They find accounts like this one. Eventually, the sleep debt becomes unpayable and they forward it.
If you've never received it, this account will mean nothing to you. If you have received it — if you're reading this after opening an attachment you shouldn't have — then you already know what the dream feels like. You already know what the dog wants.
Spread the word.
It gets easier after you do.