RE: techInDreams
I've been thinking about writing about dreams for a while, so
having read tfurrows post while catching up on phlogs (I got a bit
behind starting with when I did my batch of laptop
refurbishment/sales - I really don't have the energy for all that
plus what I already do, but "anything for money" so I'll have to
anyway) I decided it was a good prompt.
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2021-02-28_techInDreams.txt
I don't dream much. I remember (I don't do very well on that front
either, but this has somehow stuck) that when I was in my earlier
school years I beleived that I didn't have dreams at all, which may
or may not have been true. While I do have them now, sometimes, I
do feel that their lack is somewhat symptomatic of a lack of really
stimulating experiences.
The observations that have lead me to this suspicion are firstly
that most of my dreams are quite conciously constructed, at least
those that I remember (and that memory doesn't last long, I can
hardly think of any now that I remember well enough to describe
what they were specifically about, just the general structure or
template). A common, and enjoyable, type is to imagine a place that
I know well, but simply far more pleasant than it is in reality.
I've always liked small, cluttered, spaces without many/any people
[looks around - yep realised that here in my house for sure!], but
also the perceived dimensions of places are adjusted in some
indeterminable way that is just far nicer than reality. Possibly
nicer than any real place could actually make me feel. Within them
I explore, without really knowing what to expect yet conscious that
I'm dreaming, and if an avenue of exploration does progress to an
unpleasant outcome such as death, I can often "rewind" back a bit
and reconstruct everything avoiding that path.
To some extent these might not even be "true" dreams because I have
so much conscious control over them. It's probably significant that
often the times when I do have dreams out of my control, that I
can't rewind or even identify as a dream, are when I've recently
done something exciting. This could be any range of things: a rare
social occasion with people my age, or my yearly trip to Melbourne
where by walking aimlessly around I always stumble into some
situations that seem odd to me (it doesn't take much given how
otherworldly a city like that is compared to my normal
environment), or (more conventionally exciting, but honestly more
normal for me) responding to a fire (I'm a volunteer firefighter,
not sure if I've mentioned it, dips into the side of my life that I
don't talk about here). The fact that it takes these things to get
me dreaming normally(?) does make me wonder whether my regular
existance is just way too subdued - whether by constructing and
settling in more or less my preferred habitat, I've cut out any
true life experience. Worse, I know exactly what replaces it all -
my mountains of old VHS tapes. But then, living comfortably (money
concerns aside) and dreaming happy dreams, isn't that good? People
piss me off and at best I just rant at them about stuff like this,
I don't actually like Melbourne as a place to live and if I walk
around dodgy places long enough someone will probably stab me, and
fire burns stuff. I don't actually want any of that, do I? Actually
if you turn up the knob a little bit with some of it you probably
just end up with PTSD, certainly there are some times that I've got
stuck on a recurring dream of a past unpleasant event, even to the
extent of shouting "stop bloody thinking of it!" out to the
emptyness after waking up in the middle of the night.
Then there's the other observation which is of my really confused
dreams. Here's where the tech comes in. I don't really know how
much tech penetrates into my "concious" dreams, I don't remember
them with that much detail. I think electronics does, but probably
not computer software. But computer software, and to some extent
electronics too, is certainly what fills that void of uncontrolled
"unconcious" dreaming. Sometimes this can be really ridiculously
mundane. If I've been working long enough on something that's not
working and I've got no idea why but just have to figure it out
because it's my one path to untold riches (I usually do figure it
out eventually, but nobody buys the thing anyway) then I might just
dream that I wake up, change that one thing that probably won't
help and will take a bit of time but MIGHT just fix everything, and
it all works! End of dream. I eventually wake up, possibly unsure
of whether it was reality or not, go to work and immediately see
that the proposed solution is completely stupid and won't have a
chance of fixing anything, so go back to spending the day banging
my head against the electronic/programmatic wall as usual. What
this basically says is that I'm obsessed, and what my bank balance
says is that this obsession isn't worthwhile. But my solution is
always just to obsess over something else. Possibly obsessing over
how to exist without money would actually give me both the
excitement and security that I'm after. I'm not sure what sort of
dreams those homeless people in Melbourne have though...
Proving that same point is a deeper level of tech dreaming. Where
reality is completely abstracted into the same level of the
engineering that I'm working on. People become C functions, or
Assembly subroutines, or logic arrays. Thought becomes linked to
instruction cycles, and must be optimised, travel is brances in
execution. Hardware compatibility becomes the deciding factor of
real-world activities. Sex is I/O, heaven help me if I find myself
a gender-bender! Time to wake up - exit low-power mode where
there's a reduced clock frequency and peripheral availability, is
there an interrupt service routine I need to run? No I'm the
computer, if there's an ISR then I've already run it, or am I
running it? Is the house compatible with me? Yes, I think it has to
be. Shit I'm thinking like a computer again - need to wake up
properley: wait for the supply voltage to stabilise, and the clock
frequency to stabilise as the circuitry warms up. Oh stop it. It
got cold last night, I was probably outside my recommended
operational environment. No seriously, STOP IT!
So yeah, tech is in my dreams. Too deep in my dreams. I _am_ tech
in my dreams. It can't be right.
To be honest, this is a big part of why I want to get into some
proper travel - more than just the day trips I was doing before. I
changed the other real wheel bearing on my Jag, it went fairly well
especially compared to the other one, still lots of hammering and
swearing though. Once I fix the blower motors, I think I will try
that plan of adjusting my sleep pattern so that I go to bed at the
start of the evening and wake up around midnight, so I can travel
down the highways when there's no traffic, and around larger
country towns when there's no traffic in them either. Walk around
watching it come to life, people going to work, stores opening up.
I once spent an hour or two walking through a shopping centre
("mall" in the USA, but I think the size of them there is on a
whole different scale) about a week after Christmas when it was
opening up one morning. Drifting past the disjointed zones of
differing canned music, back and forth time and time again. Yeah
maybe I should just be a night security guard somewhere. Though I'd
get bored at a small place and all the big sites would be in cities
that I wouldn't like living in, or travelling to during the day.
Plus all sorts of other people would be involved. Bah. Nah haunting
the country highways is the way to go. I've just got the issue of
paying all the motel costs. Actually one of my business plans does
propose a way to make it pay, but I can't wait long enough for it
to be all set up and frankly it probably wouldn't pay for
motel+fuel anyway. I'd have to get a vehicle I could sleep and
store stock in - and then I don't have the fun of driving the Jag.
Bah. This money shit ruins everything!
- The Free Thinker
P.S. Thought I'd read tfurrows later posts before putting this
online. In "Talking about Gopher" he asks "Do you ever try to talk
about gopher with people in the wide world? I mean, people who
aren't really technical, or maybe just a little technical?", so I
might as well answer. The question basically covers everyone in my
case because I currently only really know one person who'se
"technical", my step-father. Who I don't really get along with,
particularly in that he ignores me bringing up things he isn't
already specifically interested in (it's a fairly selfish
conversational strategy on his part really), plus I don't want him
reading ths phlog, so I haven't talked to him about it either.
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2021-02-28_talkingGopher.txt
Other older relatives and the farmers I know through the fire
brigade are all just plainly not the Gopher sort. Most openly
dispise computers, with some actually avoiding them partially or
completely (yes internet-less households still exist), and others
are quite literate with Facebook on their smartphones but probably
not much beyond that.
Overall I guess I've mentioned it twice, to the two friends from my
school days who have actually been known to reply properly, neither
of whome replied to the particular communications that contained
the Gopher reference. I think I just described it as "a system from
before websites existed".
While I first dicovered Gopher during my high school days, I never
talked about it back then. But Usenet is a pretty similar case, and
I would half-jokingly bring that up when friends were talking about
Facebook, which I refused to have anything to do with. Maybe
something like "Nah I like Usenet, it's been around longer than
Facebook and the web". I didn't push it beyond that, though I guess
I was probing for someone to ask a question about it. I think some
said something like "huh? How can it have been before the web?",
but didn't listen to my response. I guess some of the small group
of gamers took the most interest, as they were clearly using some
web forums, but you-know I wasn't a gamer and Usenet was long past
the days when there were gamers there, so it wasn't really ever
going to go anywhere even if I could have (or did) kept a
conversation going long enough to explain it. Gopher would have
fallen through a similar hole - I'm from a generation that didn't
even read blogs, so Gopher and Usenet both fall on either side of
the Facebook type of service that they understood and were
interested in.
