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.