Why have I been having these most distinctive dreams?
They are very detailed, but in a particular way. There are THINGS I must keep track of and manage during sleep. It is vitally important that I handle these things properly, but they are very complicated in detailed ways.
For example, my sleeping room is also a sort of stage, on which other people are to behave in special ways. Their behavior is via all these tokens I have to create and maintain properly. There are list tokens, for example, which are cylindrical but with a bit of twist, like a magazine or a map rolled imperfectly up. They contain tabular information, typically, though there can be exceptions. A frequent theme in the design of list tokens is the use of particular colors, especially more or less pastel shades of orange, to key on certain unspoken familiarities that I can - should be - trying to build up in the user. But list tokens come in all sorts of lengths and diameters and have a zillion details to the design of the table on them, and there are all these metadetails too, all these conventions that I should be getting people to notice and adopt unconsciously. And that’s just list tokens. There are sequence tokens and direction tokens and time tokens and people tokens and point tokens and where-has-it-traveled tokens and on and on and on and on and on and on. So, I can’t help but notice the parallels between this and programming, especially writing Windows programs where there is a workspace that is my user’s stage and unspokenly also the room I must live in when I program. The tokens are all Windows forms. I don’t have direct control over what the users will do when they come here, but by rapidly shifting between their and my point of view I am supposed to make them work effectively just the same. And the forms are little objects, they have properties like text values and label shading and color, always color, lots of color. Which when it is red means some kind of warning, some potentially bad thing, because everybody gets that red suggests potentially bad things and nobody would automatically associate happy thoughts with red. Unless they are Chinese, of which there are four times as many as there are us annoying Americans, but now I am confusing color themes with localization which is because of some sort of messed up attitude on my part, which in turn is something I made up out of nothing and not a reaction to anything else, even though other things that look like feelings and smell like feelings and feel like feelings (which should be the clincher) are of course reactions to other things and never made up out of nothing. JESUS, JESUS, FUCKING JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH ON CRUTCHES WHAT IS MAKING ME DREAM LIKE THIS???
Ahh… where was I? Well, no matter. The thing is, these all turn into nothing as I awake. That is, I start to get more and more fatigued about the responsibility for making all these things go right, though not so clearly the ability to, and I start to kind of slip. I treat them as less important. No, better to say that I decide it is OK if they don’t all have to work. No, that isn’t it either. It’s more like the audience that could always be there, like you when you are reading a cartoon, that omniscient observer is changing their frame of mind, from one in which it is assumed that all the details must go right, to one where we could after all have a sense of humor about these things. And I start to draw a wilderness line, saying Well these will work pretty well but maybe those won’t, and the others here may pretty much not do anything at all. And so I’m in this space, sized like a large room but having a dirt floor, cheap old cinderblock walls, and no ceiling, just open sky. And there are these things running through it, things that are sort of themes or consistensies that tie everything together, but they are also sort of physical objects. Objects like roots or branches. Or they have been exposed so long they aren’t clearly either roots or branches, but clearly wood, clearly one or the other. Or both. Except painted. Various colors, conveying some sense of what they are about. Pastel orange, say. And they thread everywhere. And dealing with these damn things is like trying to dig a hole in dirt that is just criscrossed every which way with gigantic fresh rock-hard roots the size and, sheesh, isn’t that the shape, the shape of a sturdy man’s leg? I mean, I have to deal with these to get finished, to get them to work like I want. To get then to push one another in the right order, so they move in unison, which can be very complicated to work out ahead of time, especially because there’s noplace I can get to see the entirity of one all at once, and because they are obviously going to be moving several at a time in their own directions. So their movements are complicated. No, that’s wrong, their movements are simplicity itself, it is the fact that they must move in certain organized ways, the fact that their movements must occur in patterns. But you can’t picture these patterns, of course. You could picture a movement, but soon you are saying the light green ones will go left and the light orange ones will go right and the purplish one will go up, and all the other ones, their movements shouldn’t matter from over here, so let me move a few feet to the right with all that in mind and reconsider everything. Reconsider how they will move so I can go. That is, to get clear of them. To be able to move around right again. Because what I am doing is trying to extricate myself. Though, not vividly, that is the things aren’t touching me and holding me, I just don’t have the ability to get out of here without resolving all that satisfactorily. So in a figurative sense I have to move them so I can go but not in a literal one. Well, actually, the way I said it, that WAS literally true, but I’m not literally held here by them, I’m not literally caught in them, just figuratively.
Oh, man, I’m tired again.
All right, what is up with this? Is there a name for these bizzarrely fussy and complicated dreams, characterized by a sense of the importance of all these details, details which seem to melt away to nothing as I awake???
I do have some stuff afoot at the moment, which I can get into, but I’d really like to learn a bit about dreaming if I might!