Dreams are weird. For a start I often wake-up knowing that I’ve had a dream only to ponder on what it was about. It’s as if an erase function was pressed the moment the sunlight starts to beam through the curtains. As if my mobile’s alarm triggers a mental dustbin to empty.
Now, if I do wake-up from a dream in the night, I try to remember to scribble a note. Naturally, that’s merely a case of putting down a couple of words, not a full-page story. Interestingly that note can be surprisingly useful in restoring a glimpse of what I was dreaming.
I’m not going to get into the interpretation of dreams[1]. I don’t think they are a kind of prophecy. Literature is full of that notion. To me it must be that complex jumble of stimulus that has accumulated slowly being sorted, either filed or discarded. That’s not an analogy with a conventional computer. I think we have a powerful desire to take masses of information and make sense of it. That means wrapping a story around a lot of disparate stuff.
Dreams are weird. That’s because they have parts that make everyday sense and parts that live purely in the imagination. Boundaries and simple cause and effect don’t have to conform to waking reality. Imaginary worlds can be way of the charts.
Here’s goes. Fragments of what I remember go like so. It’s a clean room, like in a large semiconductor manufacture. White coats and white walls. Workbenches and sophisticated equipment laboratory style. Serious looking people.
Groups in different rooms. Could be in entirely different places. All working on making some kind of super chip [Have I been reading too many articles on quantum computing and alike?]. Could be a scene from a classic 007 movie where the villain invited their competitors to their secret hidden laboratory.
The last image was curious. A group of scientific people standing around staring intensely at a device (chip) sitting on a bench knowing that its performance has beaten all the opposition. Left the competition in the dust. Lots of questions being asked. This was not a hostile or nightmarish dream. This solid grey device looked like the base of a ceramic butter dish.
Even stranger the heatsink that rose up from the structure was shaped as a miniature model of the Roman forum[2] in Rome. It was as if the designers were so cocky they wanted to play a joke on their competitors. Me being one of them.
I don’t think there’s much mileage in sensemaking of this morning recollection. A dream about an imaginary future happening isn’t a kind of prediction. Perhaps it’s a chunking together fiction, facts and fantasy. However, it’s possible that some kind of breakthrough technology is sitting on a cleanroom bench somewhere. Where are the modern-day oracles when we need them.
[1] https://www.freud.org.uk/schools/resources/the-interpretation-of-dreams/
John Vincent 