Hyper-realistic dreams
Feb 2017 W. Beaty

An earlier example was when I was female, a chief designer for a large pharma/fashion corp, trying to track down industrial spies who had been stealing our tech. They were after my chem breakthrough, a hair dye which could make customers' hair look just like the kandy-sparkle-paint on 1950s concept-cars, which was a big retro fad in ?2070?. All this was happening in a semi-domed city, with 20ft flatscreen displays all over every wall, constantly playing advertising videos. I saw a couple products in use there which nobody has ever conceived (they're patentable. I could become "the inventor," like with transparent aluminum.) Years later, the movie "Minority Report" came out. It showed something pretty close to the city in my dream; I'd been walking around all over inside the city from Minority Report (except the movie didn't show those two kickass product ideas!)

Second dream, I was very old, a long-bearded smelly unbathed street-beggar waking up downtown in bright sunlight, but the sun was fake, and all the passersby on the sidewalk were naked (only poor people wore clothes.) Giant buildings from Bladerunner, filthy streets and sidewalks. Crowd of naked rich teenagers drags me onto my feet with promises of spare change, then talks me to going into a bodymod tech botique, and buys me expensive top-of-line artificial eyes. I'm put under, and they're installed.

Now, everyone I see has hi-res motion-tracked opaque CGI clothing, which I'd never seen before because I couldn't afford eyes like the normal (employed) people all used. Ah, I suddenly get it, the punch line. This was all about using rich parent's credit card to play a big joke on the disgusting homeless derelict, because I find that I cannot turn off the CGI clothing-view feature, and now I never will oogle the naked teenagers anymore. The entire dream, from start to finish, turns out to be a comedy indie short-film. (Then years later I discover Karla Speed McNeil, and her domed cities ...and she has the unwanted-artificial-eyes trope in here Finder comics! Oh jeeze we're both tapped into the same thing. "where do you get your ideas?" From the Cosmic Othermind; leakage from the Imaginal Realm. In othe words: personal dream journals! )

Now the latest dream. I'm at Burning Man many years from now, trying to make my way to a certain camp by crossing through many other art installations. Our camp is the one with the the giant retro-robotic oracle goddess, made from an old "real doll" female upper body, plus a lower-half: a 20ft black fiberglass robotic scorpion with motorized joints and giant stinger-tail raised behind. Oriental hangings and carpets, a huge Bedouin tent.

The "real doll" section is automated, a rod-driven puppet which moves arms and head, but her face and mouth is static. Over the years, tens of thousands of people, "supplicants", have crawled on their knees across our dusty carpets to approach the goddess and ask their Question. Her "robot brain" had once been a bank of cassette tapes with sultry female voice-actor recordings, each clip being selected for playback by a hidden person hitting one of several keys, ...producing the same answers as MAGIC 8-BALL(tm)!!!

An entire playa BRC camp forming the World's Most Expensive Magic 8-ball! (When I woke up, I thought, what a great idea! Wish I'd been the one to think of it.) In the dream ...during early years our puppeteer had once personally manipulated the arms and head. But that was decades ago. More and more tapes were added to the bank, and finally some unknown person had built "The Randomizer," made from thousands of wooden parts, where friction and bearing-slop would give random coin-flipping and deterministic- chaotic results (and later, in the waking world, I found out that the infamous automaton "The Turk" had a fake one of these; some complicated do-nothing clockwork, just for show.) Our clockwork really worked, and was a cube about a meter on a side, hundreds of pounds of motor-driven wooden parts to control the motions of the goddess-puppet. When triggered by noise (or the sound of a question,) the arms and head would go through one of several sequences, and a random tape would speak an answer.

Also, in front of our robot, we'd set up banks of hidden loudspeakers on either side of the "supplicant" position, but only playing mono, so the playback sounds like mono headphones, as if the sound was coming from inside your head. Like telepathy. Fake art-installation telepathy: that way we didn't have to animate her mouth! (Note that all this stuff was in the dream, and on waking, I'm scribbling it all down and saying coooool i wish i'd been the one who came up with that!)

But next, recently many weird things were starting to happen with the Goddess- Oracle. The wooden parts of The Randomizer do change slowly over years through wear, and now the puppet's motions weren't the same all the time, and also, one tape would interrupt, then play a fragment from another. Often the puppet would "suddenly glare" at the supplicant and say "I KNOW ...YOU" before any question had even been asked, and it would actually be a person who'd been there repeatedly. Also, the broken audio sequences were starting to form crude but sensible sentences, and they were predicting genuine future events and giving advice corresponding to the questions asked. Popularity soared, and the line of 'Burners' waiting to consult the automaton-Scorpion-Goddess were many hundreds of feet long, lasting even all night. The puppet had clearly developed a memory, no question, yet this was completely impossible (and of course the wooden randomizer had no memory-bits.) The puppet had started performing human-like motions which weren't programmed, even displaying a sense of humor and a takes-no-bullshit "arch warrior goddess" personality in the audio segments, yet nobody had designed-in any such thing.

(Upon waking, I realized that this dream reveals Frankenstein's Secret, how to create a living being, by providing a randomizer, plus harnessing the "Tibetean Tulpa phenomenon," where the concentrated belief and expectations of tens of thousands of "supplicants" attending Burning Man had accidentally altered the wooden Randomizer, teaching the infant being, or perhaps "haunting" it with an artificial "discarnate spirit" which all their expectations had programmed both to think, and to communicate with people by slightly manipulating the vast patterns of friction inside the cubic-meter wooden "computer" which ran the puppet limbs and selected taped audio sequences. This, all from a dream?! (See, it's like a movie, with scriptwriters and research!)

But but but, that suggests that human beings might also be the same. WE ARE HAUNTED RANDOMIZERS, hooked up to muscles and eyes; vast patterns of chaotic beat-wave ring-oscillators made from tiny neuron-clusters, with some sort of external pattern (of nonlocal zero-point fields?) which actually provide the consciousness/memory/personality. Anyway, the dream continues.)

After the unexplained disaster (Disaster?) where all of Burning Man was torn down (riots? giant storm?) I'd managed to rescue from the the wreakage just the tape bank, The Randomizer and the upper real-doll part of the puppet. I had them crudely hooked together, clearly repaired, but it wouldn't work. Sitting in our huge yurt-tent on piles of cushions, our group was joking, and someone made some risque sexual comment about "wanting to get stung" by the scorpion-goddess. Whereupon the randomizer starts grinding, the puppet turns and looks at the person, and the tape bank plays an offended female voice, "THAT WOULD ...BE DISGUSTING."
I jolt awake, and start writing the whole thing down so it doesn't fade away. Feb 2017