Crossing Reality Plains

Video games have been a staple escapist activity for 30+ years.  In this day and age the number of people who have never played a video game is ever declining. Before long, virtual reality head sets will become part of the norm and revolutionize the art of escapism.

I'd like to argue briefly that video games, when immersive, become another plain of reality.  They're a reality you can turn on and off, even though what one does in that reality isn't real since you're still looking at a screen.  But while immersed in that world, video game reality is reality.  What you see in a video game is a real place that you're peering through a window into.  You exist as whatever avatar is in the game and you live according to the games physics, rules, and storylines.

In a way, real life is your own piloting of an avatar fully immersed in first person perspective.  You have full sense perception and mental faculties.  You live according to physics and the rules of society.  The only difference is you create your own storyline.  Although, many videos allow you to do that to.

Another plain of reality, which many people dismiss as unreal and give no more thought than they do to video games, is the dreamworld.  Despite being able to wake up and have the whole dreamworld vanish like a...a dream...I would say that this is a far more immersive and real reality.  You can have total freedom of physics, laws, rules, and bodily limitations, if you luck into lucidity or know how to do it.

Imagine crossing over these two plains of reality.  Twice this week I've had dreams that have Minecraft settings.  Not only that, I crossed between the regular world and Minecraft world within the dream.

So in the first dream a few days ago, I was exploring a Minecraft (MC) style cave when I came across a MC house.  Upon entering, I found two twin women who were champion tennis players.  Like me, they were not made of blocks.  The told me if I went out the back door I could enter the real world (RW) hills of Pennsylvania.  I followed their advice and voila!  I was back to RW and stood amongst the brown leaved trees on the side of Mt. Penn.  It was a glorious transition from video game to RW while staying within the dream.

Then last night, this one was even more surreal and fun.  I was walking down a RW valley on a bit of an escape.  The back story of this one is, in waking life I play Minecraft as a thing to do while I catch up on my podcasts.  And so over the weeks I built a pretty impressive city and then I built another city later.  The second one was under-developed and needed quick resources.  So, I implemented my own story line, thus sacking and razing the first city as a member of city two.

Back to the dream, I was presumably a person fleeing from the destroyed city number one.  My waking story influenced this dream.  As I mentioned before I was fleeing within a RW mountain valley.  Somewhere upon my journey, a horse I think, told me if I went through a certain forrest, I could find a new sanctuary.

I got on and the horse took me to the tree line of the wood.  He urged me to hurry up and run through as quickly as I could or I may not find it.  He must have been a very convincing horse because I trusted him and did what he said.

It was midnight and I ran straight in among the trees.  It was very hard to see where I was going, I got hit by a lot by tree limbs and pine needles.  Eventually I came to a wall.  But since I had picked up so much speed as I ran, I was able to clear this seven foot wall by jumping.

From here forward I'm going to start a dream log short hand notation to make these things easier in future posts.
dreamrun- when you run in a dream and get progressively faster to superhuman speeds
dreamjump- superhuman type jumps

Anyway, after a bit further I had to jump a second wall.  Once beyond it, I began to see the glow of light through the trees.  I was getting close.  As I exited the forest, I emerged on the outskirts of the destroyed MC city I had fled.  Except, the new city was fully intact and had an air of peace.  The replica was brightly lit in the night.  The only difference was that it was empty.  The city was a melencholic skeleton that was perfect for display, but was not alive.  A city's people is what makes it alive.

I walked the streets a bit and climbed the city tower.  After a little while I decided to leave the city for a better place.  One not frozen in time.  

Simon and Sushi

Last night I had a dream that I went to a convention down somewhere by the sea.  The only part I remember of the convention centre was the cafeteria.  Any food you'd want to eat, they had it!  But I ended up purchasing $26 sushi some how.  It still tasted quite good for dream sushi.  

The secret is, is that waking Zytroft has never had sushi.

Also, the price is dream exaggerated but convention food prices are jacked up in real life.

Back in the dream.  Acquiring chopsticks was hard.  I had to climb three ladders to three different platforms to find chopsticks that weren't shaped like long screws.

After my lunch, I ran into Paul Simon and we sang a duet of Kodachrome.  He was impressed by my pipes and asked me to join a duo with him and tour around.  I accepted.

In the final chapter I found myself on a beach, having walked away from the convention.  I needed to swim to a sandbar to reach my lost shirt.

How'd I lose my shirt? I don't know.  

Did I lose it partying?  Perhaps that's why I don't remember any other parts of the convention.

Did Paul Simon steal it?  Maybe with help from Julio.

Was it the Japanese sushi chef?  Nah, he already got my $26.

Regardless, I got it back!  Celebrate by please sharing and commenting.

Keep dreaming Bithiyanites.

The Bowie Slides- Dream 7/31/16

Ok, so I will try not to let this blog become a dream journal, because I already have one.  But on some days, circumstances only allow me to write my dream.  So here it is…

            I was on vacation and travelled west into Appalachia.  I believe it was West Virginia and I stopped at the Bowie slides.  This was a great playground like structure, much like those at Six Flags where kids can climb high into the air on rope bridges and whatnot.  The structure was constructed like a platform that is used for water slides.  Part of the Bowie Slides was attached to a mountain cliff face, and was quite the hike to reach.  By the time I summited it, my legs were weak and fatigued.  At the top, I could see down into a valley with a river flowing through it.  Then, I sat down onto the top of the first slide and went.  Bowie slides was called so because there wasn’t one continuous slide that went the whole way, but it ended on the next level and you’d have to get on the next slide.  The other reason it was named Bowie Slides is because every slide you went down you heard a different David Bowie song.  The most fun slide I remember (the only one I remember) played Modern Love, or may it was Golden Years.  Both are good songs, nonetheless. 

            After sliding, I went into the locker house to find that the bathroom was absent of private stalls but was set up more like a roman bath house, with a long row wooden toilette seats right next to each other.  Luckily, no one was there but me.

            Next I met up with a friend (we’ll call him Jayson) and went for a swim in the lake that the river flowed into.  As we swam we discussed the topics of liberty and law.  When we came upon a rope floating across the lake, Jayson noted that it marked the boundaries of the swimming area and advised me not to cross it.  Knowing full well that there was no danger beyond it. I began to swim across and turned into a stingray.  I rejoiced in the freedom of swimming as a member of the superorder Batoidea.  I leapt out of the water, into the air and did a backflip.  I landed back with a splash, tossing a spray of h²o from the free waters over the boundary to Jayson.

            Thus concludes my dream.  Typically, in my dream journal, I will tailor the events into some sort of plot that will feed into the narrative of all my other dreams.  Here I just wanted to portray the dream in its natural state, rather than it be part of a bigger storyline that you readers wouldn’t know about. 

Dreams: Fiction and Philosophy

            Dreams are a very natural part of life.  They can either amaze you or frighten you, motivate you or let you down.  But usually you wake up and are like "wtf!"  Dreams are very important to me, especially as a creative minded person and a writer.  They don't lack in entertainment either. They spice up your sleep experience.
             Dreams can be a very important tool for a fiction writer. You can use elements or storylines from dreams to influence a plot or base a story upon.  Being able to do this though does depend on your dreaming skill.  Say, if you dream very infrequently, or do not remember them but a few times a year, dreaming would probably not be a good writing technique. Having very vivid dreams and remembering them often will present you with rich material that begs to be written down. Being able to lucid dream(especially on command) is the the ultimate in dreaming ability.  With lucidity you have your own adventure, experience it, and then write it down.  As you know, dreams can be very random.  Sometimes when you are using a dream for a story idea, some details are too ridiculous for the story to be taken seriously.  So feel free to use your creative license to change some things.  Because all that really matters is that you write the story how you want it and people like it.  But if you change too many things, then you would have to go from describing the story as a dream you wrote down, to being based on or inspired by a dream you had.  In reality though, no one can actually prove that you're lying about a fictionalized dream because they can't get in your head.              
                  Dreams throughout history have had different philosophies associated with them.  From being messages of the gods to predictions of the future, their meanings have been subject of debate.  My personal philosophy:  Dreams are merely a continuation of our daily lives in an alternate reality.  Our consciousness travels there during sleep and takes up another body in that alternate reality.  This body could resemble yours, another person's, an animals, or object.  It can also switch bodies.  Your consciousness in these bodies can interact with other people and things.  Sometimes other people's traveling consciousnesses(usually just a part) can drift into your dreamscape.  There your interactions with them by you is fully influenced by you and their interactions with you by them are partially influenced by their consciousness and how they'd interact with you in non-dreaming life.  Yet they do not usually remember interacting with you.  This is a way for you to discover partial truths about other people in  your dreams, which they did not tell you in outside your dreamscape.  It only works if their consciousness truly did drift into your dreamscape.  But you must make sure to subject anything you learn from a person to heavy interpretation.
                I have kept a dream journal for a little over a year now.  I used up almost two notebooks.  This has been the most steady writing I have ever done.  Lately I have slacked off due to my busyness.  But keeping a dream journal is a very effective tool to improving your dreaming skills. (Note.  I keep my dream philosophy and my talking about dreams and their application to writing separate.)  The more often you write down your dreams, the more you start to remember them, and the better your dreaming skill gets.  Experts recommend you write down your dreams in the morning or after you wake up so you get the freshest and most complete description possible.  The way I do it does not follow the experts. The first reason is that I'm no good in the morning.  I enjoy my sleep and I'm not going pop out of sleep and write down a description of a dream.  Secondly, and the more important reason, when I write down my dreams, I'm not writing them to be exactly what happened.  I have to translate the jumble of thoughts into fictional prose that follows a storyline.  Also, I like the narrative to somehow flow from the previous dream as a continuation of a long saga.  It takes a day of thinking about and deciphering to turn a dream into a story.  Then I write it down in my dream journal.  Mon journal de rêve.  I like to refer to it as my dream novel because the stories connect and the ammount i have written is probably enough to be a novel.
                  Many people discard dreams as nothing to think twice about, but dreams, whether you agree with my philosophy or not, can inspire works of art and literature and can even impact the world!  

*No longer my current dream philosophy but I am not rejecting this theory. Edit 4/21/15