Dreamscapes
Sometimes I've dreamed dreams that consistently take place in places that don't quite exist. A melange of the real, and the plauisbly different. Events in a house that isn't there in the waking world, but recurs time after time. A railway station that exists where a park normally resides. A persistent backdrop for dream after dream over years.
And as I sip my coffee and wait for the sun to come up, I wonder...what if I could make this place? This house that I keep seeing. This neighborhood. That street. See them and walk them in the waking (if virtual) world.
What would I learn about myself, perhaps? About the way I connect ideas, thoughts, images, meaning. Maybe too, I would discover all sorts of holes in what appears, in my dreams, to be a whole cloth.
Would it all gain or lose something in the translation? And the translation itself would be a brobdignagian task. Converting the imagery of the mind into anything external is quite the feat in and of itself. Ask any artist.
An even better question is: Why haven't you already tried it, in Second Life?
ReplyDeleteWhen the Jennifer Lopez science fiction movie 'The Cell' came out, I went to see it, intrigued by both the art design and the premise: to explore a serial killer's mind by entering his dreams.
However, I walked out of the theater about halfway into the movie, because the killer's dreaming environments were eerily similar to many of my own (minus the more obvious violent overtones). The decor, the lighting, the ambient sounds... all hauntingly familiar to me. To see my oneiroscape portrayed so superbly onscreen was more than I'd been prepared to witness, and I left the theater.
I have since been able to watch the movie in its entirety, and enjoyed it for what I was able to take from it. The impact of the original viewing has never left me, however, and has made me wary of writing about my dreams ever since.
I offer this insight to you as... not a warning, though you might take it so, but as a message in a bottle, from the shores of another's island. Those dreams we inhabit are, indeed, real places and times, and we place them in the Waking World only with sober responsibility. We never know whose life we might touch with our images and thoughts, and with what strength. Let us proceed with full awareness.