RE: techInDreams

I've been thinking about writing about dreams for a while, so 
having read tfurrows post while catching up on phlogs (I got a bit 
behind starting with when I did my batch of laptop 
refurbishment/sales - I really don't have the energy for all that 
plus what I already do, but "anything for money" so I'll have to 
anyway) I decided it was a good prompt.
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2021-02-28_techInDreams.txt

I don't dream much. I remember (I don't do very well on that front 
either, but this has somehow stuck) that when I was in my earlier 
school years I beleived that I didn't have dreams at all, which may 
or may not have been true. While I do have them now, sometimes, I 
do feel that their lack is somewhat symptomatic of a lack of really 
stimulating experiences.

The observations that have lead me to this suspicion are firstly 
that most of my dreams are quite conciously constructed, at least 
those that I remember (and that memory doesn't last long, I can 
hardly think of any now that I remember well enough to describe 
what they were specifically about, just the general structure or 
template). A common, and enjoyable, type is to imagine a place that 
I know well, but simply far more pleasant than it is in reality. 
I've always liked small, cluttered, spaces without many/any people 
[looks around - yep realised that here in my house for sure!], but 
also the perceived dimensions of places are adjusted in some 
indeterminable way that is just far nicer than reality. Possibly 
nicer than any real place could actually make me feel. Within them 
I explore, without really knowing what to expect yet conscious that 
I'm dreaming, and if an avenue of exploration does progress to an 
unpleasant outcome such as death, I can often "rewind" back a bit 
and reconstruct everything avoiding that path.

To some extent these might not even be "true" dreams because I have 
so much conscious control over them. It's probably significant that 
often the times when I do have dreams out of my control, that I 
can't rewind or even identify as a dream, are when I've recently 
done something exciting. This could be any range of things: a rare 
social occasion with people my age, or my yearly trip to Melbourne 
where by walking aimlessly around I always stumble into some 
situations that seem odd to me (it doesn't take much given how 
otherworldly a city like that is compared to my normal 
environment), or (more conventionally exciting, but honestly more 
normal for me) responding to a fire (I'm a volunteer firefighter, 
not sure if I've mentioned it, dips into the side of my life that I 
don't talk about here). The fact that it takes these things to get 
me dreaming normally(?) does make me wonder whether my regular 
existance is just way too subdued - whether by constructing and 
settling in more or less my preferred habitat, I've cut out any 
true life experience. Worse, I know exactly what replaces it all - 
my mountains of old VHS tapes. But then, living comfortably (money 
concerns aside) and dreaming happy dreams, isn't that good? People 
piss me off and at best I just rant at them about stuff like this, 
I don't actually like Melbourne as a place to live and if I walk 
around dodgy places long enough someone will probably stab me, and 
fire burns stuff. I don't actually want any of that, do I? Actually 
if you turn up the knob a little bit with some of it you probably 
just end up with PTSD, certainly there are some times that I've got 
stuck on a recurring dream of a past unpleasant event, even to the 
extent of shouting "stop bloody thinking of it!" out to the 
emptyness after waking up in the middle of the night.

Then there's the other observation which is of my really confused 
dreams. Here's where the tech comes in. I don't really know how 
much tech penetrates into my "concious" dreams, I don't remember 
them with that much detail. I think electronics does, but probably 
not computer software. But computer software, and to some extent 
electronics too, is certainly what fills that void of uncontrolled 
"unconcious" dreaming. Sometimes this can be really ridiculously 
mundane. If I've been working long enough on something that's not 
working and I've got no idea why but just have to figure it out 
because it's my one path to untold riches (I usually do figure it 
out eventually, but nobody buys the thing anyway) then I might just 
dream that I wake up, change that one thing that probably won't 
help and will take a bit of time but MIGHT just fix everything, and 
it all works! End of dream. I eventually wake up, possibly unsure 
of whether it was reality or not, go to work and immediately see 
that the proposed solution is completely stupid and won't have a 
chance of fixing anything, so go back to spending the day banging 
my head against the electronic/programmatic wall as usual. What 
this basically says is that I'm obsessed, and what my bank balance 
says is that this obsession isn't worthwhile. But my solution is 
always just to obsess over something else. Possibly obsessing over 
how to exist without money would actually give me both the 
excitement and security that I'm after. I'm not sure what sort of 
dreams those homeless people in Melbourne have though...

Proving that same point is a deeper level of tech dreaming. Where 
reality is completely abstracted into the same level of the 
engineering that I'm working on. People become C functions, or 
Assembly subroutines, or logic arrays. Thought becomes linked to 
instruction cycles, and must be optimised, travel is brances in 
execution. Hardware compatibility becomes the deciding factor of 
real-world activities. Sex is I/O, heaven help me if I find myself 
a gender-bender! Time to wake up - exit low-power mode where 
there's a reduced clock frequency and peripheral availability, is 
there an interrupt service routine I need to run? No I'm the 
computer, if there's an ISR then I've already run it, or am I 
running it? Is the house compatible with me? Yes, I think it has to 
be. Shit I'm thinking like a computer again - need to wake up 
properley: wait for the supply voltage to stabilise, and the clock 
frequency to stabilise as the circuitry warms up. Oh stop it. It 
got cold last night, I was probably outside my recommended 
operational environment. No seriously, STOP IT!

So yeah, tech is in my dreams. Too deep in my dreams. I _am_ tech 
in my dreams. It can't be right.

To be honest, this is a big part of why I want to get into some 
proper travel - more than just the day trips I was doing before. I 
changed the other real wheel bearing on my Jag, it went fairly well 
especially compared to the other one, still lots of hammering and 
swearing though. Once I fix the blower motors, I think I will try 
that plan of adjusting my sleep pattern so that I go to bed at the 
start of the evening and wake up around midnight, so I can travel 
down the highways when there's no traffic, and around larger 
country towns when there's no traffic in them either. Walk around 
watching it come to life, people going to work, stores opening up. 
I once spent an hour or two walking through a shopping centre 
("mall" in the USA, but I think the size of them there is on a 
whole different scale) about a week after Christmas when it was 
opening up one morning. Drifting past the disjointed zones of 
differing canned music, back and forth time and time again. Yeah 
maybe I should just be a night security guard somewhere. Though I'd 
get bored at a small place and all the big sites would be in cities 
that I wouldn't like living in, or travelling to during the day. 
Plus all sorts of other people would be involved. Bah. Nah haunting 
the country highways is the way to go. I've just got the issue of 
paying all the motel costs. Actually one of my business plans does 
propose a way to make it pay, but I can't wait long enough for it 
to be all set up and frankly it probably wouldn't pay for 
motel+fuel anyway. I'd have to get a vehicle I could sleep and 
store stock in - and then I don't have the fun of driving the Jag. 
Bah. This money shit ruins everything!

 - The Free Thinker

P.S. Thought I'd read tfurrows later posts before putting this 
online. In "Talking about Gopher" he asks "Do you ever try to talk 
about gopher with people in the wide world? I mean, people who  
aren't really technical, or maybe just a little technical?", so I 
might as well answer. The question basically covers everyone in my 
case because I currently only really know one person who'se 
"technical", my step-father. Who I don't really get along with, 
particularly in that he ignores me bringing up things he isn't 
already specifically interested in (it's a fairly selfish 
conversational strategy on his part really), plus I don't want him 
reading ths phlog, so I haven't talked to him about it either.
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/2021-02-28_talkingGopher.txt

Other older relatives and the farmers I know through the fire 
brigade are all just plainly not the Gopher sort. Most openly 
dispise computers, with some actually avoiding them partially or 
completely (yes internet-less households still exist), and others 
are quite literate with Facebook on their smartphones but probably 
not much beyond that.

Overall I guess I've mentioned it twice, to the two friends from my 
school days who have actually been known to reply properly, neither 
of whome replied to the particular communications that contained 
the Gopher reference. I think I just described it as "a system from 
before websites existed".

While I first dicovered Gopher during my high school days, I never 
talked about it back then. But Usenet is a pretty similar case, and 
I would half-jokingly bring that up when friends were talking about 
Facebook, which I refused to have anything to do with. Maybe 
something like "Nah I like Usenet, it's been around longer than 
Facebook and the web". I didn't push it beyond that, though I guess 
I was probing for someone to ask a question about it. I think some 
said something like "huh? How can it have been before the web?", 
but didn't listen to my response. I guess some of the small group 
of gamers took the most interest, as they were clearly using some 
web forums, but you-know I wasn't a gamer and Usenet was long past 
the days when there were gamers there, so it wasn't really ever 
going to go anywhere even if I could have (or did) kept a 
conversation going long enough to explain it. Gopher would have 
fallen through a similar hole - I'm from a generation that didn't 
even read blogs, so Gopher and Usenet both fall on either side of 
the Facebook type of service that they understood and were 
interested in.