markitechture

dream.ini

Background

I have, throughout my life, had periods where my dreams have become extremely vivid and intense, and at times fully lucid. There’s a movie out about lucid dreaming right now, perhaps you’ve seen it. Much of what is in Inception is actually quite real; perhaps I should go into that in another post but in short, the totems, clocks, time stretching and inconsistency and so forth are all bread and butter components of lucid dreaming. Especially the clocks, but I digress …

At about 3:00am this morning, though in the midst of a very vivid dream, I awoke suddenly for some reason. I got up to visit the restroom (might as well) and remained in the in-between state where I was neither fully conscious nor fully dreaming. Though this state is common in lucid dreaming, it is more frequently experienced while falling asleep, and much less common to occur while waking. In any case, I dug it, and sort of watched the end of the dream trail off; most often this is what happens when you realize you are dreaming, and lucid dreaming is largely about controlling this, to prolong the dream while you are aware that you are dreaming. I made no effort to continue the dream as I was now awake and figured it was a lost cause. Also, weird dream so good riddance.

Then a funny thing happened.

In the dark bathroom, a vivid illustration whipped across my view. Like a stock ticker sped up 100 times, I saw … code. I could not slow it down, and could only try to get a glimpse of what it might be. It a flash I was able to catch a bit of the text and realized …

… it was a serialization of dream settings.

Wow

I went back to bed. Later this morning I had time to reflect on what I saw, to try to glean anything of interest from the snapshot in my mind.

The first (obvious) revelation is that what I saw was a series of key-value pairs. Great, that’s a decent starting point. But what are the keys and values, what do they represent?

Oh snap! I think I got it.

The Purpose of Dreams

In my experience, periods of intense dreaming present themselves during times stress, specifically anticipatory stress of upcoming change and uncertainty. Knowing my dreams, and in hearing about my friends’ dreams I often find that the clear purpose of dreams is to address anticipatory anxiety and fear. I’ve heard that a common explanation of deja vu is this same principle.

My thought is the brain’s dream architect works like this:

1. Identify anxieties to explore/address in the dream.
2. Map each anxiety with a metaphor (‘code’).
3. Create a vivid scenario in which the anxieties present themselves, using the chosen metaphor.
4. Begin the dream. Allow the dreamer to interact with the coded anxieties, which will help the human build confidence and allay their fears through life-like experience.

For this to be possible, there would firstly need to be a huge list of anxieties. Here is a brainstorm of what some common ones might be:

(Are these cultural? Personal? A priori?? That’s an interesting question.)

The first thing that would need to happen is to weight the relative relevance of each anxiety would need to be assigned. This would be driven, of course, by the current events in the life of the dreamer.

In order for these anxieties/fears to manifest themselves in the dream, the architect would need an approach - a method of instantiation - for each significant theme. That’s where the code that I saw comes in. This is some sort of initialization or configuration file for the dream that maps the salient fears to coded images or messages that the architect can reliably employ to provide dreamer interaction and role play.

So by this point, the architect is quite well prepared to simply create an environment and allow the dreamer to enter, and interact with their anxieties in some sort of phenomenological form, be it objects, people, or events.

Example

The following is a fictional example, to demonstrate how I imagine dream architecture might function in the brain.

Let’s imagine a 20-something, successful and sure of himself, but going through a time of personal professional transition. His profession? He is an editorial columnist. To complete the picture, let’s detail his anxieties (since we’re making him up, we can’t be wrong!). He is talented, he has no anxiety about being able to do his job well. Yet he remains anxious about making a professional move; he is fearful that he will join a team where he is not as needed as he could possibly be.

The architect sees this anxiety and needs to retrieve a code/metaphor for it: being_unnecessary. It turns out it’s not a fear of being good, or being useful, it’s a fear of not being absolutely core to the effort he undertakes.

His ability to write exceptional columns? This will be represented by a computer printer.

The dream: the young man approaches a friend and offers a computer printer as a gift, but is refused.

The Twist

Perhaps our brains are even one level smarter. It is possible that the inner workings of dream mechanics are so clever as to present themselves to me, the dreamer, in a way that I might understand. It is possible that the inner workings are even more basic - that the metaphor that I witnessed is precisely, and simply, just that: a metaphor. These mechanics and behaviors presented themselves to me as architectural tiers, system components with a clear separation of concerns. I like to think through problems this way, and so it’s a good bet that I might grok the message presented thusly. Also, the use of data serialization (complete with code highlighting, you see that sh*t?) borders on an inside joke with myself.

Afterword

I have no qualification to assert the behavior of the brain, or how dreams are conjured, executed, or experienced other than through my own dreaming. If anything about this is right/wrong according to actual science, I’d love to know.