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Warren Shea

Can your dreams outsmart you?

Saturday, March 12th, 2011 at 3:37 am

Let me just re-iterate various tweets I had today, which were in direct relation to the dream I had last night.

1. I’m pretty sure the characters in my dreams are much smarter than I am. I don’t know what they’re thinking and they always seem to outwit me
2. Last night, I had a dream that Amazon went to recruit me for a job. They offered be $120,000 and 7 weeks vacation. I tried to counter with 8
3. I then discovered that Dream Warren is greedy, much like his IRL counterpart.

I’m not one to often talk about my dreams…as they’re generally only interesting to the person that’s had them. I’ll make an exception for this post…as it’s not the dream that’s important, but the psychological importance of the dream mind and dream world.

It’s a pretty linear dream…I basically start off with some Amazon guys who have flown in from the US to recruit me as a developer. They offer me $120,000 to work there, and 7 weeks vacation. But I figure that it’s not enough…I try to counter-offer for 8. This explains tweet 2 and 3. Anyways, fast forward, and I’m working there but I don’t know what they want me to do.

This lady is explaining my job, and she’s using all these technical terms and acronyms that I don’t know.
“We develop in CVH here and render graphics with SVG1 codecs, cross-platform syncing, and texture manipulation throughout the vertices and axises on all objects in the geographical centralization”. That’s what it was like.
Now, I can’t understand a word she’s saying despite (and ironically enough) coming from my head.

I manage to pick out key words: Texture manipulation. All objects. Geographical centralization.

From that (or because of it?), I was able to determine that my job was to develop a way for textures to be automatically added to a 3D object using the points of the object. Say, you want a car to have a sandstone texture (I don’t know why, but this was actual imagery from my dream)…how do you develop that?

Anyways, that’s not the point. The point was that she was able to say all this really complicated stuff and I was only able to grasp parts of it.
I found key words she used to deduce my job, despite the fact that she said many things that I didn’t understand.
Was it all nonsensicalness garbage? Bogus words and keywords? Was it an unconscious mind with actual, practical knowledge that simply surpassed my own conscious mind?

Side Story: YEARS ago, between 5 and 10 year, I had a dream regarding a card with a robot on it, from my childhood. Now, this card was in my dream, but it had a word in it that I didn’t know.
“Incubus” it said.
I woke up and remembered the word, not knowing what it was or meant. As soon as I woke up, I went to Google to check. What is “Incubus”.
Incubus:
– An evil spirit supposed to descend upon and have sexual intercourse with women as they sleep.
– A nightmare.
– An oppressive or nightmarish burden.
Let’s ignore the perverted evil spirit sex stuff, as when I read the definition a few years ago, that didn’t exist. What I googled was that “Incubus” meant “A nightmare”. How…ironic or coincidentally that I would dream about a word, that represented a dream. I swear to God that I didn’t know what Incubus meant or where I’d heard it. I only remember seeing it on a card, and waking up and Googling the word to find out what it meant.

Anyways, the side story, as well as my stuff before that, was to signify just how…odd it is that my conscious mind wouldn’t be aware of things that my unconscious mind would seem to know.

In the past, rather recently in fact, I’ve had a conversation in my dream where this occured:
Me: I would say you’re in your late 20s.
Girl A: I’m actually only 23.
Me: Well, I was close. You look mature for your age! (that’s me trying to cover up the faux pas)

Now. This girl exists inside by head, but outside my knowledge. Is it possible to have completely separate thoughts when you’re unconscious? Can these characters and their thoughts exist outside of the control of the one that created them? Or am I God of the dream world, everything controlled by my unconscious, including the mind of my dream self which is enough to fool my dream self into remembering only what my awake self can remember?

Yes, it’s confusing. And as I write this, at 3:30am, with 7 beers/drinks behind me, I totally didn’t understand what I wrote above (pre-drinking)

I’m just wondering….can a dream be smarter than me?
Can it have more knowledge in the unconscious mind than my conscious mind?
Am I smarter than I’m aware of?

I tried to Google this question but came up with disappointing results. Apparently maybe this just happens to me.

I just find it odd that while I sleep, I control my mind, but also the rest of the world, relative to that dream self. Am I God of that world? Is my unconscious the real God while my conscious is just a mere mind among many (in the dream/unconscious world)?

Maybe I’ll explore this tomorrow…and right now, I’m clearly not in my top blog game. Which leads me to my next, and final post of tonight.

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