![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Aging Polymaths and Weird Dreams
Nov. 17th, 2012 08:23 am"It's all about the math," said the guy walking his dog. "Calculus. See, they don't do the math anymore. It's all computers."
I laughed uneasily. "That's a problem. Good day to you, sir."
I always try to be polite to the age-addled inhabitants of this little Long Gisland enclave.
Three steps later, it dawned on me that the man walking his dog was probably just about my own age.
At what point will I start barraging random strangers with my odd theories about numbers and the universe, I wonder?
So, anyway – the dream –
In the Future, the primary form of entertainment is something called prowling. Prowling consists of locking into the psychic feed of another person, some strange hybrid of sensory information and memory so that you are following their narrative point of view but as yourself. There are prowling stars, kind of like Reality TV celebrities, chosen by media networks. They choose people who have the ability to translate their sensory feed into metaphors – so if you look up and seen the clouds, for example, you might get a playful wisp of a fresh laundry smell.
But there's a whole underground prowling scene, kind of like bittorrenting. And these prowlers prefer to lock on to the psyches of dead people, people from the recent past. In particular, they prefer to lock into the heads of violent criminals, to experience murder and mayhem up close and personal.
So in the dream, I was the (male) cellmate of a particularly violent and loathsome serial killer who was really, really popular among the prowlers of the future. Guy had never been nabbed for one of his actual slaughtering sprees, but was in prison on some sort of technicality. He would have these long, elliptical, Hannibal Lecter-ish conversations about the murders he'd committed, but he was too smart to incriminate himself directly.
Problem was that his strange evil mindset was infiltrating into the minds of his prowlers in the future, who were all embarking upon crime sprees.
So I was being visited by detectives from the future in the hopes that I could somehow get my cellmate to confess so he would be executed. The thought was that this would get him off the prowler market – although now that I'm awake, I can see the hole in the plot.
I was being promised redemption for my own dark, not quite understood crimes…
Very strange dream. Well nigh philkdickian.
I laughed uneasily. "That's a problem. Good day to you, sir."
I always try to be polite to the age-addled inhabitants of this little Long Gisland enclave.
Three steps later, it dawned on me that the man walking his dog was probably just about my own age.
At what point will I start barraging random strangers with my odd theories about numbers and the universe, I wonder?
So, anyway – the dream –
In the Future, the primary form of entertainment is something called prowling. Prowling consists of locking into the psychic feed of another person, some strange hybrid of sensory information and memory so that you are following their narrative point of view but as yourself. There are prowling stars, kind of like Reality TV celebrities, chosen by media networks. They choose people who have the ability to translate their sensory feed into metaphors – so if you look up and seen the clouds, for example, you might get a playful wisp of a fresh laundry smell.
But there's a whole underground prowling scene, kind of like bittorrenting. And these prowlers prefer to lock on to the psyches of dead people, people from the recent past. In particular, they prefer to lock into the heads of violent criminals, to experience murder and mayhem up close and personal.
So in the dream, I was the (male) cellmate of a particularly violent and loathsome serial killer who was really, really popular among the prowlers of the future. Guy had never been nabbed for one of his actual slaughtering sprees, but was in prison on some sort of technicality. He would have these long, elliptical, Hannibal Lecter-ish conversations about the murders he'd committed, but he was too smart to incriminate himself directly.
Problem was that his strange evil mindset was infiltrating into the minds of his prowlers in the future, who were all embarking upon crime sprees.
So I was being visited by detectives from the future in the hopes that I could somehow get my cellmate to confess so he would be executed. The thought was that this would get him off the prowler market – although now that I'm awake, I can see the hole in the plot.
I was being promised redemption for my own dark, not quite understood crimes…
Very strange dream. Well nigh philkdickian.
