There's some famous phrase saying, "Go West, Young Man," which I guess meant that the land of opportunity, at least for white males, was thataways. I'm just mentioning that because we're on the internet now, and anyone younger than me probably doesn't get the outdated styling of this post's title.
In a related vein, I sometimes have dreams which try to convince me they're real. It turns out I'm just as sarcastic and cynical in my dreams as I am in real life, so even when a heavy hitter comes along I usually give things a sneer and then keep my own counsel. It's not that I'm disrespectful of dream life; I have a hard time tolerating bad logic and obvious cons in most of the realms I'm conscious of existing in. That being said, there are things that get automatic bows (a sign of acknowledgment and acceptance) from me, like talking cacti, talking tea-pot like objects that also walk, anything involving snakes, and of course the House, the Lord of the House and certain Thai monks. (And you, if you've rolled by.) But mostly I'm a highly suspicious and skeptical cuss and my dream philosophy is if you can't bring it, go home. There's a reason you're in a dream.
That being said, I had a dream about 15 or 20 years ago, just as the great unwashed masses were discovering the internet and poisoning it for the rest of us. It was one of those dreams claiming to be an alternate reality, only this one claimed to be in the future. A time travel dream. Back then personal websites hosted by something called geocities were common, because the clueless newbies were too dumb to learn about hosting and FTP (remember FTP?) blah blah blah. In the dream, I logged in without any apparent device (back then, think desk top towers and wired connections for contrast) to the location of my dream host, who was a prepubescent boy. Except it wasn't really him, it was what today we would call an avatar of him that did the greeting of visitors and directed them around the site. It was his own website, kind of like an interactive 3D Facebook page but also a fully immersive virtual reality experience.
Then the owner of the webpage inhabited his avatar and started talking to me directly. He explained that I was experiencing where technology would go in the future and that this was in fact a time travel dream. (Never had one before or since. Other planets, yes. Time travel, no.) I was lucid enough to ask him, once that reality feeling started to kick in, what the name of this technology was called. Maybe I could get in on the ground floor and retire to Hawaii like Zachary Fox. The boy said it was called "Gonemon" pronounced Go-noh-mahn.
I looked it up. It wasn't a word. It wasn't even close. There was gnomon, with a silent G, that is the thing in the middle of the sundial that casts the shadow. I tried different languages, but back then I was as yet unfamiliar with dream language and the sneer it has built in. (At least for me. Ya'll might have the Virgin Mary built in, but I came out of the shop with the sneer package. I actually saw a ;) in a pile of alien writing on another planet that someone else who claimed to be real was showing me. I was like, "Apparently alien writing has evolved at least partly from Earth emoticons, how interesting and do you even have a clue as to what this one means?")
I have not yet done Pokemon Go. The main reason I probably will (from a non-Sue-entity account) is because it sounds, well, interesting and new, vaguely social which I know is good for me, and while it's not the thing I experienced in that dream, it's the first steps toward it. This is going to become bigger, spawn Facebook-like personal internet virtual reality experiences, and take over how people interact with one another via the internet. "Go-noh-mahn" was obviously Pokemon in terms of vowel shapes, with the initial P replaced by a G. I just hope the little brat who welcomed me to his virtual reality of the future wasn't me, because I really want to be a monk in my next life.
You heard it here first.
In a related vein, I sometimes have dreams which try to convince me they're real. It turns out I'm just as sarcastic and cynical in my dreams as I am in real life, so even when a heavy hitter comes along I usually give things a sneer and then keep my own counsel. It's not that I'm disrespectful of dream life; I have a hard time tolerating bad logic and obvious cons in most of the realms I'm conscious of existing in. That being said, there are things that get automatic bows (a sign of acknowledgment and acceptance) from me, like talking cacti, talking tea-pot like objects that also walk, anything involving snakes, and of course the House, the Lord of the House and certain Thai monks. (And you, if you've rolled by.) But mostly I'm a highly suspicious and skeptical cuss and my dream philosophy is if you can't bring it, go home. There's a reason you're in a dream.
That being said, I had a dream about 15 or 20 years ago, just as the great unwashed masses were discovering the internet and poisoning it for the rest of us. It was one of those dreams claiming to be an alternate reality, only this one claimed to be in the future. A time travel dream. Back then personal websites hosted by something called geocities were common, because the clueless newbies were too dumb to learn about hosting and FTP (remember FTP?) blah blah blah. In the dream, I logged in without any apparent device (back then, think desk top towers and wired connections for contrast) to the location of my dream host, who was a prepubescent boy. Except it wasn't really him, it was what today we would call an avatar of him that did the greeting of visitors and directed them around the site. It was his own website, kind of like an interactive 3D Facebook page but also a fully immersive virtual reality experience.
Then the owner of the webpage inhabited his avatar and started talking to me directly. He explained that I was experiencing where technology would go in the future and that this was in fact a time travel dream. (Never had one before or since. Other planets, yes. Time travel, no.) I was lucid enough to ask him, once that reality feeling started to kick in, what the name of this technology was called. Maybe I could get in on the ground floor and retire to Hawaii like Zachary Fox. The boy said it was called "Gonemon" pronounced Go-noh-mahn.
I looked it up. It wasn't a word. It wasn't even close. There was gnomon, with a silent G, that is the thing in the middle of the sundial that casts the shadow. I tried different languages, but back then I was as yet unfamiliar with dream language and the sneer it has built in. (At least for me. Ya'll might have the Virgin Mary built in, but I came out of the shop with the sneer package. I actually saw a ;) in a pile of alien writing on another planet that someone else who claimed to be real was showing me. I was like, "Apparently alien writing has evolved at least partly from Earth emoticons, how interesting and do you even have a clue as to what this one means?")
I have not yet done Pokemon Go. The main reason I probably will (from a non-Sue-entity account) is because it sounds, well, interesting and new, vaguely social which I know is good for me, and while it's not the thing I experienced in that dream, it's the first steps toward it. This is going to become bigger, spawn Facebook-like personal internet virtual reality experiences, and take over how people interact with one another via the internet. "Go-noh-mahn" was obviously Pokemon in terms of vowel shapes, with the initial P replaced by a G. I just hope the little brat who welcomed me to his virtual reality of the future wasn't me, because I really want to be a monk in my next life.
You heard it here first.
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