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Dreamingness. From quite a while ago.
((Some of this one, especially the bit about language, is a little extrapolated and not pure dream.))
At the start of the dream I was a littlekid - no older than 4. My father had just finished putting the final touches on the education system that he was going to try out on me. (I had never left the house. This is important.) I think he must have been a memory person 'cos he's so clear but I'm not sure who. He had a kind of long face, with a mediumlong straggly beard elongating it at one end and medium-guy-length hair in a scruffy pattern up top. He wore glasses and his face was kinda uneven, like some older guys' faces go. I don't think he was meant to be more than about 30, 35, tho. There was no mother in evidence.
There was then a quite long sequence explaining the education program. At the basic level it was a multiple choice thing, but if you waited too long to choose these red fuzzy bugs with rounded-ball-ended antennae and eyes in the middle of the fuzzy bit and plasticish arms and legs ate the wrong answers, and then tha t question type would be asked again. It was a semij-immersive vr type thing - touch-screen over field of view, but you were still aware of surroundings - unless of course you were complteley engrossed like youcan get on computer. My father was often away but I didn't really mind because the computerthing took up most of my time, and I wasn't afraid because I didn't know what there was to be afraid of. (No history at that stage.)
And I grew up, to about 10 or 11, and I loved my father in that littlekid way, but I didn't know any other people, and most of the time I was alone with the computer, and I was happy being alone.
Then one day the computer was just displaying the next question (pictures gone to text mainly, bugs and multiple choice gone to an answer box or a countdown timer) when the screen went black, and in the darkness (which I'd never faced before, as there were no windows and I was used to sleeping in the light) I heard shouting - other voices than my father's, and not through the computer relaying the famous speeches of the dead, or the stories of characters. Shouting, and the stamping of boots, and then the door to the computer room was thrown open, the one that my father used and I never had occasion to. because the light that was in the little room behind it hurt my eyes. The soldiers (milita? police?) came in and took me, although they were suprised by the amount of resistance I put up, biting and scratching and kicking because they had made my father unhappy and were taking me out through the place where the light hurt my eyes, and they had to be very careful not to hurt me, for a reason I discovered later.
Then I was in a room with a crowd of people, so many people, like I had only seen in pictures; some of them were my size, but most were bigger, and their proximity confused me, so I sat on the floor and put my arms around my head to block out all the noise and new sights, because I'd decided I quite liked this new 'darkness' stuff.
Somebody said 'Hello' to me, so I said 'Hello' back, because that's what my father liked me to say when he said 'Hello'. And they asked me why I had my arms over my head, and I said it was because I was confused and darkness wasn't so confusing. And she said everyone else had left, so I lowered my arms cautiously and there was this little girl, looking vaguely similar to my reflection. And she asked me to come with her, so I got up off the floor and followed her, because my father had always got something good for me to eat or see or play with when he asked me to go through to the other room with him.
I remember people, and noise, and confusion, and standing in lines in a hall singing or chanting something which I didn't know the meaning of, and wooden desks with no input boxes and being taught to iron and cook and clean and to work machinery which I wasn't any good at because I couldn't write, although I kept trying to tell them that I knew stuff, but I couldn't write so I was officially not intelligent enough. I kept trying to write, copying the letters I could remember from the computer, but when I got good enough at it they burnt it, because it was the wrong language.
One night I slipped away from the dorm room and found an old and dusty room with a switch. And the walls were computer screens, and they wrote to me in letters I could understand, and they also wrote in the letters I didn't understand. I fell asleep in class sometimes, because every night I went back to the room and learnt the right language, or sometimes played with the imaging language, first in my own alphabet then in the new one for practice. And I finally learnt to write and I was put into the classes I deserved, although there was still a lot of stuff that seemed unnecessary or wrong that we were taught, and I was often in trouble for correcting the teachers on facts and matters of logic. And for a while I almost forgot about the room.
Eventually I made some new friends (that girl who had taken me into the school had ben my friend for quite a while, in my dorm, but she was fundementally very different from me) who were also outsider types, scientific and not afraid to challenge the teachers when they were wrong. And I took them to the room, and together we programmed a fantasy world, whihc we stayed in at every oppertunity. And we slipped through the cracks of the system, and a few people joined us, and we stayed there, playing our characters, until one day I realised I was just a cipher in the program and remembered my past and left the room to search for my father.
I wandered through the rooms of a fading mansion, old furniture beginning to discolour, faded wallpaper, stained carpets. It was full of people, standing around with wine-glasses in elegent clothes, making polite conversation, and I passed among them like a ghost, avoiding contact, searching from room to room. Eventually I began asking, 'have any of you seen my father?', but even when I tried to describe him they laughed politely, as if I'd told a joke, then continued their conversations, sometimes trying to include me, but I never knew what to say, I didn't know what they were talking about, so I melted back into the crowd without another word. And as I travelled in this way, I started growing younger; at the start I was a young woman of about 18, with just longer than shoulder length brown frizzy-bubbly hair and brown eyes and a slightly non-English complexion, although definately white. At the end I was a littlekid of 8 or 9 again, with shorter hair (kinda like an older Rio).
And in another almost identical room, I found my father, sitting on an old battered sofa reading a textbook and checking the diary on his laptop, old and worn out, like the mansion. I said 'Hiya' and he looked up and smiled weakly at me.
He was in this intensive training program for scientist people. And I could see that it was killing him - it wasn't designed to educate or to make ppl useful, it was there to burn them out, to kill them mentally, to kill their spirit. But he couldn't understand it; he thought that he would make me proud when he had the job that was at the end of this, how much per year he'd earn, how he could have a house again, could take me home. But I just wanted him to stop. He had to go to a conference then, and I demanded that he take me.
((There proceeded a scene irrelevant to the actual story which was afaik just a dream weirdness section. I was sitting on my father's lap in the seminar room, and the woman next to us had two small children sharing her lap, babies or 1yrolds. and they kept trying to attack me and they were all sticky and I hated them. This all occurred in the semidarkness of the lecture theatre auditorium, because there was a darkness/stagelights setup.))
So I went to the conference.
And then all I can remember is the last scene. I'd just shot someone, in the back of the head, through a 'window' in the back of a open-back truck/van cab, and I was looking curiously at the gun, and the dead man, and I was older again. And I'd attracted a crowd, and my father was standing next to me. And I asked 'How come I can do that?', and wondered why I didn't feel anything, because there was meant to be this stuff in the air that made people empathic, so if they caused pain to others directly they'd feel it, so people couldn't fight. And my strange isolated childhood had immunised me against it, but now I didn't feel anything about hurting people, not like other people did - it wasn't that I was amoral, I was very moral, and this person had hurt, indirectly, a lot of other people, and would have continued to if he wasn't dead. But I didn't feel anything because I'd killed someone, I didn't feel anything when I tried to kick and bite the guards or defend myself against the friendly babies which I thought were attacking me. (Which were relevant, now I come to think of it. I misinterpreted their friendliness as attacking, and felt nothing about forcing them back.)
Now, that was weird.
((Some of this one, especially the bit about language, is a little extrapolated and not pure dream.))
At the start of the dream I was a littlekid - no older than 4. My father had just finished putting the final touches on the education system that he was going to try out on me. (I had never left the house. This is important.) I think he must have been a memory person 'cos he's so clear but I'm not sure who. He had a kind of long face, with a mediumlong straggly beard elongating it at one end and medium-guy-length hair in a scruffy pattern up top. He wore glasses and his face was kinda uneven, like some older guys' faces go. I don't think he was meant to be more than about 30, 35, tho. There was no mother in evidence.
There was then a quite long sequence explaining the education program. At the basic level it was a multiple choice thing, but if you waited too long to choose these red fuzzy bugs with rounded-ball-ended antennae and eyes in the middle of the fuzzy bit and plasticish arms and legs ate the wrong answers, and then tha t question type would be asked again. It was a semij-immersive vr type thing - touch-screen over field of view, but you were still aware of surroundings - unless of course you were complteley engrossed like youcan get on computer. My father was often away but I didn't really mind because the computerthing took up most of my time, and I wasn't afraid because I didn't know what there was to be afraid of. (No history at that stage.)
And I grew up, to about 10 or 11, and I loved my father in that littlekid way, but I didn't know any other people, and most of the time I was alone with the computer, and I was happy being alone.
Then one day the computer was just displaying the next question (pictures gone to text mainly, bugs and multiple choice gone to an answer box or a countdown timer) when the screen went black, and in the darkness (which I'd never faced before, as there were no windows and I was used to sleeping in the light) I heard shouting - other voices than my father's, and not through the computer relaying the famous speeches of the dead, or the stories of characters. Shouting, and the stamping of boots, and then the door to the computer room was thrown open, the one that my father used and I never had occasion to. because the light that was in the little room behind it hurt my eyes. The soldiers (milita? police?) came in and took me, although they were suprised by the amount of resistance I put up, biting and scratching and kicking because they had made my father unhappy and were taking me out through the place where the light hurt my eyes, and they had to be very careful not to hurt me, for a reason I discovered later.
Then I was in a room with a crowd of people, so many people, like I had only seen in pictures; some of them were my size, but most were bigger, and their proximity confused me, so I sat on the floor and put my arms around my head to block out all the noise and new sights, because I'd decided I quite liked this new 'darkness' stuff.
Somebody said 'Hello' to me, so I said 'Hello' back, because that's what my father liked me to say when he said 'Hello'. And they asked me why I had my arms over my head, and I said it was because I was confused and darkness wasn't so confusing. And she said everyone else had left, so I lowered my arms cautiously and there was this little girl, looking vaguely similar to my reflection. And she asked me to come with her, so I got up off the floor and followed her, because my father had always got something good for me to eat or see or play with when he asked me to go through to the other room with him.
I remember people, and noise, and confusion, and standing in lines in a hall singing or chanting something which I didn't know the meaning of, and wooden desks with no input boxes and being taught to iron and cook and clean and to work machinery which I wasn't any good at because I couldn't write, although I kept trying to tell them that I knew stuff, but I couldn't write so I was officially not intelligent enough. I kept trying to write, copying the letters I could remember from the computer, but when I got good enough at it they burnt it, because it was the wrong language.
One night I slipped away from the dorm room and found an old and dusty room with a switch. And the walls were computer screens, and they wrote to me in letters I could understand, and they also wrote in the letters I didn't understand. I fell asleep in class sometimes, because every night I went back to the room and learnt the right language, or sometimes played with the imaging language, first in my own alphabet then in the new one for practice. And I finally learnt to write and I was put into the classes I deserved, although there was still a lot of stuff that seemed unnecessary or wrong that we were taught, and I was often in trouble for correcting the teachers on facts and matters of logic. And for a while I almost forgot about the room.
Eventually I made some new friends (that girl who had taken me into the school had ben my friend for quite a while, in my dorm, but she was fundementally very different from me) who were also outsider types, scientific and not afraid to challenge the teachers when they were wrong. And I took them to the room, and together we programmed a fantasy world, whihc we stayed in at every oppertunity. And we slipped through the cracks of the system, and a few people joined us, and we stayed there, playing our characters, until one day I realised I was just a cipher in the program and remembered my past and left the room to search for my father.
I wandered through the rooms of a fading mansion, old furniture beginning to discolour, faded wallpaper, stained carpets. It was full of people, standing around with wine-glasses in elegent clothes, making polite conversation, and I passed among them like a ghost, avoiding contact, searching from room to room. Eventually I began asking, 'have any of you seen my father?', but even when I tried to describe him they laughed politely, as if I'd told a joke, then continued their conversations, sometimes trying to include me, but I never knew what to say, I didn't know what they were talking about, so I melted back into the crowd without another word. And as I travelled in this way, I started growing younger; at the start I was a young woman of about 18, with just longer than shoulder length brown frizzy-bubbly hair and brown eyes and a slightly non-English complexion, although definately white. At the end I was a littlekid of 8 or 9 again, with shorter hair (kinda like an older Rio).
And in another almost identical room, I found my father, sitting on an old battered sofa reading a textbook and checking the diary on his laptop, old and worn out, like the mansion. I said 'Hiya' and he looked up and smiled weakly at me.
He was in this intensive training program for scientist people. And I could see that it was killing him - it wasn't designed to educate or to make ppl useful, it was there to burn them out, to kill them mentally, to kill their spirit. But he couldn't understand it; he thought that he would make me proud when he had the job that was at the end of this, how much per year he'd earn, how he could have a house again, could take me home. But I just wanted him to stop. He had to go to a conference then, and I demanded that he take me.
((There proceeded a scene irrelevant to the actual story which was afaik just a dream weirdness section. I was sitting on my father's lap in the seminar room, and the woman next to us had two small children sharing her lap, babies or 1yrolds. and they kept trying to attack me and they were all sticky and I hated them. This all occurred in the semidarkness of the lecture theatre auditorium, because there was a darkness/stagelights setup.))
So I went to the conference.
And then all I can remember is the last scene. I'd just shot someone, in the back of the head, through a 'window' in the back of a open-back truck/van cab, and I was looking curiously at the gun, and the dead man, and I was older again. And I'd attracted a crowd, and my father was standing next to me. And I asked 'How come I can do that?', and wondered why I didn't feel anything, because there was meant to be this stuff in the air that made people empathic, so if they caused pain to others directly they'd feel it, so people couldn't fight. And my strange isolated childhood had immunised me against it, but now I didn't feel anything about hurting people, not like other people did - it wasn't that I was amoral, I was very moral, and this person had hurt, indirectly, a lot of other people, and would have continued to if he wasn't dead. But I didn't feel anything because I'd killed someone, I didn't feel anything when I tried to kick and bite the guards or defend myself against the friendly babies which I thought were attacking me. (Which were relevant, now I come to think of it. I misinterpreted their friendliness as attacking, and felt nothing about forcing them back.)
Now, that was weird.
