the ‘Irrational Design Artefact’

4/08/2010 On Waking...

Last night, I dreamed I was staying in a large beach house. I am only vaguely aware of how I got there and why it came to resemble a beach house, but that’s all quite irrelevant anyway. When this dream came into phase, it was a beach house located in what felt like the Port Phillip Bay area.

I was at the beach house with a group of high school friends, but the fact that I can’t remember any of them specifically nor recall any of their faces tells me this was just a carriage to rationalise why I was there in the first place. As the dream progressed, it took focus around the other inhabitants there: Some members of my family, and a large group of my younger brothers friends who I now realise were an analogue for a group of Apollo Bay locals I had befriended in a trip there earlier in the year. They were all in the 17-21 age group and all drank to excess nightly, harbouring an odd fusion of surfie culture and country bogan culture that I must have stuck with me in my thoughts; it was the predominant emotional component of this dream.

This was quite a long dream, pleasant though mundane, it did bear at least one interesting point. Most of the dream involved making endless circular conversation to the other people in the house, helping my brother remove an ink-run from his favourite T-shirt, organising the distribution of alcohol, hitting on my brothers friends or guessing their age-appropriateness or both, and so on and so forth. While none of my brothers friends are anywhere near age inappropriate, for some reason in this dream we were both age shifted back to a period where this was more likely... at a guess he was about 17 and I was about 20. Everything about this dream had been fairly standard, nothing even slightly counterintuitive had given me cause to snap into lucidity until I decided to take a shower, and I observed the most interesting point of the dream: the Irrational Design Artefact.

An ‘Irrational Design Artefact’ is my term for an in-dream phenomenon where one encounters a ludicrously designed every-day object or device that tests the boundaries of the in-dream delusional state though never quite enough to seed self-awareness in its own right. An example could be a vending machine requiring you to play a game of Tetris on its keypad before it dispensed your can of soda, a couch requiring an electrician connection to prevent it from collapsing or even a broken stop sign that had been repaired with Lego. Anything that perpetually breaks when trying to use it, is overly complex for what it does or is just plain curious, that you ought to indicate you are dreaming but fails to.

In my case, this occurred when I went to take a shower. I went to turn on the hot water, and noticed a torrent of steaming hot water coming from a PVC down pipe out of the wall and straight into the toilet bowl. It was as if somebody had gone to do some DIY plumbing but had simply given up; the water came out of the wall and straight down the toilet in a seemingly closed loop. I noticed a handle, which seemed to divert the water to a small plastic overhead shower rose... I had to stand on a milk crate to be underneath it but had my head touching the ceiling when I did so. It also had me with my face right in front of a small window looking out into the lounge room, and so I took my shower, standing on a milk crate next to the toilet, head touching the ceiling and looking out at all the drinking games going on in the lounge. The shower head would periodically re-adjust itself, always against my best interest, by virtue of some kind of electronic motor on its main hinge; it appeared to be a salvaged hair-dryer motor.

Ordinarily I am quite good at reaching lucidity in-dream from even minor irregularities but for some reason this perplexing shower design arose none of my suspicions. What ultimately did bring me to self-awareness was going back to help my brother with his t-shirt stain, the bleach I was using was making his black t-shirt turn orange when bleaching black cotton is supposed to make a pale red colour instead... yep that’s all it took and I knew I was dreaming. My first though: Why the hell didn’t I notice the shower?

I have been thinking about this quite a lot, and clearly there is a hell of a lot more going on than meets the eye. It is accepted speculative theory that in the dream state, certain parts of the brain pertaining to logic and rationalisation are purposely switched off to allow the continuity of the dream uninterrupted; I myself have observed that as the ability to maintain a dream in a state of lucidity grows, so does the ability to reason and rationalise in-dream. It certainly feels like this ‘switch off’ of logic is a defensive mechanism owing to the fact that lucidity for most people will terminate the dream and any quality REM along with it, so it would make sense that the logic would return when the risk of breaking a dream is reduced to a minimum. My question remains: How does this Irrational Design Artefact get into a dream in the first place?

One idea I have been toying with is that the brain deliberately puts it there, infusing it with a pre-emptive dose of acceptability and comfortability so that the healthily functioning logic does not pick it up. I do not believe the brain can simply turn logic on and off over a few seconds for selective in-dream objects, so this would have to be how its done. I also speculate that the brain does this to test the limits of the dream/delusion state and the logic confliction; it wants to know exactly how obscure it can build the dream without having lucidity become a threat, so it proceeds to create a dream-breaking design artefact that it pre-emptively masks or conditions to be acceptable then looks at your thoughts to see how dangerous it “could have been” under ordinary circumstances.

Sound complicated? I agree, but I cannot for the life of me think why my brain would dump this completely obscure and perplexing design into an otherwise very believable and very long-running dream, pull enough strings that it does not arouse suspicion, then send me on my merry way. As soon as I reached lucidity I just about slapped myself at how ridiculous it was, I went back to look at it again but it was a completely normal shower and a chill went down my in-dream spine. I shrugged the experience off and went back to hitting on my brothers friends... it’s a hell of a lot easier once you know they are figments of your own psyche.

The Circular Dream Trap

3/08/2010 On Waking...

Lots of dreams, non descript. A Deadwood dream: I was going back to The Gem, an aged Al Swearengen (who looked a lot more like Wild Bill Hickok) with small round face, long white hair. He was very pleased to see me in a concealed way, like the return of an old but grown-to-love nemesis. He said I still had plenty of funds left in his holding (4000 gold units) and implied it was slightly more than I was able to carry, case and all. I went upstairs to meet an old lover of some sort, probably an amalgam of Lady Garrett and that woman who plays Mr. Whites wife in Breaking Bad, as I went upstairs I could read her dreams, I was briefly juxtaposed into her 2nd person perspective and she was dreaming of the protagonist, who at this point I realise was nobody from the actual series. Upon returning to 1st person protagonist viewpoint, I go upstairs to meet her, find her sleeping or in some form of induced coma, and an altercation breaks out between Al Swearengen, myself and the owner of the other hotel (wikipedia tells me E.B. Farnum). And a mathematical debate breaks out about my chances of beating both to the draw and surviving, or more to the point; Al’s chances of loosing. EB explained how the initial 10:1 of an overskilled gunfighter in close quarters with a slightly lesser skilled (Al) and unskilled fighter (EB) was to be revised down to 8:1 due to some further set of circumstances and that it was not a risk worth taking for Al, given I would draw for him first. This is all I remember of the dream, I was getting bored, even by the scenery and settings and by this point and the creeping lucidity that I was being stuck in yet another ‘circular dream trap’ was becoming real to me. I broke out of delusion-state and changed the dream before abandoning lucidity and hoping I would enjoy the next one more.
 

Circular Dream Trap: this is a very common form of unpleasant dream I am well used to having. I believe it to be the result of oversleep, latent anxiety, REM failure, or any of the above. It essentially works, or I believe it to work, by having certain parts of the brain normally repressed in order to maintain a quality dream state become awakened, while possibly having other parts of the brain drop in their activity, perhaps from overuse or fatigue. This would support the oversleep idea, I tend to only get stuck in a dream trap after having dreamed for too long or too intensely in a single nights sleep.
 

As for the trap itself: Imagine that Greek concept of hell where you push a boulder to the top of a hill, taking an entire days labour, only to find it at the very bottom of the hill the next waking morning. The trap is characterised by a stressful and anxiety laden series of circular tasks or goals that can never quite be accomplished, the more you try to achieve them the more that goes wrong and gets in your way. The more you canvass all options and push the boundaries of the dream, the more the dream changes and morphs into a second dream without you realising... all memory of the puzzle forgotten for at least another series of minutes, leaving you again temporarily fresh and eager to escape before realising in the dying seconds of the dream you have had the same one 11 times in a row now and are about to have your memory wiped and go for number 12.
 

The quintessential circular dream trap, I will describe, is one I had in late high school. I was stuck in Melbourne Central Station, platform 1, desperate to go home. Every time a train was close to coming, it would be cancelled. Every time a train actually came, I had become momentarily distracted by getting my money jammed in a vending machine, being held up at the bathroom, going to find a non-existent friend to remind them they were about to miss the train, and so on. All that matters was that I never got on the train: something would always get in the way. Dream-time, this would continue for hours, and usually at every stage of failure I would remember how many times I had failed previously for only a brief few seconds before the world shifted and I once again became absorbed in the dream world, saying ‘Aha, next train in 5 minutes, I’m out of here’. Finally I would break out of the confines of the dream world, going up to street level to find a bus for example, trying to call my mum for a lift on my phone, even attempting to walk it. This would only ever make things worse by expanding the trap, and I would waste at least another 5 dream stages missing busses, getting lost in the CBD at night, or having my phone conversation cut out due to lack of credit or low battery.
 

As time would go on, the stages would become narrower and narrower, collapsing in on themselves, changing every 5 seconds. At every corner, at every turn, every time I opened a door, the dream would reset and enter a new stage, and I would be reminded of the hell I was stuck in with machine gun repetitively but never long enough to find a way to exit it. Exiting dreams has never been hard for me, but it does require at least a good 15 seconds of in-dream time to realise you are in a dream and remember a good exit technique. Eventually the dream would collapse completely, and I would find myself swimming in a sea of grey, distant sounds filtering through the haze and wondering where I was and what was happening. At this point I would wake up, usually in a cold sweat, pounding headache, and realising I had overslept by a good 3 hours. The Dream trap had prevented my circadian rhythm from waking me up naturally; I had dreamed every last drop that I could until my brain could not sustain the dream state any longer and the dream state failed. Under a sedative, or in a coma, I truly fear how bad a Circular Dream Trap could get. It scares me to this day.
 

Luckily, I have become very good at killing Circular Dream Traps before they start, as happened last night. Somehow I could feel the back and forth mathematical arguments between the three of us would only get deeper and more complex until my dream shifted and became dominated by an unsolvable puzzle or paradoxical labyrinth or impossible task. I am not sure why I realised it or what happened when I prevented it this time, I guess that the dream state shifted, ended and I slept out the rest of my night in a state of non-REM sleep. Maybe I got a small and tidy second dream out of it, I am not sure... either way I woke up feeling quite good so clearly it did work. It has been years since I had a truly horrible dream trap experience, but I have no doubt that the right (or wrong) environmental triggers could pull me into another at any time.

'Mirror Encounters' and Technological progression...

08/2010 On Waking...

Last night I went to sleep in a state of near terror that I would have a “mirror encounter”. A mirror encounter is my term of the phenomenon of seeing oneself in a mirror inside a dream, and viewing the reflection as not a distortion of ones physical image but something much more powerful: a doppelganger, a contorted and twisted representation of oneself so similar yet corrupted to ones likeliness that the immediate emotion of “pure evil” is felt from its presence. I am not even close to a religious person, but some of these “mirror encounters” had me, upon waking, convinced I had met an otherworldly sentient entity, as close as my atheistic mind can approach to the devil himself. I reasoned this on two fronts: The emotion was so powerful and so pervasive I could literally not imagine being able to feel it in waking reality, not even when viewing the most vile static images that the most depraved corners of the internet can provide (and that's saying something). Secondly, I understand my dreams and the dream state moderately well, and I am thoroughly convinced that my brain could never be creatively responsible for an image so expertly and professionally contorted into such a disturbing resemblance.

However, my abstract intuition tells me that this is more a case of mathematics than mystical, that with certain parts of my brain shut down or under-powered in a dream state, the attempt to process my own self image in-dream results in a state of data or file corruption so specific to these conditions that the result is unsurprisingly terrifying: an image no man could consciously imagine in the same likeliness as a number no human could calculate. The image was the biological equivalent of a computer malfunction, artefacts from an overheating GPU or a characteristic ‘popping’ or ‘white noise static’ from a malfunctioning sound card; annoyingly common but probably fiendishly difficult to reproduce in a healthily functioning chip. The very reason this self image is terrifying is because it exists outside of normal brain function and process, it is alien in every sense of the term because it has never been experienced in waking life, even when intentionally attempting to simulate terror.

The doppelganger is characterised by facial features bordering on normal but just outside of it; proportions, distances between eyes, nose position departing from the threshold of acceptability, combined with a kind of facial expression only comparable to electrocution or mental retardation: an angry, yet ecstatic grimace of pure contempt and anticipation or excitement combined. I have had many of these encounters before, mostly during lucid dreaming and almost always during dream re-entry. I had been so disturbed by these that I decided to stop practising lucid dreaming about 3 years ago, after a particularly bad encounter.

In any case, my actual dream last night thankfully did not involve any mirror encounters and was largely forgettable but, did involve a time-travel back to an ancient state of my home city Melbourne (I would guess 1920-1940). The main thing I can remember from it was standing outside of some kind of large building: a paper mill, a power plant, a hospital, a tram depot or perhaps even a metropolitan police headquarters. I remember being outside a discrete back entrance, there was a sign indicating rear entry or discrete entry, and something about “mule entrance” or "mule departure zone" or something that told me that this was where smaller horse drawn carts (or in this case, mule or donkey drawn) came in and out, possibly to dispose or deliver dead bodies, remove noxious biological waste or something undesirable or unpleasant in this vein. The predominant emotion was of how the world worked in this era in contrast to now, of how all these bad things could not be simply concealed, zipped up in industrial polyurethane black bags, or piped away in subterranean metallic pipes but had to be physically carted around using biological, non mechanical labour, and that building structure had to reflect this inconvenient reality. I remember wondering (or perhaps remembering) what this building or entrance was used for in the contemporary era, and deciding that it bore no immediate clue as to its prior function and feeling that its current use almost deceptively and sneakily denied its past.

It was both fascinating but strangely disconcerting, I felt a kind of painful empathy for the inconvenience and hostility of the situation combined with a kind of helplessness and inevitability in that it had already been and gone and nothing I could do, or even anyone of the era could do, would have made a damn difference. None the less, it was an emotionally painful sight to behold; the way the old world functioned and went about the arduous task of life using the best resources available and without looking backwards. I am unsure why I did not derive inspiration from this, as would seem logical, to me the image above all empowered in me a definite sense of nihilism and antipathy towards the progression of the human existence, a painful reminder as to the relativity and subjectivity of the notion of “comfort”, “convenience” and “technological advantage” while simultaneously highlighting the fact that any convenience or technology we enjoy now was only a few living memories away from having to be (painfully) done without. This was additionally distressing. Unsurprisingly I consciously slept through my alarm in hope of happier dreams that morning.