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.