12/13/04
Words Into People

This was just a tiny snippet from a longer, confused dream I had when I dozed off for perhaps 15-20 minutes while taking a bath yesterday.

In one part, I was apparently typing something in Notepad on the computer; I say Notepad and not Wordpad (the program I usually use), as the text seemed to be Courier New, which I do not use in Wordpad, but which is the default in Notepad. I think I might have been copying some text from something else (typing it up myself, I mean)--I did not seem to be writing original fiction. There were just rows and rows and rows of text covering the entire white space--Notepad was maximized--when all of a sudden, every letter began flipping or something, and as I sat and watched, stunned, it was like all the letters flipped over and shifted into an ASCII (text) image of a person. It was a black person, a woman I think, perhaps in bright African clothing (I seem to remember mustard yellow fabric, like a puffy hat or something).

I gaped at this odd image; it was just the head, shoulders, and upper torso, like a portrait, facing the left in three-quarters view. Then all the little colored letters and symbols forming this image flipped and shifted again, and it was again a screen of plain text.

I thought, maybe the program was supposed to do that every so often. But still it was quite bizarre. I went back to typing, but after a while the letters all began flipping, and I stopped to watch them ripple across the screen--that's what it was like, RIPPLING, like a crowd doing the wave. And again it turned into a realistic ASCII image of a person--I think it was a man, of a different ethnicity this time, maybe white or Latino. And then after a moment, it all went back to text. And a little bit later it did it a third time and presented a third, different, person.

I had been kind of freaked out by this at first but now I found it just...awed me. I had even been careful with my typing, in case I might ruin the image, or the image might overwrite what I had typed. This dream was yesterday and I didn't take note of it so I'm hazy on everything I was thinking, but I felt there was some significance to what had happened in my file. In some later part of the dream just before I woke up (I was only dozing with my head on my arms, on the edge of the tub), I was walking down a hall alongside somebody, telling them about this incident with Notepad, and offering my own explanation as to what it meant, but I can't recall what I thought exactly. All I know is I did have my own theory, like the program was meant to do that for some reason--I did not see it as a glitch. I don't know, maybe it was trying to tell me something. *shrug*

When I woke up the dream stuck with me and puzzled me, too. Even though I was only dozing, and could not have been dreaming for more than a few moments (in a light sleep), it was an oddly realistic dream. (I recall that in some other part of the dream something had happened, I'd told myself I was dreaming, then I'd remembered, "That's right--I'm in the tub, taking a bath"--and then either almost awoke to find myself dozing with my head on my arms, or just dreamed I did--it felt almost like I was trying to drag myself out of the dream, and the realization that I was in the tub was a startling one, although true--that's why I can't be sure if I almost reached lucidity there, or if the entire thing, even the "awakening," was a dream.) The imagery was also so specific--plaintext letters shifting into images of vastly different people and then back again--that the dream seems as if it could mean something important, so I decided (belatedly) to take note of it.

As I said there were other parts to this dream, including that white hallway and a sort of classroom with other people in it, but I do not recall them well and they did not impress me as much.



2004 Dreams
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