It was 7 o’clock, a fine Sunday evening in the early Autumn with the sun now behind the horizon. I remember looking out of the window of the strange house that I found myself in. Well, not that strange really. I knew the house, it was directly opposite from my own house…. except I didn’t live there any more. I digress, daylight gave in deceptively quickly to a clear bright starry night with no sign of a moon. There was however, something out there and each time I passed the window something in my consciousness jarred, prompted by events tantalisingly always on the edge of my vision.
Without knowing why I had an uncomfortable knot developing in my stomach. After a busy weekend at the various local cornish beaches there was a definite feeling of ‘end of term’ although it was in reality still mid school term. The girls were all at home and preparing themselves for school the next day, by preparing I mean generally anything other than what they needed to be doing; laughing, singing, playing guitar, making videos, offering endless cups of tea and such other acts of intended bribery. I felt that we were all in a place that was special, warm and fuzzy, a place called family. It was seconds later that the bottom of my world dropped away, spinning merrily into a nose dive with no sign of saving. I saw the lights tracking across the the sky and I knew it was no small thing. I knew that they had come for us all. Within what seemed like seconds and an aeon simultaneously an unfathomable amount of light burst out from the earth in the valley to the west of our village.
There was no panic, no screaming or shouting, and no tears. The figures appeared suddenly and without any drama, they were just like the lights, beyond the edge of vision, despite being in full vision to each and every one of us. I just remember that they were grey and very thin, I guess like all of our current conceptions. There was one figure, just one, for each house. The figures said nothing but we knew that we were all to leave the house and follow them, we did so as a family. It felt for all the world like we were making our way into the fields around our house for a picnic. The younger girls were skipping and singing, as they do, without a trace of fear; to them it seemed natural. Although the natural light had abandoned us the walk was well lit by the strange shows that seemed to emanate from every valley in every direction, it felt like we were in broad daylight. I felt the fear in me as we marched to wherever we were being led. As we walked I grabbed my girlfriends hand, It was this action that forced ‘our being’ who was just on the edge of belief to turn on me. I don’t remember what it said but the gist was clear to me as was the venom in the delivery; he no longer existed merely as a splinter in my consciousness. Whatever it was, it regarded my girlfriend as a spoil of war and would not have me, a mere human, laying claim to her. Along with the gist I will always remember that the face was contorted into the classic Edvard Munch ‘scream’ shape though there was no evidence that it was angry. It was almost as if this face was its only face but that it had only now let me truly glimpse it, in a moment of intimacy between conqueror and condemned. At any rate, I don’t remember letting go of her hand….
Time passed imperceptibly, the next I knew we were all in a field, picnic blankets out and it seemed like the world and its dog was there, thousands of people; except in my village the only way you’d ever get more than 200 local people together would be with a mass resurrection of the graveyards to the rear of my house. There was a definite festival vibe with a centralised point from which huge images and light shows were projected. They were devoid of content but fabulously showy, the colours were strong, clean, intensely vibrant and the lines of the holographic images were so sharp that they appeared to be more real than anything we had ever seen in our lives. But we were all aware that this was just filler, we were here for a reason. Mankind was assembled across the whole globe for this great reveal.
And then, as quickly as they had all arrived earlier their light-show ceased and an ominous silence and darkness enveloped the entire valley. The remnants of the now dying light show seemed to fizzle in our minds and fill the descending darkness until finally our brains caught up with the total black that consumed us all. The silence that enveloped us all was the kind of noise that can only follow a full scale assault of the ear drums and then just as the silence started to itself die away the music started and the holographs pierced the darkness with increased ferocity. It quickly became apparent that the main feature was itself an advert, an advert for a car. At first it seemed just like any other car but then with a deep and final feeling of dread we all knew what was coming and we all knew what it meant. The vivid green of the holographic car slowly morphed, losing its colour and it seemed that the entire fabric of the car became all together more….. organic. One thing was clear to me at this point, this was no advertising campaign nor was it an even thinly veiled threat; it was a clear statement of intent and was being delivered in much the same way that a Bond villain spills his carefully laid out plan to James moments before he is to die. It became clear that we were looking at our future, quite literally. But still no panic, I think we were all frozen with fear and the coolness of the night.
And then…. the swimming skies started to interweave themselves with reality, my now conscious Neanderthal control centres were fighting the sleep chemicals and asking for full control of whatever remained of my mind after what had gone down earlier…..It was at this point that I remember waking from this, probably the most memorable dream, that I have ever had; scared beyond belief and breathless. That dream stayed with me constantly for days, not dying with the morning as dreams normally do and here I am nearly two years later still recounting the entire dream.
So why, what’s the point I hear you say? Well its a conversation all about context. I understand everything that I remember and I have a view of what I saw in this dream. None of it is so weird that its off the scale of my ability to process it but here’s the point. Without the context of my mind at that point in time the whole scene makes no sense at all. Without knowing the running state of the machine on which the dream was played out we cannot hope to understand the context of even our own thoughts and we certainly will never get the punchline (that is assuming that we ever get there as dreams just seem to dissipate with no warning or conclusion). We don’t even understand with any degree of certainty the purpose of dreams. My mum believes that they are a way of backing up the data of the day to ‘long term storage’ , a nightly back up if you like. I feel that there is a little more than that to it, I believe that we are archiving the data for sure but at the same time we are trying to form some world view of the events of the day, hence why we seem to make these large creative mental leaps during the night. I think that we are not only storing these memories but are building up an index of life events incorporating everything that seems to fit in with our general world view. I think that this explains why some heavily traumatised individuals can’t last the night without the dreams becoming so horrific that they waken in a state of severe anxiety, They just cant make sense of the reality, even in a totally abstracted manner. My dog? She thinks that dreams are where the sea goes to at night but she is far cleverer than I!
For probably the finest example of context and punchlines look no further than the Biscuit Story attributed to the great Douglas Adams
That there is one other person in the world who experienced the exact same events but missed the punchline as DNA saw it and instead has his own view of what happened at that train station is the clearest indication that context is everything. Without that clear context the joke is not just not funny, its not even a joke.
We have a parallel too in the world of software, issues within software normally exhibit themselves as some weird unexpected output much like my dream. If you were to try and understand why these events occurred with out any context you would be forgiven for coming up with all sorts of weird and wonderful explanations. Bereft of context dreams could indeed be where the sea goes to at night! Luckily, unlike my real dreams, by extensive use of logging we can give context to ‘these dreams’ and take the mystery out of the situation. With carefully designed logging we need never stumble in the dark for that elusive clue as to what a dream really means. If only real life was like that, then again…. maybe not.