Tag Archives: dreams

Weird and Fascinating things …

Okay, I should be preparing for my panels at World SF Con, but I am writing a blog post about Weird and Fascinating things.

I came across this – a Dutch photographer who finds glitches in computer games and turns them into art – in the sense that when you stop and look at them they are fascinating and they seem to say something about the human condition. His name is Robert Overweg.

Here is one of his photos from Grand Theft Auto, where he found a way to slide under the world and look up at it.

Here is an article on him and some of his work. There is a dreamlike quaility to his work. Since I find the world a fascinating place anyway, I love this kind of thing, a segue into surrealism!

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Ramble on Writing

I just went to see the Inception movie.  The premise is that someone can enter your dreams and they can construct dreams which feel so real, you don’t know you’re dreaming. In the movie they use this to steal information or plant ideas.

Listening to them talk about this kind of dreaming made me realise that writers do this all the time. In fact, we’d do it all day long, every day if the rest of the world would let us. For us the dream (our stories) is more real than reality. Otherwise why would keep coming back to write?

I saw this article which said that gamers, if they play games directly before going to bed, they can control their dreams to a certain extent.

Well, isn’t that what writers are doing all the time? When we are ‘in the zone’ we are lucid dreaming. The only thing that holds us back is the speed we can type at.

Inception was good. I liked the layers of the story and some of the visuals were breathtaking. I liked the main character’s motivation and it was a change for a movie to have a happy ending. Or was it?

Did you sit through all the credits like I did to find out if the top stopped spinning?

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Do creative people have more vivid dreams?

When I went to an acupuncturist, he asked me about my dreams. I told him I have lots of vivid fascinating dreams, complete with backstory, in full colour. I didn’t tell him they were sometimes stylized (if I’d been reading graphic novels) or, on rare occasions, set to music with rhyming dialogue. ( I know, weird).

He said it wasn’t normal for people to dream vividly every night. I’d thought my dreams were normal.

And perhaps they were for me.

According to David Watson, a professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,  “There is a fundamental continuity between how people experience the world during the day and at night,” he said. “People who are prone to daydreaming and fantasy have less of a barrier between states of sleep and wakefulness and seem to more easily pass between them.” In other words, creative people tend to have vivid dreams. See the full article here.

Now, it seems,  video game players might be able to control their dreams up to a point. Jayne Gackenbach, at Grant McEwan University has been doing research into dreams and gamers. She found that lucid dreamers and gamers tended to have better spacial skills. Both groups had a high level of concentration.  According to a 2006 study, people who frequently played video games were more likely to have lucid dreams and to be aware that they were dreaming.

“A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.

The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness.” See the full article here.

I’ve been reading a book on current knowledge about plasticity of the human brain. It looks like game players have been rewiring their brains specfically for this ability. The more you do something the more this sinks into your brain and becomes second nature.  So keep reading, keep day dreaming and keep dreaming. It is all tied into creativity, even if we don’t understand how or why, just yet.

I’ve used scenes from dreams as leaping off points for stories. Do you experience vivid dreams? Ever had a dream where everyone is talking in rhyme?

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