Night of October 5, 1977. Wednesday.
This is one of those dreams I did more personal work with at the time because it was much longer than usual and more vivid throughout. I had other “versions” of it later on and made a comic which I no longer have.
Near the beginning, there was the idea of going on a long journey. Part of the journey was related to finding answers and learning from a large new computer, supposedly the best built thus far. This was long before computer technology was a more familiar asset in everyday life. It would be about the size of a house and all the data in the world would be active within it. It was almost like a quest, I suppose, or maybe a play on “question” relative to the idea of a quest, as that is regarding the last scene of my dream.
The first part involves scenes relating to watching the shapes of clouds in the backyard of my home in Cubitis. For some reason, Ernie and Bert, the “Muppets” from “Sesame Street”, are doing a longer skit from behind the area of the foundation of the shed that my father had been taking down that section of. I cannot quite hear the routine. A light rain begins to fall. The rain sizzles in an odd way on the Muppets’ “skin”.
There are other people with me, mostly unfamiliar, but I seem to be on my own at times. My older brother Jim joins us in the last section, though. We go through different landscapes, heading southwest. One scene involves looking down from a narrow wooden bridge over a stream, not that far above the water. Even though the stream is likely to be a freshwater stream, I see a colorful (seemingly spotted) orange octopus which then seems to be a brittle star. Although an octopus has eight arms and a brittle star has five, the brittle star in my dream seems to have eight arms at times. I watch it for a few minutes through the wavy patterns of the water’s surface. I did find out much later, though, that there are eight-armed sea stars in Australian waters near where I was to live many years later. An awareness of the numerical pattern regarding the number of arms (or assumed arms) being eight and five. My first initial came up, then a zero (as a potential egg?), the full four-digit sequence turned out to be a way to easily manipulate the “choices” that computers used many years later (interestingly, in 32-bit hexadecimal, which came long after the 16-bit ones) and led me to finding out all I needed to know about computer technology and the bizarre lies and popular myths that were built over a longer time period to where it now all seems like a mythological religion in the mainstream domain - to be able to get a program to do anything I wanted. (The bridge over the stream in my dream seemed to later represent the concept of “being above the mainstream” - perhaps meaning having more knowledge than the mainstream.)
There are other scenes of moving through landscapes, reminding me a little of “Damnation Alley”, which I had only seen the trailer of at the time but did see eventually. The movie has a similar aspect as one part of my dream - very strange “clouds” (unusual bands in the sky), an effect I do not recall seeing in any other movie, and quite intriguing, really. I also had a paperback book with stills from the movie, which I think I later got fifty cents for at a bookstore in Wisconsin. I would not refer to the dream environments as dystopian, though, it is quite varied.
The outcome of my dream is that I and others reach a large business building where the computer is kept. It almost seems as if we have not traveled that far or maybe are still near the area from where we first started in my backyard. My brother Jim is there (who had a higher interest in computers - more than anyone else I knew - long after this dream - and was the first person I knew in real life to get a computer) and talking to different people who are behind desks. One part of my dream seems to feature a structure that is somewhat like a railroad track - creating impressions of both underground mines and the “Haunted Mansion” ride at Disney World. It seems one section of the tracks goes near or even into the large computer.
I approach the computer and ask it what the family name of cats is. After standing there a short time, a paper prints out (as well as it being said in an electronic voice) the word “Felidae”. I then ask it what the family name of dogs is, and another paper comes out that reads “Canidae”, also with audio.
“Do you know everything?” I ask the computer.
“Yes,” says the computer, “Welcome to MYOPIA!”
“Don’t you mean Utopia?” I ask.
“I can’t see,” mumbles the “computer”, and then it curses. I lift a small, rectangular, silver door at about upper-chest height and a very chubby, sweating man looks up through the small patch of light going into the area he is enclosed in. He has a large open book he appears to be looking things up in. He then runs out from the side of the computer by opening a larger metallic door and at first I try to catch him (to publicly expose the whole business as a fraud), but I soon give up. He jumps into a coal cart and it moves down the track to the north. The “great computer” was completely fake.
