dream rendering

i just woke up from the first full night's rest i've had this week. that's nothing dramatic: i did a three-day commercial and got 5-6 hours of a sleep a night during those three days. but i had a dream last night. like most dreams, it morphed from one scene to another. i was in minneapolis with my my best friend from high school (nothing weird there; that's where he lives) and we were shopping at a sort of costco-type store, where we could by four-foot tall boxes of frosted flakes for $2.59. not a bad deal.

i think president sam was also in there somewhere, but dreams are so fleeting it's no surprise i don't remember it all. the final scene was with the crew i've been working with for the past few days (love those guys) and we were driving on a sunday and had stopped at a town/outlet mall/rest stop that had a pretty good comic book store in it. i was pretty big into comics in junior high and still like to peruse them on occasion. and so i did, despite the guilt that it was sunday. i looked around the store at the different shelves, full of trade paperback editions, graphic novels, and various action figures in addition to the boxes and boxes of comic books, grouped by publisher then sorted alphabetically. i wasn't planning on buying anything and didn't even know what i was looking for, but it was fun just look through everything.

i pulled out a white cardboard box and began thumbing through the comics. as i did, it was as if my vision started to go bad. i could barely see more than a blurred image on the cover. i one out and held it closer to see better. this had the opposite effect: it became harder to see, as if my eyes had been sealed shut. i could see nothing.

there wasn't much more of the dream. i remember continuing to look around the store while my friends played catch with a football, ready to leave and waiting for me. as i searched around, the store seemed larger than i had first noticed, with dozens of shelves to look through. yet the same phenomenon persisted: like playing the original doom computer game, as i would walk closer to a shelf, it would become fuzzier, more out of focus, until i could hardly make out anything on it.

i woke up soon after that and, as i picked up my phone from my night stand to check the time, my text messages, e-mail, and facebook updates, i thought about this.

dreams are essentially like a computer-generated movie. everything in the scene has to be created. and my brain has seen enough comic book stores to have plenty of archives to research and make one pretty easily. and in a cg movie, if a character is going to walk over to a box and start rifling through it's contents, that box is going to have to have each of those comics have a different cover, designed and rendered.

for whatever reason, my brain didn't have that in place. whoever it was programming the dream (i guess that's me) didn't plan on me looking through there. or my brain just couldn't create or find in an archive a handful of comic coves to slap on there in real-time. dag; i'm 30 and my brain is already losing processing power. perhaps it had something to do with the fact that i was soon waking up. sam noted that sometimes we will try to run in a dream but not move, which i've noticed happened when i'm at the start of waking up and so my brain isn't sure if we're suppose to run in the dream or in life, leaving me motionless (to be eaten by a dinosaur or something). maybe this was similar.

whatever the case, it was an interesting insight into how dreams work (or how my brain doesn't). kind of like finding a flaw in the matrix. ....oohh.... what if....