Re: Do you dream in SF tropes?

On Aug 7, 7:30 pm, Phillip Thorne <tho...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...] but since it's a dream, it benefits from a direct emotional component.

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007, htn963 <htn963@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When I was younger, I was a regular lucid dreamer. I usually
know when I'm dreaming and can occasionally influence the shape and
outcome of my dream.

I read a book about lucid dreaming 15 years ago and have been
practicing ever since. The author asserted that you could create an
ideally-equipped workspace and thereby unlock your creativity, but I'm
skeptical about that level of control. The most effective technique
I've discovered is to notice "hey, this is a dream," and then make a
loose wish that something entertaining will happen. Sometimes it
does, but more importantly, this avoids the "yay!" excitement known
for waking you prematurely.

I went shooting out of the earth, past the sun, the stars, a vast,
dark region, and finally arrived at a blue expanse where I saw several
gigantic faces imprinted against the dome of sky.

But can you identify any works that use this trope? This is
rec.arts.sf.WRITTEN, after all, and therefore I'd like to focus the
discussion.

[...] One fantasy-like dream that impressed me was finding myself in a
gigantic, ancient cathedral dedicated to some dark god -- an H.R.
Gigerish/H.P. Lovecraftian place like Severian would encounter in
BOTNS -- with minute arcane symbols and writings etched on *every*
inch of its mile-high walls and statues.

A common trope -- easy to write about, impressive to do in visual SF
-- and with obvious historical precedent: hieroglyph-covered tombs and
sculpture-crammed cathedrals. As a society nowadays, we tend to avoid
this expense and visual overstimulation in our architecture, which is
probably why the imagery is so powerful.

I surveyed the whole place,
knowing that all those writings meant something, and just kept saying
to myself, "Damn, my mind can contain and conceive of all this?!"

That's one of the interesting bits about the dreaming brain -- the
degree of scale and detail it can "render" seems to vary wildly.
Sometimes it manages the vast spaces; sometimes it seems pressed to
manage any speed faster than a walk.

Nowadays, my dreams are not as flamboyant, but occasionally some
contains a deep sense of a past history of their own -- i.e. while in
the dream I "remember", "know", or "accepted" a bunch of events,

I've experienced that also, and devised a notation for my dream logs.
Either I identify a place as personally significant (e.g. my childhood
school) although it's physically quite different, or I simply get a
powerful sense of "this is profound and significant!"

[...] so you might say they are visions of alternate realities.

Or you might say that brain subsystems are being triggered in an
uncoordinated fashion, unconstrained by the consistency of physical
reality.

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