Awake within a dream: lucid dreamers show greater insight in waking life.
I’ve been lucid dreaming since I was 10, in fifth grade, after I read about it in an Omni magazine and decided to try it.
There was another kid who was doing it with me, and we talked about building a “dream VCR” one day. We didn’t quite understand the extent of the technical problems involved in that at the time.
I still dream of my dream VCR. VCR’s are great. You bought it, you own it. The successor technologies, you don’t buy, or even rent, but “license.” It’s basically HAAS (hardware as a service) and of course the shows reside in the cloud, which claims authority over what you can “record,” etc. My dream VCR is a single database table:
create table vcr (
channel as integer,
frame as datetime,
x as integer,
y as integer,
r as byte,
g as byte,
b as byte
);
Basically the last three are the dependent variables and are a function of the first four. There’s also audio, of course (and closed captioning and Odin Bog knows what else), but I’m trying to keep this example simple. It’s not hard to imagine simple queries from that one table (and maybe one other for sound) covering virtually any conceivable playback option–
* weekly appointment,
* news time on historically significant dates,
* picture-in-picture,
* black-n-white,
* auto-detection of cuts, fades, zooms, pans, etc.
* dampening of strobe effects (surely you know what I mean)
You name it. I mean, it’s basically a rectangular box full of color, right? Recording? That function probably -should- reside in the cloud. I assume that’s logically where that service comes in, that I forgot the name of, that was ruled illegal or unconstitutional or whatever by some High Court– the one that was trying to exploit some loophole by leasing tiny TV antennas in server-farm type configurations to its clients so they could stream out-of-town broadcast stations or whatever.
Ha, now hot to get the output from the brain is the real problem. If you figure that out, you have a Nobel prize on your hands (I get a share of the loot).