I love dreams. I always write down all the dreams I have. Many people see in dreams something more than just an experience: they interpret them, find connections with things that could happen in the future, or think they reveal what the “subconscious” says, therefore what one truly thinks. I think that a dream is simply an experience. We tend to think that in dreams we see our life as if it were in a parallel universe, but this is not very different from “imagining,” even while awake. As far as I’m concerned, a dream is a show. Our brain “shows us” something without reasoning beforehand, and we just watch. It’s different from seeing “everything that comes to mind,” because when awake we choose what to think or at there are stimuli that lead us to think certain things. In a dream, the brain processes “something” undefined: random electrochemical signals that are forced to function in a narrative context (source: Dream - Wikipedia). Indeed, what we see is never truly random. If we’re fixated on something for a period, it’s very likely we’ll dream about it. If just before sleeping we read a book that captivates us, it’s possible we’ll imagine something related to it in our dream. There’s something of us in dreams, but according to the previous reasoning, it’s still random. The randomness factor here lies not in the choice of the dream’s “topic,” but in its animation and contextualization. That’s why we’re led to want to interpret dreams: because we see something of ourselves and it’s strange for it to be there without meaning. Now I don’t want to dwell on the usefulness of dreams or how they’re conceived by society, but rather on the “chemical” fact that we experience them. Why am I talking about dreams? It’s the common thing among all humans that brings us closer to thinking more about the actual “experience” of life, thanks to the five senses and consciousness.
The thing that fascinates me and that I think isn’t talked about enough is the fact that: we live. But how? Leaving aside the natural and biological side of things (talking about the formation of life and evolution), the life experience itself and what we see with our senses is something that isn’t taken for granted and should be preserved as best as possible. My question since childhood that I’ve never been able to fully explain to anyone has always been: why am I living, me specifically, and seeing these things, as if God had chosen me? It’s something I’ve asked people, and that made me I understand I’m not the protagonist of the universe. Everyone has their own way of experiencing life with their own senses. But if everyone has their own way, isn’t it a shame that every type of experience isn’t preserved? When I talk about preserving, I mean devising an objective model to describe a type of experience with all the details that each consciousness can have differently from another. I’m talking about small things, like the fact of closing your eyes and seeing abstract shapes rather than others, associating smells with specific moments from the past, having a particular figure you’re afraid of for no apparent logical reason. In practice, I’d like to put on paper everything that “stays inside us,” that we don’t describe to anyone because we know it’s something only ours, or that anyway isn’t worth talking about.
The archiving of media and content has always been something that fascinated me but I’ve never explored much. Regarding this field, I’d really like to create something concrete. With my current abilities, I’m not able to put the pieces together and truly understand what I want to do, so I’d like to limit myself to doing something with a purpose of pure entertainment: I’d like to create a video game, or an interactive digital experience, easily accessible to anyone, that best describes all the apparently subtle details that unite us all in our consciousness. A media I’ll want to take inspiration from is LSD: Dream Emulator, the first “experience” game that comes to my mind, which is based on transcribed past life experiences (the dream diary of a staff member). For now, the definition that best summarizes my project idea is that of an “entertaining sensory simulation.”
I hope I’ll want to explore this project more soon. Possibly, there will be a need to have someone collaborate on all this, because I’m not an expert in every technical and creative side necessary to realize it. For now, I’ll keep dreaming.