Dreamlog: The Merkeltoad
Sometimes you get strange ones...
I am de-facto guild leader for a six-player party in a new, still-in-beta, MMORPG. I don't really know the other players except that they are students.
One of the new features of this game is that it takes in-group guild social dynamics seriously, and attempts to provide automated tools to reduce 'drama' between players. For this reason, as guild leader I have a web-based form to fill in with information on the other players and various psychological rankings of them. However, we've only played the first few missions and I haven't yet filled in any of the forms.
Which is why I am surprised when a serious businessman in a suit comes to call on me at my workplace. He represents the game company and wants to know why, as a registered beta player, I have not yet filled in the required psychological information for my teammates. Specifically, he wants to know their real names and occupations.
I want to cooperate, but I tell him that I honestly don't know these people in real life. I feel as if I am sitting an exam I haven't prepared for. I pull up the game UI and look at the player list, to see if I can make any guesses. But the players don't even have fully fleshed-out VR avatars and their character information is all nonsense. The only one with an actually implemented avatar is 'wearing' a character called The Merkeltoad, which I recognise as a direct import of a licenced Disney-ish CGI cartoon franchise: a humanoid/frog sort of crossover. It's high-resolution, but conveys no sense of the player's personality.
"See", I tell the suit, "there's nothing to tell you. They're strangers to me." But I'm feeling more and more disturbed by his questions. Just what kind of game *is* this? The production values are amateurish in an open-source sort of way, yet this is obviously a commercial operation. It's starting to feel like some kind of intelligence sting, and I want out.
Subdivisions
Sprawling on the fringes of the city
In geometric order
An insulated border
In between the bright lights
And the far unlit unknown
Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions all provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided
In the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone
Subdivisions
-- Rush, Subdivisions (1982)
I never really understood the trendy American hipster terror of suburbia: you have to live *somewhere*, and anywhere seems as good as anywhere else. Hating on the middle class McMansion seemed like a kind of snobby elitism. I preferred Steven Spielberg's suburban magical-realism, of the suburbs as a place of light, where the weird glow from a window might be just the TV or it might be aliens come to visit; and the two might actually be one and the same, technology as spirituality.
But I wandered today through a subdivision site near what used to be the Sunnyside mental hospital in Addington, and something of that emptiness, the dark side of suburbia, came over me.
Linden Grove, the ornamented gate proclaimed. A park-like setting! And it is. I walked past trees, a river. Birdsong all around and the quiet of grass and small insects. From a distance, I could see the Southern Alps: a rare sight at ground level here in the city. Usually the houses block the mountains.
But as I approached, I could see the fences. The lots, around two hundred of them, have already been assigned, carved up. Access cul-de-sacs and footpaths are laid in asphalt. The tiny patches of dirt are raked and covered with lawnseed. Clusters of utility feeds emerge from the ground like fruiting bodies of a vast fungus: telephone, electricity, presumably water and sewerage there somewhere. Real estate billboards. There are still no houses built to block the view of the majestic mountains, but once they're up it will be just a chunk of expensive residential street like any other.
And the cars will come, and the patio furniture, and the mortgages, and the financial crashes, and the foreclosures, and another layer of toxic human unreality will settle over the sweet green truth of soil and grass and birdsong that really makes the world run.
We read Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening in high school. Our teacher suggested it was about the temptation to suicide. I disagreed then and still do, because I think I know the emotion that poem relates. I think that poem is not about the wish to end life but the intense desire to join it mixed with the frustration that we can't, yet. It's about the sort of melancholy I felt there in that subdivision today, an ache as deep as life: the sense that as a human, I really don't belong in the world of arbitrary business and schedules that we make for ourselves; but neither do I fit in that world of quiet green things that know how to cope. I am not an animal; I have rules and a mind and heart and obligations and can't just go back to the woods and live there. I have been ejected from Eden but have yet to find a way into Paradise.
I want to go home, is the thought. I don't want to be here. I want to leave a world where the need to survive and make homes for ourselves -- a need that's not wrong in itself -- makes us trample on beauty in order to fit our petty little schemes. One plus one equals two but the answer is wrong. I want to be where everything glows with light that doesn't just attract bugs and zap them.
If we are to take some of the mystics seriously, God is really and literally at the heart of everything: consider the lilies how they grow might be not just a sentimental phrase but a description of how living things somehow are tuned in enough to take their life energy -- their patterning, their fractal organisation, their unfolding -- from an infinite data/energy source which is a Person. If I walk in a grove of trees and can see mountains I can feel something different, a lightness about the air, a sense of space and structure. Invisible frequencies modulating the very nature of shape around me. Reminding me that there is a home that we come from which is not this confusing world we find ourselves in, there is a bright centre to the universe, there is a way of living that makes all of life unify and make sense. Even if I can't presently see it.
When I take a photograph at dusk with my digital camera, and I bring the image into Photoshop and play with the contrast setting, it is amazing how much light I can find. Scenes which are dark to my natural eyes show as bright as day to the camera.
If a mere mechanical device can so amplify ordinary light as to reveal that what we think of as 'night' as just a lack of our own vision -- what might that mean to the other kind of light, the light which comes from God and carries that information, that patterning, that quiet patient joy which the plants and animals seem to be able to tune into and use to structure their DNA? Might we not see it flowing all around us, making our world actually as bright right now as we sometimes dare to dream it might one day become?
How can we learn to see that light, and no longer fear the dark, the casual cruelty of the world, our own casual and blundering trampling of beauty and order? The closer we look, the more it seems like the source of darkness is woven deep inside us; but if like the camera, God can turn the brightness up to infinity and see only his Light -- what might those eyes show to us?
Life Review
While dreamhunting, I've been flicking back through my last three years on Livejournal, and it's depressing. I wrote a lot more back then and now I seem to have dried to a trickle. Also, setting up a Wordpress site was possibly a mistake, as was interrupting my main blog with my Dataspace notes. Most of my main writing has been there, but I seem to be grinding to a halt and my very first Dataspace posts seem to be much in the same territory as I'm in now. I've done a lot of comp.sci reading but not managed to pull anything much together clearly enough to get a functioning model (other than a few sketchy notes on a Lisp syntax). The whole thing might be an illusion; probably not entirely, but I'm just tired of going over the same ground. I don't have such a system, I'm losing faith that I have the ability to describe it, much less build it, and time goes on.
(Ie, my very first Dataspace post on June 11th 2007 pretty much outlines the fundamental vision I'm still looking at. The rest is fussy semantics about storage and processing details, yet without those, nothing is buildable. It's like I've got half of a brilliant idea but no idea of where to find the other half. And after sixteen months I can't fill in those missing bits on my own. So maybe I just need to let it go.)
I wish I had what I want Dataspace to be, right now: a kind of distributed filing system where I could simply copy weblog posts from one system to another, and make new categories at will. I want a Social Web that works. But I don't have one, and now I'm scattered between Wordpress and Livejournal. And the new version of Wordpress doesn't seem to allow backdating of posts, which means I can't cleanly port bits of my online life from one place to another.
Bleh. It might be time to move back to Livejournal.
Meanwhile, my life in the local church and neighbourhood is taking more and more of my energy, which is probably a good thing, but means I'm somehow finding less and less energy to think about what I'm doing.
There are heavy things I need to work through about spirituality, religion, sustainability, and politics, and instead all I'm posting are dream logs and meta rants.
Dreamlog: Ferrymead
This is frustrating: I'm sure I had a dream some time ago, possibly last year, which featured a Victorian-ish town and a bridge. But I can't find it in the backlog of dream entries so far.
I write this because I experimented a moment in real life today which either powerfully reminded me of this dream, or was some kind of weird meta dream deja-vu.
(The reason why I started this dream log was to try to track my dreams and look for patterns in them. Also, because it's fun. I wish I had a better place to put it than here.)
Anyway:
The dream, as best I recall it from this distance:
I am in a Victorian or Edwardian kind of building in a city main street or shopping centre; the building is some kind of music hall. Horses and carriages pull up outside and people in smart ballroom type outfits walk in. Later, I walk home over a bridge across a river/estuary which I identify with the Ferrymead area.
The real life moment:
Today, I am visiting Ferrymead Heritage Park for the first time in several years: it is the end of Heritage Week 2008 and there's a 1950s theme. The park's main street is full of crowds and vintage cars and organisers in 1950s dress.
So far, so good. Then I walk into the Clydesdale Society's stable and suddenly get a flash of THIS IS THE PLACE FROM MY DREAM. I can't explain it, just know that this is what I was looking at: a barn-like building with a horse and carriage inside (a replica, this one) and a sense of being two stories high.
It's not *the same*, but it has the same feel and somehow it connects.
I wish I could pinpoint when I had that dream.
Bandwidth
Something is suddenly eating all my 2GB monthly bandwidth limit and it's probably spam bots. If I go offline, this is why.
Edit: Oops, I think it's fallout from my previous worm. Not happy. Hopefully it's contained now, but I can't be sure.
Dreamlog: The Vegetable Conspiracy
From last week:
I find a flyer advertising a weekend sustainability conference, but forget about it.
Later, my father and I are on the run from some kind of conspiracy connected with the conference. We have infiltrated the complex - a college campus of some kind, with 1960s brick and prefab buildings. All the people are here for the conference and they know that we are not part of it. We try to hide in comic-book fashion behind various sorts of flimsy cover but are invariably spotted and pursued.
I escape through a doorway into a small office/bathroom type room. Closing the door, I discover that it has a false inner door - it is some kind of secret hiding place. Passing through, I find another copy of the flyer and suddenly realise what is going on: this is a live action roleplaying game and the flyer is a signal that I am a gamer. If I pick it up, I will be identified as a conference-goer. I take the flyer and indeed the next person who meets me acts 'in character' and immediately assumes that I am attending the conference and answers all my questions.
It is getting late in the evening on the final day of the conference. My new guide leads me toward the big bonfire/feast which will wrap it up. We pass through the complex's gardens and I realise that the vegetables are much larger than they ought to be. Is the conspiracy something to do with genetic engineering?
As we approach the bonfire site I see that all the other attendees are there, all college-age students (and of course, actually role-playing gamers). A big denouement is evidently about to happen. I wonder how well all the others have done on solving the 'conspiracy' plot; because of my mistake with the flyer I have missed most of the game content.
In a garden hut two students are having a formal debate; only their heads are clearly visible through the hut's lighted windows. The scene has obviously been staged for the benefit of the assembled crowd. The argument appears to revolve around obscure movement rules of a board game. The first debater makes a point to the effect that bringing a Roman-type empire backwards through time in such a way as to change its own history would introduce the rule called 'Interferus'. The other debater responds that there is a parallel to human cellular neurobiology.
Just before the point of the game is about to be revealed, I wake up.
A Path to Mystery
I'm trying again to gather together a core set of materials that I think most clearly lay out a single coherent mystical Christian theology, or at least seem to converge for me:
* Mary Baker Eddy's 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures', 1875-1910
* Frances Bird's 'The New Dispensation', circa 1915
* Agnes Sanford's 'The Healing Light', 1947
* Thomas Merton's 'New Seeds of Contemplation', 1949-1961
* Helen Schucman's 'A Course in Miracles', 1965-1972
* Rick Joyner's 'The Harvest', 1989
* Regina Dawn Akers' The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament, 2006
ACIM and NTI are very closely linked, and Science & Health predates both. The Harvest and The New Dispensation, though nearly over seventy years apart, also are linked by language and metaphor. Science & Health, ACIM and The Healing Light all deal directly with healing miracles.
To which I might add:
* The writings of Julian of Norwich, late 14th century
* The writings of St Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582 and St John of the Cross, 1542-1591
* The Zodiac messages (1921-1957)
* The Stephen experience (1973-1980)
* The Medjugorje messages
* The Quaker and Anabaptist movements
* The 'Emerging Church' movement
There's a common thread here, through Christian Science, Christian Spiritualism, Roman Catholic (Trappist/Cistercian/Benedictine and Carmelite) monasticism, Latter Rain Pentecostalism, Charismatic Anglicanism, and no formal religious alignment at all (ACIM, which paradoxically is the writing which most strongly asserts itself as being the actual voice of Jesus), and it intrigues me the more because it crosses such steep denominational boundaries.
It also challenges me deeply because there's a very high standard of life, thought and conduct set which I'm not sure how to live up to.
