I awoke from a dream in which I was in a relationship with Claudia Black. Or maybe it was her character Vala Mal Doran. I don’t have a Claudia Black thing going on, but I had been watching the last season of Stargate SG-1 recently. It was one of those dreams with compressed time and a lot of ground was covered. In the end things didn’t work out and we were both unhappy. I woke up feeling genuinely down about the whole thing. I tried to find a message in it. Maybe she reminds me of someone.

—

I think I have too many apps on my iPad. Like over 150. I had this feeling the other day like I was at a bar staring down a trail of shot glasses that ended at my hand, like I might have a problem. If something I might like is 99 cents, I buy it without question, archiving it for later. With physical objects and media, I keep it spartan, but with the digital I am a pack rat. If there were a show called CyberHoarders, I would be on it. I have a little black box with a million worlds on it.

—

Since I don’t track the passage of time well, I have a suite of reminders on my phone and computer which tell me when to do things. Routines can be good right? But sometimes they seem like fences or mile markers. Hedges around my life or notches measuring the remainder of it.

Here is what I can’t forget to do:
1. Clean out the litter box (every 3 days)
2. Administer nasal sprays (twice a day, 1 dose followed by another 30 minutes later)
3. Clean out the Roomba (twice a week)
4. Take a 1 minute exercise break (every hour)
5. Go to Boards ‘n Brews (every Tuesday night)
6. Write a blog post (every Saturday)

I guess that isn’t too bad. I wish it also said 7. Make-out session (every…week?)

—

As I was doing some prep work for the components for the Dune game, I realized something that could be designed differently. The original game has a disc for each of the characters. Why a disc? So it can fit in the disc-shaped slot in the combat wheel. But why do it that way? Why not just put them on a card instead? You can put your card face down to keep it secret. And why do you even need this huge combat wheel? Why not a card-sized wheel like the life counters in Magic? So now you can just hold a hand of cards: your leader, your Treachery cards, and your combat wheel card. There is something neat about the discs and putting them in that slot, but when you take a step back it is really a bit convoluted and unnecessary.

One of the worlds was a field of rolling hills through which completely unnecessary channels had been dug. I had built bridges over the channels. I appeared to her as a bridge, explaining that the company intended to eventually charge pedestrians to cross the bridges. She realized that I had made the channels narrow enough that you could jump over them without paying the toll. I explained, in waking life, that this is exactly the sort of passive-aggressive thing I would do to subvert plans I found foolish yet I am for whatever reason obligated to follow.

That’s all I remember about that dream before it turned into a dream about me and a group of resistance fighters in battle with a paramilitary group.

It was set in some desert town in New Mexico or Arizona. Somewhere that easily serves as the backdrop for post-apocalyptic films. I was hanging out with a bunch of hooligans, people I didn’t know in waking life. One of these friends persuaded me to drive a truck in the big monster truck rally the next day. I agreed. The rallies in this part of the world happened in football-size arenas and were gladiatorial duels which tested man and machine.

Later on, I somehow found out that the rally was happening in an arena called Fleshdrome. I had been betrayed by my friend. I wouldn’t be driving a monster truck at all, but instead I would be strapped down to a rack in the arena as a potential target for the drivers. I played along, pretending I had no knowledge of my friend’s plans and acted like I was going to be driving a truck the next day.

On the night of the rally, as I was crossing the carnival-like midway, I ran into a girl that hung out with us. She wished me good luck in the rally. I embraced her and whispered into her ear that I had been tricked and that my friend was blackmailing me into becoming a sacrifice for the monster trucks. I just wanted someone to know. I walked into a bar where the drivers hung out. I was supposed to meet some guy who would mentor me in the basics of monster truck arena combat. I asked around the bar, but he was a no show. I had all kinds of questions about the rules, but everyone just shrugged.

I didn’t actually get into the arena. Instead, the dream ended on a classic note: I realized that I had been forgetting to go to math class for weeks and the homework was just piling up.

We walked to an old farmhouse, looking for my friend Jake. We found only traces of him like his baseball cap wedged inside a door handle. A group of serious-looking college frat boys sat around the table in one room, staring at me. Somehow I realized that they weren’t really human and they had killed Jake.

I went into the kitchen to discover than the Megan Fox girl had been replaced by Jake’s wife, Jenny. She was sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, while a tea kettle started to boil. I urgently explained that we needed to leave the house as it was the home of vampires or demons or whatever the frat boys actually were. They had killed Jake. She already knew about this and calmly explained that we needed to stay because Jake’s ghost now haunted the place. We needed to help him seek vengeance.

Suddenly my old-fashioned cell phone started vibrating in my breast pocket. Then it started to burn. This was Jake warning us to run for our lives.

I woke up.

I poked around online to find some people asking these same questions, but a lot of people were discussing the data and its implications as fact. And the implications were myriad. As it turns out, the statement means whatever you want it to mean.

Here’s what it means to me, or, rather, what the “fact” inspired. Information is spreading so rapidly that it has gone beyond the ability of Wikipedia fact-checkers and Snopes-like watchdog groups to evaluate. Reality, “fact”, is a product of consensus. Rapid data proliferation via social networks and memes gives the same appearance as consensus. On the Internet, the appearance of consensus is virtually the same thing as consensus itself. So information that may not be “true” is being treated as such.

But so what? Hasn’t it always been that way? Sanity and facts and laws and morals are all ultimately outgrowths of what the majority agrees to. These are the written and (largely) unwritten social contracts that make the world work, regardless of “truth” or “rationality”. The world got along just fine when the sun orbited the earth or when it used to be flat or when Pluto used to be a planet.

Some people might venerate science and logic and the importance of “truth”. I would argue that placing importance on such things is as faith-based as any religion. Ultimately, at the core of such beliefs, is the decision that any of it matters. There is no altruistic capitulation to geometry or thermodynamics. No one says, “Oh, I don’t have any real stake in gravity, but I’ll go along with the idea regardless.” No. People go along with science or any other system of measurement because, on some level, they have decided that it matters. Outside of the social contracts we have made as a species, the particles of reality have no intrinsic value and any system which measures them is, at its core, absurd.

I have observed the same people who put value on logic and “reality” also treating them with a cavalier attitude. It is illogical to eat junk food or smoke or not recycle, but smart, rational people do these things all the time. People plan for “tomorrow”, a day that isn’t real and has never existed. People create paintings and movies and books about fantastical worlds and those creations all find a place in society’s prefabricated boxes, but belief in the reality of said worlds is considered irrational.

Here’s what is real to me: I have to feel it. I don’t care if a decision is “rational” or “logical”. I care about how it will make me feel afterwards. Sometimes this overlaps with logic, but it certainly isn’t the driving factor. If a thought or belief or image makes me feel anything at all, then it is real, because that is the only system of measurement that matters to me.

What is the point of subscribing to anyone else’s system, no matter how many people agree with it? They don’t have to live my life. They never have to deal with my feelings. They are not in here.

I went to the bathroom to take a shower. While looking at myself in the mirror, I noticed that my skin was extremely dry. Marbled veins of dryness covered my body liked cracked earth during a drought. I frantically slathered moisturizing lotion all over me, spreading it on so thick it looked like I had crawled out from a vat of pancake batter. The pressure of this rubbing caused my skin to burst in places, sending heavy streams of blood down my face.

This was too much to handle so I called for my mother, who happened to be at my house at the time. She came into the bathroom and promptly slipped on the floor, falling, hitting her head on the edge of toilet. I carefully turned her around and propped her up. Her eyes were milky and opaque. She was blind.

Then I had some other dream, but this one stuck with me.

Most of my dreams take place indoors. When they do occur outside, it is always dark, even during the middle of the day. In this dream, I was flying above the entire Earth. The Earth was sheathed in a thick blanket of clouds, so I did not know what country I flew over or my altitude. Around me was only cold and dark, perhaps of night, perhaps of space.

I descended into the cloud bank, feeling the clamminess of the air passing by. I could see lights below, a city. I worried that my poor understanding of geography had brought me over the Far East, where English was not spoken. I flew closer and alighted on a high balcony on one of the skyscrapers. I was in New York City.

Before the dream ended, I remember going inside through a service entrance and finding myself in the deserted halls of an office building. I remember wanting to call someone to tell them where I was.