After releasing the Beta I planned to go into a deep sleep because I’ve been neglecting sleep for a while in order to finish up for the Beta test. At 4:00pm I finally go to sleep (from the night before), rubella and I was only asleep for about 45 minutes before I woke up gasping for air. I had just died in my dreams… again!

I’ll edit this entry to eventually include descriptions of all of my death dreams for those interested… this is going to be long.

Last Night’s Dream – Death Part III

I don’t think this is normal, clinic because I’ve heard the rumor quite often that dying in dreams kills you. Not the case. By my count this was the third time I’ve died in my dreams. It was another one of the quickies though. I was coding and all of the sudden I noticed that all of my whiteboard scribblings on my desk (which is made of glass) started to feel all grainy as I was wiping them off. I thought “that’s weird, and it’s almost like they are getting dried out by radiation”. I have my shades covered in a blanket because of my weird sleep schedule (in real life and the dream), so I pulled them to the side to see an early mushroom cloud in partial bloom. I read a book called “Hiroshima” once, with real-life accounts of some of the people who survived the Hiroshima bombing, so I knew there were ways to survive if you were far enough away. So my first instinct was to shout “NUKE!” and try to run next door to my mother/brother’s room so they could get some cover (that’s not real.. Dennis lives there, my family is in another state), and as I turned the corner I saw they looked kinda ashy already. We were too close to the blast. Almost instantly I felt a wave of radiation start to pour over me and it knocked me to the ground. Wind and waves of radiation were rushing over me as I had about 5 seconds to ponder my death as I was being painfully disintegrated. Lots of things were rushing through my head about how lame it was that someone else could decide so suddenly to end it all for us. I was curious as to who did it. I suspected terrorists because I could feel it was radiation that was killing me, terrorists tend to be more of a threat with dirty-bombs, whereas conventional nukes (hydrogen bombs) used by major countries would be more likely to have thrown the appartment like a tornado. Then came the normal thoughts about dying. I can’t describe it, but it’s different that pain. It’s almost magical, but in a really depressing way. Next to being born, dying is the most important thing that will ever happen to you.

As my mind raced for the very few seconds I had left of life, my last view of the world was the mundane sight of the carpet of my appartment where it meets a bare white wall. As my flesh melted away, everything was going dark, and I knew it was all over. I was dead, then I woke up gasping for breath. Good fun.

What shocked me the most was that it all came out of nowhere. Before the nuke, I had been having a nice long dream where normal stuff was happening. Normal conversations, just chilling in the appartment, and I was coding. Then BAM! – DEATH. It was definately the least glorious of all of my dream deaths.

Side Note:
After going back to sleep, getting up eating, and going back to sleep again (all to just get 9 hours), I had another dream where I almost died. That’s normal… I figure I have one of those at least once a week. They’re what make dreams so much cooler than most of reality. My whole Posse was getting chased by a biker-gang, and as we’re driving away, a tornado started. A large section of my extended family were several cars… I was in the back of an SUV with my older brother and cousin. My ‘rents and his were in the the middle and front. The tornado touched down behind us and began to hurl some of the motorcycles from the road, and then even more (that didn’t have riders) from the top of a car-carrying truck that was carrying motor-cycles. I cropped out the beginning of the story and I’ll crop here too… One bike smashed into the roof of the car between my bro & coursin and it definately would have rocked their worlds if it had been one foot off in either direction. Several more tornados showed up right in our path, and we had to go through them. 10 in all (I was counting… there was little else for me to do since I wasn’t driving).

Dream Test

Several of my dreams bring up the idea that there should be a dream-test. I compare this to the Turing Test. The Turing Test (named after Alan Turing) is a concept that there should be a test that humans could almost always pass and computers would almost always fail. Probably the only Turing Test you’ve seen in the real world at this point are those little pictures of distorted letters & numbers that you often have to decode before signing up for accounts on websites. My idea is that there should be a test for determining if an experience is real, or a dream. As a parallel: it is a test that reality would always pass and dreams would always fail. Call it the “Colombo Test” if you so desire ;). The typical “pinching-yourself” thing has failed me on many occasions. The first time, I was getting attacked Independence-Day style by aliens, and it really freaked me out because I had thought that was a foolproof test. Looking at the visual quality of images has also failed me. My dreams are in vivid full-color and sometimes even the text in the dreams makes sense. I had heard that text doesn’t make any sense in dreams, and after testing that theory I found it to be right fairly commonly. Real words and even phrases will be there, and it will seem to make sense until you concentrate on it enough, and you will realize that those words and the sentences they compose don’t mean anything in their order. I used to go by the theory “If you’re asking yourself if it’s a dream… it probably is”, but then I found myself applying that to real life, and of course, that was wrong. I have years of failed attempts at seperating dreams from reality, and I don’t remember what caused it recently, but I remember that a couple of weeks ago I ran several tests that all said I was in reality, and this made me convinced that a rather frightening situation was real. Meh, maybe it’s more fun not to know. The nuke-dream didn’t even get to this point anyway. It was so mundane to begin with, and I never had the time to consider that it may be fake. I was just dying and that was that.