The End?

I dreamed last night that I had traveled back in time in a small go-cart-like machine to a period in early colonial America. I was assisting in mundane preparations for some sort of rustic banquet in a town hall. Suddenly one of the other kitchen workers came into the kitchen area and exclaimed that the end of the world was coming!

We followed him into the dining hall where he pointed out a window to a black storm dropping what I assumed was tons of rain in giant gusts from the clouds only a few miles away. I tried to assure everyone that it was just a passing storm and we should all get back to work and not worry about it.

But, a few minutes later back in the kitchen area the same worker came in and exclaimed, "The sky is gone!"

I asked, "What do you mean, 'the sky is gone'?"

And he said, "It's just gone!"

So we followed him to the same bank of windows and this time in the distance I saw a modern city, which made no sense for this time period. And the city was being crushed by a wall of stone rocks and whatnot coming down from the sky. When I looked up directly overhead I saw some sort of giant machine spanning the entire sky coming down through darkened clouds.

None of this made sense. I knew that because I was from the future I would know about a calamity of this scale. I saw the machine in the sky tilt so that in the distance it made contact with the earth and began pushing up huge mounds of rock and mud. I felt the earth tremble as the shockwaves passed like earthquakes.

I ran back to the kitchen looking for my time machine and escape back into the future. But I had apparently disassembled the machine and realized there was no time to reassemble it.

I began to panic and tried to calm myself so I could think clearly and find a way to survive what seemed now clearly to be the end of the world. I decided I did not want to die inside and not knowing at least what killed me.

So I burst open the kitchen door and ran outside. I found myself in a contemporary urban neighborhood with two and three-story apartment complexes but only a few other survivors.

I yelled out, "What's happening?"

But no one seemed to hear me from the din of the storm and destruction all around.

I saw a woman in a '67 Mustang convertible with its top down that had been thrown off the road into a field. I approached her and repeated my question.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"I don't know!" she yelled back.

Then I heard a song, or rather felt a song in my mind that conveyed intention without words. It sang something like, "This is to heal you." But the word "This" was a kind of self-reference in lieu of "I" or "We", and "you" meant the entire planet, not the inhabitants (people) on it.

It was like some multi-dimensional entity had descended upon the planet, not from some other space or time, but from some other dimension entirely. So it was able to appear throughout the entire history of earth at once. And the people, like me and the woman in the car, were not even germs to it - or "this", as it seemed to call itself. The ground under my feet became pillowy and difficult to walk on, and streams of what seemed like tangled magnetic tape at first, and then becoming long tangles of human hair, like dreadlocks, came down from the sky in clumps that entangled and retrieved anyone out in the open.

I managed to evade the "dreadlocks" and started looking for cover. I could see giant fleshy wounds the size of cities opening up in the earth off in the distance. I saw a cement structure built into the side of a hill nearby with someone in it. This looked relatively secure so I made my way to it.

I managed to get inside, but only just. I saw a man with his teen daughter there who appeared to be from some future beyond my own time. But the structure was clearly not sufficient to ward off the destruction from all around and we knew we were doomed. The last thing I remember before waking up was that I wanted to take off my clothes, so I could leave the world the same way I came into it, naked.

[J.D. December 18, 2019]

Robot.edu

A recurring theme to some of my dreams since my arrest in 2005 has been having a job and being at work but not knowing what my job is. This usually involves some strange variation of the job I had when I was living in Fargo working for Invie Consulting as a computer programmer while attending college part-time for several years leading up to shortly before my arrest. But in that job I always had a good sense of what my job was, while in my dreams I never know what I'm being paid to do or even if I'm getting paid at all (in real life I was earning $18 per hour with full benefits).

But, the night before last I think this recurring theme finally resolved itself. In the dream I had I was hired by an eccentric millionaire to work for his high-tech company in a posh modern office building. Like other dreams following this theme I wasn't clear about what my job was even though I assumed I had been hired because of my unique skills and qualifications of the high-tech sort. In real life I have always been highly skilled and qualified as a computer programmer, but in dreams like this one I can never seem to apply those skills, apparently for the same reason that I cannot perform other complex intellectual tasks, like reading or writing more than one or two words at a time.

So, I wondered around the office building, looking for someplace to fit in I suppose. I ended up in a foyer with the rich man who had hired me. Usually in dreams like this I am distinctly reluctant to question anyone about what my job is supposed to be lest I expose the fact that I'm not needed and end up losing the job altogether. But in this dream for some reason I felt emboldened to ask the boss man himself what he expected me to do.

He explained to me that he had formed the company with plenty of capital but no clear business objective. The idea was to hire a bunch of really smart people and then let them decide what the business should be, banking on the assumption that whatever idea the new employees came up with would be profitable. So, he and I, and a small group of other new employees, began discussing our skills and other resources. The actual discussion was a blur, at least as I recalled upon awakening from the dream, but the outcome was distinct and clear.

We would form a company called "Robot.edu". It would be a company that provided the massive data sets necessary for modern computer programs to "learn". After I woke up and thought about this idea it made a lot of sense to me. In fact, I would not be surprised at all if such companies already exist. As "learning systems" become more and more prevalent there will be a corresponding demand for the highly specified data sets that the systems need in order to learn.

I also realized after thinking about it some more that these systems will by necessity start "learning" independent of each other. The assumption that once a system learns a specific lesson, such as how to diagnose medical conditions, this "knowledge" can then be uploaded by another learning system. But that's not how they work. The lesson must be learned by a specific system an unless another system is exactly the same --- i.e. has already "learned" all the exact same lessons under the exact same hardware and software conditions --- then the lesson cannot be transferred or shared simply by uploading the data. Each system must "learn" according to its ability and what it already "knows", just like real people.

Thus, companies like "Robot.edu" will become necessary as millions upon millions of these unique systems seek out the data sets they need in order to learn according to their unique specs. Even if you make an exact copy of a system as soon as one copy "learns" something that the other copy does not learn they will no longer be able to learn simply by uploading the "lesson" per se. They must each learn by "studying" data sets, just as humans do.

So, my dream seems to have hit on a very likely possible future business that might even already exist in some form. More importantly, I felt a clear shift in my dream from not knowing what my job was to not only knowing my job, but actually defining it as well. So now maybe this recurring theme will end.

[J.D. December 7, 2019]

Update:

It seems the above dream may very well have changed the "theme" after all. I have had at least two more dreams since the one I described above where I not only am employed, but I was a highly valued and skilled employee, in direct contrast with the old recurring theme. For example, just this morning (after breakfast) I dreamed that I was a highly skilled astronaut working with an exploratory team on another planet --- like in a science fiction movie, yet not like any movie I ever remember seeing --- my job was troubleshooting complex problems as they arose, and in the dream was the most valuable team member, or "asset" on the mission.

I like this sort of dream job a lot better!

[J.D. December 12, 2019]