Dream Journal 2019-08-21: A Really Cool Sci-Fi Dream Is Completely Derailed By The Weird And Stupid Things That Usually Appear In Dreams
Greetings! I have been on a grueling traveling schedule the past few days with little amounts of sleep, both of which impact dreaming. But now that I’m back on a regular sleep schedule, the dreams are flowing like a firehose and that’s not always a great thing. Case in point: tonight’s dream.
Each of the “plot threads” was interwoven throughout the dream, but in the interest of narrative simplicity, there will just be a bulleted list of all the “subplots” that showed up. And to clear up any confusion, those quotation marks are of the sarcastic variety.
The Bulleted List Of Stupid Things
I retrieved a bag of ranch-flavored tortilla chips from where they were chilling in the refrigerator, as well as a bag of regular tortilla chips, and sat down to eat them. A coworker wanted to let him know when the food was ready because he had chorizo to share.
A lady with a fancy Chanel dress (and I only know who the designer was because it was covered in the word Chanel) breaks into a 1990s-era McMansion and snoops around in a place she is not supposed to be. She does not walk normally, and instead twerks the entire time to a song with a heavy beat that exists only in her head.
Brenda Song, an actress most known for her work on the Disney Channel, finds two people sleeping together in a walk-in closet. Just regular sleeping, folks, nothing to see here! She accidentally wakes them up and then talks about skin care and how to prevent pimple outbreaks on the bottom lip.
Someone attempts to play a harmless prank on their coworkers. They record themselves laughing and hook it to a toy voice-changer that makes it sound like the Green Goblin laughing. Once all the wires are figured out, this person hooks it to the vending machine in the employee lounge, and it laughs evilly whenever someone buys something. A repair technician is called, and he has seen this particular issue before. The solution? Stab the machine with scissors and “cut the wires.”
I find a fist-sized wad of facial tissue and petroleum jelly on the floor. Naturally, I place another layer of tissue on it and then slap it against my face like a soggy sock. This will make me even more beautiful.
The Cool Sci-Fi Part That I Wanted To Be Longer: System Cycle
A group of diverse and photogenic teenagers do whatever it is that teenagers do. Real talk, though, I haven’t been a teenager in a long time and have no idea what teens these days do because I am so old. Luckily, this is not a plot point important to the story.
Someone is observing this particular group of teens, though the teens don’t know they are being watched. It’s clear that whoever is watching them is doing it for Legitimate Science Purposes. The scientists converse with each other in snippets of impenetrable jargon. It is immediately clear from their white lab coats and speech that they do Real Science.
One of the scientists mentions something about a “double-minus system” and that no subject has ever successfully navigated more than 3 consecutive double-minus systems. Another scientist presents something that looks like the hydrologic cycle diagram at the top of this post, only with more arrows on it.
The teens continue to do their teen stuff, oblivious to their watchers. They go on dates, go to class, and drive around. One of the scientists is also watching a computer model of the situation and things aren’t looking good. He says to a colleague that a “modal switch in the cycle” is imminent. The colleague looks at the simulation and there is lots of red on the screen. Obviously this data does not indicate sunshine and happiness.
It is at this time that a major data dump happens in my brain and I understand parts of what is going on. The scientists are watching the same group of people across several different realities, and the scientists specialize in an obscure branch of study that seeks to guide our timeline along a path that will (hopefully) avoid realities that have a statistically-likely possibility of ending in a universe-imploding cataclysm.
There are an infinite number of possible universes, and these scientists have a device that is able to peer into alternate realities that are nearly identical to our own. When a point in our timeline seems likely to end in disaster, these scientists look at twenty of the most similar adjacent realities to avert disaster. Each group of 20 realities is known as a cycle, and each reality in the cycle is known as a system.
Once all 20 systems have reached the predetermined branching point, the outcome in this reality is determined by the most-popularly-chosen outcome from a majority of the other systems in the cycle. Each system has inherent properties that influence how readily we can interact with it. In normal systems, there is a small amount of control our reality can exert over the system to guide it to a more beneficial place.
In “double-plus systems,” time flows in a closed loop that our reality can poke and prod at will to create the desired outcome. These occur less commonly than normal realities, but are overrepresented in the cycle because of their flexibility. Once a double-plus system is going in the right direction, it gets left along to play out in a loop without more involvement from us. There is another uncommon system type that I don’t know the name for, but time flows backwards in them and they are useful for seeing potential futures (since the future happens first in those systems).
Now we get to the double-minus systems. These are probably the second most commonly occurring system type, but they are also the most delicate. In a double-minus system, our reality cannot exert any direct control on the system and time does not flow in a closed loop. Once a double-minus reaches its branching point, that’s it. It’s final. Double-minus systems are the least-wanted systems in a cycle because they almost never go the way we want them to go.
Additionally, there is phenomenon called “echo memory” that many of the system types have. The order in which systems appear in the cycle is important, because changes in the first system can weakly ripple across to the next system and help reinforce positive outcomes in the second one. Of course, double-minus systems don’t have echo memory, and each consecutive double-minus in the cycle increases the likelihood of an undesirable outcome.
With the data dump concluded, we are back in the present. The cycle is on its eighth system, with twelve more to go. Things are going from the usual mixture of double-plus and normal systems to a string of double-minus systems.
Twelve of them, in fact. And now, the fate of our universe it going to be decided by twelve flips of a coin that we cannot touch at all.
