When Geeks Dream
So last night, sometime in the last hour before waking, while some annoying things were waking me up, I had this dream about fanfic. I was in an archive (not AO3) scrolling through and got to this cool fic, which I kept trying to read, only I kept running into annoying technical problems. Like the page would suddenly scroll up and I’d lose it, which was a problem since the page was super long. Or finally when I found it, suddenly all this nonsense text wast pasting into it real time -- someone’s email address and some other text, over and over -- so I couldn’t read it. The title of the story was quite impressive, like Apotheosisensis or multi-syllabic Greek or something. Anyway, I was so frustrated with this archive.
The stranger thing than this dream to me is that, when I started thinking about once I was awake, I’ve had dreams about this archive many times before. It’s not based on anything I’ve encountered in real life. It had its own archiving system, its own interface. It’s quite primitive, not based on anything as sophisticated as WordPress, Tumblr, AO3, but more like Lynx or even UNIX or DOS. (Proving that yes, I’m that old.) So in order to see these stories, you have to pass some commands and like show X type of stories in Z archive and it spits them out, then you have to say show Y specific story. Then you scroll through using function keys. It’s like I’m in the early 90s. Except I wasn’t doing fanfic then, so I invented this. I’ve been in this archive before looking at stories or finding other types of files, data, etc.
The number of times I’ve explored interfaces, software, programming code, real and imagined, in my dreams isn’t that surprising to me but other people always seem to be like “WTF, who the hell DREAMS that?”