The Crossroads: Dreams of SL

[Keli Kyrie]

I just woke from a nap where I had dream of a place where RL and SL crossed. In my dream I TP'd from my SL home to an apartment Skybox. The skybox was a cross between my BFF's college apartment in Berkeley and my favorite restaurant in Downtown Disney. The apartment had stairs that lead to a courtyard that opened to the restaurant patio. In this dream once you walked into the restaurant you entered Real Life but you could go there in your Avatar and RL people could go back to your apartment as people. There was a man who lived next door to me in the skybox and he was RPing a 1940's style detective, he starting talking to me in kind of a flirtatious way and then... I woke up and started writing this.

So what about you, do you have any strange SL/RL dreams you want to share?

[Griffin Ceawlin]

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

[Keli Kyrie]

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Griffin Ceawlin wrote:

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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I said share your dreams not analyze them. Come on I know you have had dreams about SL.

[Griffin Ceawlin]

No, I really haven't. None that I remember, anyway. I can recall very few of my dreams upon waking. The last two that I can recall (both within the past month) were about a customer of mine in RL, and I can't can't go into details here. *fans self*

[Sy Beck]

I have this annoying and recurring dream.  It's always preceded by having a dream where I am in SL.  I'm then suddenly TP'd to an empty sim, flat with just grass and in front of me are about 10 irregular shaped prims.  I then have to reassemble the prims back into their original shape of a sphere using only the LL building tools.

I've had this dream 4-5 times now and have never completed the puzzle.

[Venus Petrov]

I had a dream that all the questions posed in the Answers forum were written in an obscure language found in an isolated valley in the Hindu Kush.  As no experienced residents were left to answer their questions, LL had to actually hire staff to help them.  And pay them, too.

[Storm Clarence]

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Venus Petrov wrote:

I had a dream that all the questions posed in the Answers forum were written in an obscure language found in an isolated valley in the Hindu Kush.  As no experienced residents were left to answer their questions, LL had to actually hire staff to help them. 

And pay them, too.

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They would have to raise land fees to 'make up' for what the unpaid residents contribute to helping new people on this forum.  They would lose residents in their droves.  

[Jesica Dragovar]

I've had a few, specificly I was able to rez objects in RL, I woke up thinking "damn too bad it's just a dream that would be so useful"

[Knowl Paine]

:smileyindifferent:

[Ann Otoole]

I've recently had similar dreams. But sadly they included nuclear war. Which makes me want to make a video using a track from Moby:

[Kristin Burner]

:matte-motes-bashful: <-- Dreaming

 

Yep i have had my share of dreams that mixed SL into it, same way as i do when i watch a movie or read a book, its no different.

 

But mostlyl everything just turns to cats, then i wake up :matte-motes-smile:

[Maitimo]

I've occasionally had dreams that mix RL and SL. Sometimes I'm a neko in my dreams. Once I dreamed that I went to a local RL shopping mall and there was a nightclub I know from SL in it.

[Keli Kyrie]

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Charly Muggins wrote:

I have a dream, a song to sing, to help me cope with anything. If you see the wonder of a fairy tale you can take the future even if you fail. I believe in angels, something good in everything I see. Yes, I believe in angels when I know the time is right for me I’ll cross the stream. I have a dream, a fantasy to help me through reality, and my destination makes it worth the while, pushing through the darkness still another mile.

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Thank you I love ABBA.

[Persephone Emerald]

The things we experience & think about in waking life will always influence our dreams, but this doesn't mean our dreams are inconsequential. Our dreaming minds can be far more intuitive & creative than our waking minds, speaking a language of images & associations that only our subconscious can fully understand.

The Crossroads is a particularly important feature & theme in my dreams, which can manifest in several ways. The most literal is as the intersection of 2 roads, near which may be a dream character who is a sort of guide. If I ask this person for direction, they will either guide me or give me some cryptic message. The Crossroads is a metaphysical liminal place, where other worlds intersect with ours. In almost all pagan pantheons the marketplace is sacred to the deity of this metaphysical Crossroads, because marketplaces were traditionally set up at the crossroads of major roads. A doorway, airport or shopping mall may also be forms of the Crossroads in my dreams. Since the shopping mall is our modern equivalent to the ancient marketplace, I've found that shopping malls function as a sort of Crossroads in my dreams too, places from which I can go to other dreamscapes or realms.

For you, Keli, your restaurant spot seemed to be a sort of Crossroads, from which you could view both RL & SL realities.

 

I've had a few dreams that seemed to be set a Second Life, where objects are rezzed by will, then just as easily deleted & replaced. One of the new features of my regular dreamscapes that comes directly from SL are platforms that can float far above the earth. I didn't used to dream of this feature before I was in SL, but now they're fairly common. Flying & creating objects were already common features of my dream world.

I find there are different kinds of lands in my dreams, which are differentiated by feeling more than anything else. There are the places that look more or less like real waking life, with even roads, freeways & rivers to connect them. There are airports from which I can fly to other places. There are shopping malls, business parks, residential neighborhoods, schools, apartment buildings & casinos.

There are places that are seemingly real world, but are set in the past or future. If I dream I'm in the past & I ask someone else what year this is, they look at me like I'm crazy. I've learned instead to find a newspaper & look at it's date, or else I just guess the time by people's clothing & behavior. 

There are places that seem like other worlds, perhaps on some other planet or alternate reality. These feel much like the real waking world, but they aren't. Technology may be more advanced. Architecture may be very different. Yet they still feel pretty "normal".

Then there are places that have the feel of darkness & fear. These may seem normal at first, but I feel trapped in them. Other people may die around me or be turned into monsters, though I can never be hurt myself. I may have to face or defeat some minor demon to escape them. I call these places "suburbs of Hell".

There are places that feel like lands of the dead, not of this world, but not scary either. They may seem like "Heaven" or like some Underworld of the ancients. I always feel comfortable in these places. In the same way, I always feel quite comfortable around personifications of Death in my dreams, kind of like we're old friends or kindred spirits.

Rarely, there are places that seem to be on other planes of reality. They have a similar level of detail to my normal lucid dreams, but the details are not of this world. One had a barren landscape, reddish sky & a loud whining sound like from electrical wires.

 

What makes a dreamscape seem like SL rather than any of these other places? Mostly I just know it's SL. I know I'm on a sim or in the SL reality. The feeling is similar to the few times I've dreamt of being in a role-playing game, except that there are specific rules of "physics" for the SL world, like being able to jump off a platform & land safely on the ground below no matter how far below it is.

To me, the feeling of being in SL while in a dream is a signal that I'm perhaps not dealing with RL issues & realities. I may be dealing with personal issues, such as how I feel about my friendships or my desire to live in a safe fantasy world, but the issues this dream represents have little to do with my mundane, waking life issues.

What is "real" vs. "not real"?  To me, our dreams are just as real as is our waking life, but they represent our internal, psychological life rather than our external, physical life. Unfortunately, they're difficult to make sense of with our waking-life rational mind.