I very rarely watch movies or series; only about a handful of times during the past decade. As an ex- movie geek I lost this modern-day habit a decade ago, and it never came back.
Last month I finally watched the movie Matrix! I was surprised by the similarity of some of its scenes to my recurring dreams about simulated reality that I had prior to watching the movie, or any other similar motion picture for that matter.
My time of having dreams about simulations, precede watching Matrix and Avatar, as well as the newer series Black Mirror. During those couple of months, I was steering my lucid dreams to fantasize about the possibility of us all being inside some form of simulation. Every other night there was a new story cast behind my eyelids. I wrote down and posted some of them.
I got super excited about these visuals, and communicated them passionately. Little did I know that people had already masterfully depicted such fantasies in blockbuster movies. The dream imagery that I appreciated and presented as novel, might have felt like old news to some of you.
Was everyone out there aware of this movie genre of simulated reality, except for me, the one person most expressly obsessed about it?
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Anyhow, the similarity between those fantasies and some of those movies’ visual effects is strange. Why would such images be triggered in someone who hasn’t seen them before?
Consider particularly these three landscapes:
1. The consciousness warehouse (The dark room): There was this claustrophobic scene in some of those movies/episodes where all of us consciousness entities despite our differences are stacked up very efficiently as same items in a “dark room”. This was behind the scene of existence, the kernel of reality and any other colorful happy realization that was just an illusion experienced by those identical larvae that in reality live in a claustrophobic tight space like a lab, a warehouse or a graveyard.
I hadn’t seen a scenery quite like this before, but the dark room occurred to me in several different forms; I experienced humans once as separate folders in the physical drive of a simulation server, another time as lots of tiny hardware modules buried under the surface of another planet after we had destroyed ours. Once again as information-like replicas in a “grid” of a library, and also as dormant larvae aligned next to each other like a graveyards. Think of those teleportation helmets in the Matrix or the transfer booths in Avatar. All these nightmares occurred as disturbing and depressive recognition of the nature of true reality until I woke up and double-checked my body, making sure that I am made of real “meat” in the physical space.
2. Augmented objects with aliasing artifact: There was also this other visual effect in the augmented scenes in Black Mirror where a simulated object was overlaid on the base reality, but with a slightly different resolution/texture. That also occurred to me quite a few times in dreams (and reality!). Like this fantasy that people around me could be actually not in the scene but instead augmented objects overlaid on it; however so seamlessly that I had never noticed any aliasing artifacts in the border of their silhouette until a “glitch in the matrix” accidentally revealed them to me.
3. Object impermanence: The world goes as much as the observer goes. This crazy experimental possibility has a huge potentials to release wild imagination and was handed to me a couple of times in my dreams. Think of each object that you see and then there’s something behind it and let it surprise you in a stream of events that diverge faster than any other technique in dreaming!
On the extreme opposite of the object impermanence lies the object permanence in the mind, that is also a crazy realization. In a couple of breath-taking realizations I had the idea that the barriers around us are not opaque objects that stop the light from things “behind” them to reach us as observers. We are aware of the whole universe around us, but walls, surfaces and physical barriers overwrite our local observations and temporarily delete those further objects from our memory. As if we have full sight to the end of the universe and a sanctioning effect is additionally in place to give us an illusion of separation. That, could be hacked in my dreams, giving the observer ability to remove visual barriers wall after wall.
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The fact that I intuited these landscapes before watching them gives them a universality beyond my dream journals and beyond their Hollywood representation.
Chances are that these images are triggered independently but by a common cause.
1. The dark room scenery can be sparked by the ordinary experience of some day-to-day man-made phenomena. An ordinary dictionary in a sense is a dark room for words, if each of them has an ocean of meaning. The same goes for books stored in a large library or our lost humans buried under a real-world graveyard.
2. Any experience with VR and AR can trigger this; The visual artifacts of the augmented objects, the aliasing effect on their borders or the pixelation on their surface.
3. The sceneries with hacked object impermanence may also be triggered by any experience in programming for CAD graphics. Having a history of placing objects in different layers of front or behind each other with respect to an observer, etc. Those real-life experiences could also be some hidden signals that had come back haunting me in dreams, though this time putting myself on the stage of the simulation.
Apart from these real-life experiences that can inspire our dreams to a Matrix level fantasy, what else can be in the play? That is my main question here.
Is there a deeper universality to those experiences that we tap in to subconsciously every now and then as dreams, hallucinations or the work of art? Are there some visual archetypes in the collective mind of the mankind that extract those landscapes out of a common intuitive treasure? Like some neurological explanation that lies behind some common experiences such as out of the body or near-death experience. Say some brain circuitry creates similar funny illusions and trigger same visual effects in independent cases.
An alternative to all these explanations is pure coincidence, unless…
Unless we live in the matrix and we can tap in to its kernel every now and then!
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Interesting similarities anyway! Please next time my dreams resembled a movie, do me a favor and mention the title in the comments!
All have a good day in the simulation.