I know I dream at night. But 99% of the mornings I awake with zero recall of what and where my subconscious roamed overnight. Friends can recount dreams with fully developed plots, dialogue. My recall of dreams is usually like “I was in a boat.”
Perhaps due fatigue of finally getting home after an intense trip, falling asleep on the couch around 9:30am and then being wide away 1:30-3:00am, but waking this morning, a detail of a dream was very clear; not really any story elements to it. It fit into a tweet.
I dreamt I fell a large tree with an axe. The fall was perfectly placed in the road, but I could not move it alone. Interpret?
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) July 27, 2015
I can picture the front corner of the lot where I was chopping (there is no tall tree there). I can see the small hand axe I was using (an old one, and why was I not using the heavier wood chopping axe?). I remember thinking I was not making much progress and then the thing fell perfectly, in line with the road next to my house.
Beside’s Bill’s humorous reply (sorry no dream GIFs), a retweet came by, mine in the middle of several other tweeted dreams:
What the @dreamb0t retweets
It does not surprise me when these bot retweets happen. They are unexpected; I’ve seen it happen when tweeting lines from The Big Lebowksi, to one that corrects bad grammar, etc. It’s a weird niche of twitter. That I love.
So I curiosity click to note @dreamb0t retweets when anyonw uses “dreamt” / “dreamed” in a tweet. That’s not much of a big deal. But following the link in the bio, I see something more interesting; whomever did this is harnessing it as data on dream trends, and making available (not the JSON links):
@dreamb0t provides data on dream trends
I bet Tom can start tinkering on something that generates net poetry from dream words (?).
And you can generate charts! It’s not too surprising that there are more dreams of trees in the summer (conjecture?)
Monthly dream term trends on “tree”
Wheels start to spin here on learning activities. Simply using the site, you might try to extrapolate meaning for changes in dream trends, and then form hypotheses and start to question how you would test them? Or for advanced tech students, what might it take to build your own twitter bot and data store? Or???
Digging deeper into the domain (because I Can Read URLs), you find out more about the person behind the site.
Its reminiscent of Jonathan Harris’s We Feel Fine.
My dream is not super important in the scheme of things. I will forget it after breakfast. But this little curiosity hole is what I crave about the free, open internet. It’s more than open access to stuff, its the ability to build things of it. It’s what we get out of open APIs.
And also what happens for the vision of the web as connecting people, knowledge, and cats. Fight for that one. Demand it. Be it.
Top / Featured image credit: flickr photo by smerikal http://flickr.com/photos/smerikal/5537752633 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
That @hackdeeper site is really trippy. What an interesting find. I’m glad you know how to read URLs and discovered that. Did you watch the video? Whoa. It makes me slightly fearful for the violence we consume in our daily media if a meme can propagate so quickly through our subconscious. I also appreciate the simplicity of your tree dream; nature and cooperation – not any violence (except perhaps for the tree).