Always cool. I just had a dream (during a nap, oh yeah) where I was listening to this folksy alterna-rock song, and somehow following along to the storyline of the song. It felt like the extended trailer of a film and was highly cinematic. Think Michael Chabon being directed by Whit Stillman. Lots of driving around in cars with old people and everyone’s dressed well. And something about someone’s marriage not working out. The lyrics of the wistful song were a litany of things in the the past and then a chorus along the lines of not wanting to remember it all, but “only these days”. The singer was in tune but had unspectacular, avuncular voice, as though John Hurt were singing. Then, in the dream, I somehow exited the supra-reality of this cinematic world to quite ordinarily google the lyrics of this song to find it what the song was. Because I liked it. Then my level-of-mimesis-mismatch-detector went off apparently, because I realized I wasn’t going to find the lyrics to a real song in my dream world, and I got up. But obviously my level-of-mimesis-mismatch-detector was mistaken, because I didn’t find the lyrics to the song in the real world, either.
But the cinematic part of the film, some of which seemed to be in black and white, was actually being experienced as real. With all the research into brain interfacing and VR, there should be no reason not to expect that in 30 to 50 years you will just put electrodes on your head (or more likely, put a USB 5.0 cable into some socket installed at birth by Apsofty – the combination of Microsoft, Apple and Sony formed in 2012) and experience a fully-VR movie. Instead of multiple camera angles, for example, there will be the ability to experience the narrative as different characters. Something to look forward to, I suppose? This was just one thing that made the “holodeck” on 1990s Star Trek so stupid. Obviously you wouldn’t actually have to go anywhere physical to experience VR. It will just be an i-prefixed thingie that you plug into your brain.
inchoative: a journal 