On a night train

“So… you are from before the Internet?” She started speaking with me, for some reason I was not able to imagine, when she caught me staring at her tattoos. First she stared a me, then she moved down the earphones, then she oddly smiled at me before popping up the question. I’m a virgin – don’t have tattoos – so all her skin art called my attention. I told her so in my broken interlingua. That seemed to relax her, and she friendly swaps to standard English. “All pre-net people are reluctant to colour, so to be fair I was also curious about you. Even my father got some drawings. Why don’t you?”

“Belonephobia.” She seems to fade out for a moment, looking through the window. Probably projecting the meaning of it on it. Just in case I clarify the word.”I’m deeply scared of needles. I used to faint during a blood test. Now I’m getting better – I have no other way.”

“Some medical? No, you look healthy. Let me guess. Are you getting the Treat?” I nod. “I see. Can you believe you are the first person I really meet who’s taking it? Of course I saw you on vids. But still you are rare. I’m so lucky! I was suspecting you were one. You know what they say, that you become a bot, that an AI is taking your body.” I laugh. She smiles. Her teeth are all white and perfect. I wonder how much of her is adjusted.

“For me, it was this or dying. Let’s say I had no option. What do you think? Do I look like a teen?” This time she laughs. I know I don’t. Her voice has a metallic echo. I wonder if she’s recording, but actually, I don’t care. I can opt out of the record. My AI, although static – he lives in my desktop – is very friendly when I ask her to delete me. Of course we can’t still delete memories and she may tell her friends about me. I look at myself. Black jeans, an original Nirvana t-shirt, no glasses, no visible electronics – I carry it all in my backpack – and a somehow conservative haircut.

“You do not look like! You have old eyes. But also, you don’t look like my old ones. ” Her parents I guess. “You know. You are the new tribe.” She seems to hesitates, the she glances briefly again at the window – checking something? For a moment I regret I didn’t get my lenses. But I was not feeling like today I was going to need them. I smile the best way I can, trying to tell her that it’s OK, that I’m safe. I wonder if my teeth – implants – look weird to her also.”Some people call you returners. Are you offended?”

“Not at all. I’m returning, after all.” Returners. I heard the term, but I didn’t think of me as one. Back to the Future I guess. I’m 80 and here I am, speaking with a teenager in equal terms. I despise myself. Am I so despicable? Luckily I don’t care about what they say, and she obviously neither.

“Well this is my stop. It was nice to speak with you, returner. See ya around, ya? Take care!” She stands up in a smooth move, like a wild animal. I flash her my teeth once more, and I wonder if I will see her again. I could track her and she could track me if she wants, so it’s not a sad goodbye. Strange days, now if you speak with someone you may be connected forever with him or her. Unless you know how to break the link. That I know. But I will not. Not in this case.

Dream: I’m a spy of some kind

I’m too old to have these kind of dreams, I tell to myself all the time. But no, here I go, once again, I’m an agent – not with gadgets like James Bond, more like the realistic one – and I walk the city followed by two girls, displayed in the AI drawing above. There you see my blonde contact, Neva, who’s passively aggressively flirting with me, but doesn’t let me a way in – and my Indian contact, Navani. In my dream, she has loose hair also, but I didn’t manage to display that. We are together caring for some papers that, as far as I remember, are the designs for some rocket engine. In the picture, we just managed to find a place to discuss the transaction. Before that, Navani – the Indian girl – and me were together in bed. Because she saved my life, and I saved her, during a wild chase where we avoided to be killed by undefined thugs – some Chinese-looking, some Turks – jumping around shops, and roofs while running through that labyrinth of small streets. Neva – the blondie – found us out afterwards hidden under the sheets and right now she’s trying to get her piece, maybe for real this time. We’ll never know! I need to start leaving a notebook close to my bed to write more details. And I need a faster, better, image generator 😉

Dream: Amsterdam-American

We are in the middle of the school holiday season and once more I don’t have a clear holiday plan. So every possibility got mixed up in my mind and I ended up dreaming with what you see above, more or less. I was – we were – visiting one city with the soul of Amsterdam and the American spirit. Imagine it like what if the original New Amsterdam were still Dutch. Or Swedish. In that world, everything is a little bit more mixed, we speak interenglish – a very contaminated version of the British English – and everyone seems to be very happy. Because no one is forced to work, the end of slavery somehow derived onto a universal income, and it worked. Museums were free. Beer and food was cheap, and delicious. Weather was nice. A dream vacation. Never better said 😉

Dream: relaxing in a cabin by the river

I’m not the man in the picture, unfortunately. Let’s say I’m a little bit more round in the middle. Without being fat. I think what I bought is called daddy bod. Anyhow, she doesn’t complain, and my children love to lay over it. But let’s focus. Why this picture? I had a busy dream that I barely remember where I was running around, looking for people to perform mysterious tasks. Like literally I don’t know what I was doing but it was important. And I remember being acknowledged by those I was dealing with, totally, I get it, you are the man of the day, you know, all chocolate and honey. I guess my impostor syndrome is coming back, starting with haunting my dreams. I will survive it, because in the end, I don’t really care about. I don’t give a sh*t. I do it because of the reward. In that case, in this dream, the price was my own cabin, close to that river. Where I can go whenever I want, and get lost. Forget about all the stress and lay down, waiting for the sun to go down. And the fireflies to draw pictures in the sky. Pity that it was just a dream. Fortunately, she was with me also.

Dream: the Dimensional Digesting Robots

I believe we all are unsure of our reality at one point. I find traces of that everywhere: in books, in music, art, philosophy – Plato’s cavern anyone? In my last dream, humankind finally found out the truth about it, and decided somehow to fight it. I was one of those fighters. Reality was being consumed. We called them the DDRs. The Dimensional Digesters. They started destroying the Neanderthal time and space, far in the past, and they advanced little by little until reaching our days. We didn’t know about them because they were careful, and they attacked always where we had no references. But we found them on the Victorian Era. One day, a gentleman from the 19th century appeared on the 21st, in the middle of Piccadilly, grabbing a piece of technology beyond our knowledge. A robot arm, and a piece of its body. The NATO created quickly after analysing it two units: the ground force that was going to enter into their reality, the nicknamed DDR Matrix, and the science force – us – who were suppose to predict when the next deletion was going to happen.

I had fun with this dream. Time travelling, robot fights, you name it. You may think you can track the inspiration for this dream but I’m afraid you are wrong: it comes from a talk I attended about the future of in-silico simulations. At one point, a quite heated discussion started about the algorithm for an N-dimensional random walk. Yeah. We speak about it. Randomly, pardom my repetition.

Dream: Edinburg in the future

I have lived for a while in the Scottish city when I was almost a teenager. I do have good memories of it: the meadows, the discos, the Fringe. While there, I was fantasising about randomly finding the tomb of the King, you know the one I mean. Since a little bit before the Brexit I was seriously considering a comeback, but the more I hear about the situation in UK the more I delay it. The other day I dreamt that we finally managed to go just to find out that everything was futuristic, but oddly, the spirit of the old city was still around. The punks around Princess street became cyberpunks, and there were flying taxis, but not so many. It was a peaceful future, as you can see in the picture generated to remember it. And I woke up with a warm feeling. Everything is going to be fine, this is not the end, things are going to get better. Yes 🙂

Dream: working on the Moon

Well I’m sorry to say now I’m not posting my dreams as much as I could because I want first to get a visual tag that comes with it. And as you should know already I have a bunch of tools for it that generate quite some dreamy images, but they are definitely very difficult to train to get something that resembles what I remember from the previous night. Let’s compromise for example on the one above. I wanted to picture me working on the maintenance of some moon habitats. So far so good, but the place, in my dream, was… I’m going to say.. more normal. In other words: I was on the moon but it was not different than being on Earth. Just that we were covered by a dome, sometimes owned by the landlord, sometimes by the city. You get it. Well, it may come, if we are lucky, in our lifetime. I’m ready to fly a little bit further than usual, if needed, to free myself from this crazy world. Sweet dreams, if possible. Post Data: I may backpost some stuff that I left unfinished the last week because of … random activities that are not important 🙂

Dream: the hidden square

Again the AI is not helping me to reach the picture I want. Let me see if I manage to describe it. I’m walking through an old city. It’s probably the primordial one, the one that then AI is using to generate images. After turning around a corner, I meet a fancy antiquities shop, that of course I visit. They have art-deco lamps, gorgeous chairs, a piano, some old framed portraits, an hexagonal chess, jars and pots, and another door at the end of the exhibition room. Through the door I see another street and I hear some music. I ask the clerk, a blonde lady, where that door will lead me. She shays “I’ll show you”, and she grabs my arm. I don’t resist – she’s not young but she’s still quite pretty, so I feel flattered – and we cross together the threshold just to appear in a cute little square filled with street shops and tables. The church in the back – because each square in Europe has one – looks like some sort of gothic flower popping out of the ground, with multiple needles protruding from the central building at strange angles. A flower or a hedgehog. Anyway. She drives me to one of the shops, and orders something for me. I don’t have money but I don’t care. The dish I get contains four pieces of something that looks like a cucumber filled with minced meat and vegetables. Delicious and healthy, most probably! I sit on a table next by, with a group of people, and quickly I’m offered a beer. What a nice place. Pity that is not real. Maybe I need to go out more.

Dream: the abandoned amusement park

I climb, and climb, and climb, until I can’t go any higher. Then I look around. That will do it. Where am I? It’s some kind of amusement park, like Disneyland or similar, but long time abandoned. I try to remember the last thing I did before starting to climb, but I can’t. Looking for someone, I believe. This place is desert, but I can’t be the last man standing. I wave and shout “Hellooooo!” …something like an echo comes from below, to my right. Yes. I shout again. “Hiiii!” I finally hear. I start the ride down, almost slipping, but I don’t care, somehow I know this can’t be real. Up and down I become a wagon with hands and feet instead of wheels. At the sea level, a group of people gather around a fancy round stove – well if it is not, at least it shines like one. “Hey, it took you some time to cross the rollercoaster!” one girl says. There are two men more and a black woman in this odd group. I wonder who shouted. “I didn’t know where to go. You could have started a fire or something.” They laugh to my suggestion, sharing a private joke. I grin.”Well, here we are, where do I go now?” The black girl with the dreadlocks comes closer to me. She stinks. But I ignore it. “To the civilisation, of course. Where you’ll find a little bit more people than here.”

Dream: running around

I have visited a few mayor cities, like Tokyo, Amsterdam, London, Rome, so many times, that sometimes they mix in my dreams. Last dream I was hanging around with a band of guys that I don’t remember from anywhere and can be easily identified with the two in the krea.ai generated picture above. OK, my leader was blonde, maybe more similar to the vampire leader of the Lost Boys, but the feeling is the same. Sorry it’s not an easy game to extract the images from a dream, even with these new tools. But allow me to continue. So I was carried around by this gang and the leader proposes something nasty, like “let’s crash this shop” or similar. I decide not to join, like in the movie referred above, and I’m therefore abandoned in a crossroad. Just to find out that with them, I have lost also my trousers and my pants. And I spent the rest of the dream trying to hide my junk from the by-passers while trying to find some suitable clothes. Because sometimes you just have a normal dream 😀