Christmas Light Enigma
Some dreams contain literal meaning, some dreams contain symbolic, most a mixture of the two.
I'm not sure what to make of the dream I had this morning. I was in a cabin, not quite a log cabin but something that was primarily wood, maybe knotty pine or something like that.
Hung from the ceiling were miniature Christmas Tree lights. They were the type that are made up of series strings where one bulb goes bad and the whole string goes dark and you spend hours trying to figure out which bulb is the culprit.
They have little devices in that are supposed to short out a failed bulb so that the others continue to function but they frequently fail themselves. It's all kind of a farce actually, the design intent I think is that when one bulb fails, and shorts, that places extra voltage on the remaining bulbs, which in turn fail faster. With each failed bulb the remaining bulbs fail at an ever faster pace. You go to bed with one failed bulb and wake up to the whole string being dead.
If you are fortunate, you can nurse these things to live two or three years before the sockets are too corroded to be salvageable, then you have to replace them.
Well, these type of lights were hanging from the ceiling. There were many of the bulbs that were rapidly flickering, like there was an intermittent connection somewhere in the string and it was vibrating or arcing or in some other manner rapidly making intermittent connections.
I've had my moments of frustration with these things. But this is where it got weird. I found that if I looked at one of the flickering bulbs at an angle that placed it directly in-line with a non-flickering bulb, it would stop flickering, so would all the others in series with it. This would happen just by looking at it, I didn't have to actually touch it to make it work. But I had to look at it in a way that lined up the flickering bulb exactly with a functional bulb behind it, else it would have no effect.
Clearly this isn't a literal dream, so if there is a metaphor here what is it? So far it's lost on me.
I'm not sure what to make of the dream I had this morning. I was in a cabin, not quite a log cabin but something that was primarily wood, maybe knotty pine or something like that.
Hung from the ceiling were miniature Christmas Tree lights. They were the type that are made up of series strings where one bulb goes bad and the whole string goes dark and you spend hours trying to figure out which bulb is the culprit.
They have little devices in that are supposed to short out a failed bulb so that the others continue to function but they frequently fail themselves. It's all kind of a farce actually, the design intent I think is that when one bulb fails, and shorts, that places extra voltage on the remaining bulbs, which in turn fail faster. With each failed bulb the remaining bulbs fail at an ever faster pace. You go to bed with one failed bulb and wake up to the whole string being dead.
If you are fortunate, you can nurse these things to live two or three years before the sockets are too corroded to be salvageable, then you have to replace them.
Well, these type of lights were hanging from the ceiling. There were many of the bulbs that were rapidly flickering, like there was an intermittent connection somewhere in the string and it was vibrating or arcing or in some other manner rapidly making intermittent connections.
I've had my moments of frustration with these things. But this is where it got weird. I found that if I looked at one of the flickering bulbs at an angle that placed it directly in-line with a non-flickering bulb, it would stop flickering, so would all the others in series with it. This would happen just by looking at it, I didn't have to actually touch it to make it work. But I had to look at it in a way that lined up the flickering bulb exactly with a functional bulb behind it, else it would have no effect.
Clearly this isn't a literal dream, so if there is a metaphor here what is it? So far it's lost on me.
posted by Nanook at Thursday, August 02, 2007
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