I have always had a substantial interest in my dreams because past experiences have taught me they are far more than what most researchers know.

For example, when I was younger, I used to frequently have lucid dreams, and once I became lucid in a dream I could go anywhere I wanted just by thinking about it.  I wanted to understand if I could get real information about places I went to so I devised an experiment.  The experiment was simple, I would go somewhere I hadn’t been but that was close enough to drive to, make a mental note of the surroundings and write it down upon wakening, then drive there and see if it matched what I saw, and it did.

Many of the things you see on Eskimo North today I first saw in dreams in the early days of my BBS.  Back when my computer was a Trs-80 model III, a little 2 Mhz box with 48k of RAM, a screen that was black-and-white with a total of 16 lines of text, 64 characters wide, and block graphics that had a resolution of 128 x 192, each block could be on or off and actually it wasn’t real graphics, it just characters that divided the cell up into a 2×3 grid with an ASCII value mapped to each possible combination.  Well, it wasn’t actually ASCII but it was ASCII values with the high bit turned on.

While I had this simple machine with text-only applications, e-mail, messages, and some text games, I kept having dreams where machines were networked together and you could talk all over the globe, and where there was full motion high resolution colour video and audio and people interacted across great distances this way, and people of common interest found each other this way, and it was these dreams where I saw the potential for this technology that drove me to create what I saw.

So the first thing I do when I wake up is try to remember my dreams and if they aren’t completely trivial, record them.

I watched a program on Nova about dreams, how there are actually two types of dreams, those that occur during REM sleep (it used to be we thought we only dreamed during REM sleep), and those that occur during non-REM sleep.  And it seemed that one type seemed to involve memory consolidation and the other projection into the future.  There was no mention of the type of lucid dream I described earlier which I think are the most interesting of all.

They also said that people tended to dream more when they are depressed, not my personal experience, I seem to have about the same regardless of my mental state though there are nights when every time I wake up it is out of an intense dream, and there are others where I have no memories of dreams at all, last night was one of the latter.  Sometimes I find the converse to be true, it’s easier to be in a good mood when I see some clear path for moving forward, more difficult when I don’t, and dreams tend to help with that.