I have pretty crazy dreams. I’ll try to describe the one from last night using adjectives like “crazy”, “strange” as little as possible. In the dream, I was going through a sequence that repeated at least 10 times before it changed. I don’t want to say it was “like” anything that I didn’t actually feel in the dream. But, in order for you to imagine the setting (the walls, the tone) I can say it felt like I was in a clinical experiment, where I was embodied as a human (I initially didn’t see anyone else) but had to do mouse-like tasks, specifically walking through a maze.
The sequence that repeated itself was that I to get from one end of a hallway to the other, and on the floor were hundreds of one identical object. The size of the hallway and the object changed variously, but the objects were never piled up more than one or two deep, so it was never difficult to get from one end of the hallway to the other. The size of the hallway ranged from 10 feet wide and tall and hundreds of feet long, to ~60 cm wide and tall and 30 feet long, which felt like a claustrophobic nightmare; all of the hallways had drastically different lighting, with the really small ones being poorly lit. The objects were typically household workshop objects, like wood for shelves, or springs, or parts of a metal vice clamp. The sides of the hallway were white and drywall-like. Once I got to the end of the hallway, I turned around and looked back down the hall and something happened. Its hard to describe what the feeling was (and its fading as I write this) but it felt like I was gaining a little more consciousness or being each time. Its as if the act of walking down a hallway of a certain size and filled with certain objects arranged randomly were all necessary steps to gain intelligence or become conscious. I kind of got a sense that it was a Frankenstein-like process, where the moment at the end of the hallway I was jolted with something. However, there were no evil or painful overtones. Just each time afterward, I “felt: more. After the jolt, a door opened on the side next to me (it seemed important that it was not the end of the hallway) and I would walk or crawl through to get to the start point of the next hallway.
There was no clear progression in hallway size or object as the dream continued. After about 10 times, something changed after the jolt. Right after the jolt, I had separated, physically, into two different people. I looked over at the other person or whatever and I can’t remember any a sort of appearance, but I knew they were evil. So I went through the open door into the next hallway. The stuff on the floor of this hallway happened to be shelves, so I used that to jam the door as much as I could. I ran to end of this hallway, got jolted again, and went into the next. I could tell my evil(?) half was not far behind me, mostly from sound, but also because I got the sense I knew what they were thinking. In the next hallway, the stuff on the ground was the clamp parts I mentioned earlier. I remember these quite well because it was very MacGuyver-like to jam the door. I didn’t get the sense that I would be able to bring physical things from hallway to hallway, or that I would be able to physically fight my evil half.
This went on for a while, and then segued strangely into something else, as happens often in my dreams. They were making an interpreted version of my life story from earlier in the dream. This would have been a great time to get details about myself (because I certainly was not Dustin in this dream) but they were lacking. The set was like a theatre set, in that it was all in one piece and they used a crane camera to shoot it. It was a long, 15-foot wide hallway (which would actually be a sweet movie set). However, it was completely different from the hallways earlier in the dream because there wasn’t anything on the floor, and half of its width was taken up by little shops and diners like a strip mall, but without any exteriors or fronts (this is why I say it was like a theatre set). As the camera panned across the scene, we saw Keanu Reeves playing me, but dusting something with a black feather duster in a diner that looked suspiciously 50’s. He wasn’t wearing anything particularly rememberable.
And then the dream changed to only audio editors or producers discussing the scene, like some sort of voiceover. I can’t remember the conversation, except that they were discussing the scene and Keanu, and one of them mentioned “The Keanu Effect, as found on TVtropes.org” (a website which I frequent way more than I should, and has eaten up a large amount of my time). I thought this entire thing was pretty fucking weird after I woke up, so I quickly went over to look for The Keanu Effect, which as far as I can tell, is not mentioned by my (dream) definition on tvtropes.org, or anywhere else on the internet. So, for the questionable benefit of the world, here it is:
The Keanu Effect:
Where an actor or director is hired for a particular movie because of work they did in a previous movie has an aspect of what they want in the current movie. For example, with the trope-namer Keanu Reeves, maybe the current director wanted someone who could speak stoically or could do kung fu. However, because of a combination of the incompetence and/or narcism of the hired actor and perhaps the current director being a pushover, they basically just get exactly the same as the previous movie, including script and set changes that make no actual sense for the current movie, but existed in the previous movie.
Trope namer: Keanu Reeves.
See also: M. Night Shyamalan.
The best part about this whole thing, other than all of it, is that the actual scene in my dream with Keanu had him doing nothing like what he normally does.
I have pretty crazy dreams. I’ll try to describe the one from last night using adjectives like “crazy”, “strange” as little as possible. In the dream, I was going through a sequence that repeated at least 10 times before it changed. I don’t want to say it was “like” anything that I didn’t actually feel in the dream. But, in order for you to imagine the setting (the walls, the tone) I can say it felt like I was in a clinical experiment, where I was embodied as a human (I initially didn’t see anyone else) but had to do mouse-like tasks, specifically walking through a maze.
The sequence that repeated itself was that I to get from one end of a hallway to the other, and on the floor were hundreds of one identical object. The size of the hallway and the object changed variously, but the objects were never piled up more than one or two deep, so it was never difficult to get from one end of the hallway to the other. The size of the hallway ranged from 10 feet wide and tall and hundreds of feet long, to ~60 cm wide and tall and 30 feet long, which felt like a claustrophobic nightmare; all of the hallways had drastically different lighting, with the really small ones being poorly lit. The objects were typically household workshop objects, like wood for shelves, or springs, or parts of a metal vice clamp. The sides of the hallway were white and drywall-like. Once I got to the end of the hallway, I turned around and looked back down the hall and something happened. Its hard to describe what the feeling was (and its fading as I write this) but it felt like I was gaining a little more consciousness or being each time. Its as if the act of walking down a hallway of a certain size and filled with certain objects arranged randomly were all necessary steps to gain intelligence or become conscious. I kind of got a sense that it was a Frankenstein-like process, where the moment at the end of the hallway I was jolted with something. However, there were no evil or painful overtones. Just each time afterward, I “felt: more. After the jolt, a door opened on the side next to me (it seemed important that it was not the end of the hallway) and I would walk or crawl through to get to the start point of the next hallway.
There was no clear progression in hallway size or object as the dream continued. After about 10 times, something changed after the jolt. Right after the jolt, I had separated, physically, into two different people. I looked over at the other person or whatever and I can’t remember any a sort of appearance, but I knew they were evil. So I went through the open door into the next hallway. The stuff on the floor of this hallway happened to be shelves, so I used that to jam the door as much as I could. I ran to end of this hallway, got jolted again, and went into the next. I could tell my evil(?) half was not far behind me, mostly from sound, but also because I got the sense I knew what they were thinking. In the next hallway, the stuff on the ground was the clamp parts I mentioned earlier. I remember these quite well because it was very MacGuyver-like to jam the door. I didn’t get the sense that I would be able to bring physical things from hallway to hallway, or that I would be able to physically fight my evil half.
This went on for a while, and then segued strangely into something else, as happens often in my dreams. They were making an interpreted version of my life story from earlier in the dream. This would have been a great time to get details about myself (because I certainly was not Dustin in this dream) but they were lacking. The set was like a theatre set, in that it was all in one piece and they used a crane camera to shoot it. It was a long, 15-foot wide hallway (which would actually be a sweet movie set). However, it was completely different from the hallways earlier in the dream because there wasn’t anything on the floor, and half of its width was taken up by little shops and diners like a strip mall, but without any exteriors or fronts (this is why I say it was like a theatre set). As the camera panned across the scene, we saw Keanu Reeves playing me, but dusting something with a black feather duster in a diner that looked suspiciously 50’s. He wasn’t wearing anything particularly rememberable.
And then the dream changed to only audio editors or producers discussing the scene, like some sort of voiceover. I can’t remember the conversation, except that they were discussing the scene and Keanu, and one of them mentioned “The Keanu Effect, as found on TVtropes.org” (a website which I frequent way more than I should, and has eaten up a large amount of my time). I thought this entire thing was pretty fucking weird after I woke up, so I quickly went over to look for The Keanu Effect, which as far as I can tell, is not mentioned by my (dream) definition on tvtropes.org, or anywhere else on the internet. So, for the questionable benefit of the world, here it is:
The Keanu Effect:
Where an actor or director is hired for a particular movie because of work they did in a previous movie has an aspect of what they want in the current movie. For example, with the trope-namer Keanu Reeves, maybe the current director wanted someone who could speak stoically or could do kung fu. However, because of a combination of the incompetence and/or narcism of the hired actor and perhaps the current director being a pushover, they basically just get exactly the same as the previous movie, including script and set changes that make no actual sense for the current movie, but existed in the previous movie.
Trope namer: Keanu Reeves.
See also: M. Night Shyamalan.
The best part about this whole thing, other than all of it, is that the actual scene in my dream with Keanu had him doing nothing like what he normally does.