A Glitch in the Matrix

The Glitch with Static

Last week I may have experienced a glitch in the matrix, at lease in the dream matrix. It went down for a moment.

By way of introduction I should mention that as an old man, I apparently don't need more than 4 or 5 hours of sound sleep a night, and as a consequence I often spend 3 to 5 hours either awake or dozing. I spent these hours thinking about whatever my current writing project is, which is usually boring enough to put me back to sleep. However, being on the borderland of sleep and wakefulness, dreams are sometimes half in sleep and half in (semi) wakefulness. And I was in this borderland one night last week when I experienced the momentary glitch of the matrix. Well, something glitched, anyway.

I was dreaming when suddenly, the "screen" in my dream abruptly, for no reason, when entirely white - with a hiss of static. All I "saw" in my head, in my dream, was whiteness, with a distinct hint of static. This white gap in the dream was so abrupt that it pushed me over the border to wakefulness. It only lasted a second or less before the dream continued on for a bit, but I was awake and consciously aware of it happening, and the strangeness of it happening. I can think of no explanation for it happening, except that something somewhere went "boink" for a second, either in my mind or the matrix. Of that I'm certain. 

I'm not going to seriously propose that there is such a thing as the matrix, or that we are in some simulation, as some scientists propose, that might occasionally go momentarily down. And yet, I find the incident very strange, as I find my dreams. For, you see, my mind is not visual. I can't call up more than a murky approximation of an image in my mind; more like just the knowledge of what it looks like than an actual image. This syndrome is known as aphantasia. The strange thing is that I know that even though I can't recall my dreams in any more detail than the murky images my waking mind can produce, I know that I do see images in my dreams, complicated, full color ones, and my impression is that they can be quite detailed, including the faces of all those strangers I encounter in my dreams... I find this disconnect between my waking mind and my sleeping ones... interesting. And inexplicable. It seems to me that the disconnect between the waking world and the sleeping one for me, at least, is very hard to explain with our current knowledge. I have to believe that we know a lot less about what we think we know than what there is to know. Just say'n.

The writing update promised for today will appear next week, wind and tide permitting.