4/24 dream

In the past few days, I’ve been going to political demonstrations, art galleries, a role-playing game store, reading books about neural networks, and listening to lots of old-school ‘70s rap. Then I had the misfortune to eat a lot of beans and go to sleep with a slight fever, when I had the following dream:

I’m in the parking lot behind a train station. There are lots of bands of ragtag refugee-looking humans, each band has their own raft made out of debris. Each raft is surrounded by a humming cloud of tiny UFOs. The humans frequently fart with earthquake-like force. Basically it is a whirling cloud of flying rafts (the kind that shipwrecked people make out of wood, 50-gallon-barrels-and-twine), with each raft being surrounded by its own cloud of UFOs, and everyone shooting yellow arc-like blasts of lightning, farts, and sperm at each other.

What the hell is this about, I wondered (in the dream)? The answer: The UFOs’ main goal is to fight each other- although whether it is 2 main factions or a free-for-all is not clear. But the UFOs can’t fight unless they get power by harvesting the huge human-gas explosions. Each fart can be used to charge either a raygun, charge the engine that makes the UFO fly, charge an anti-raygun-shield, or create some kind of sperm-bomb that lets the UFOs breed. The Human’s Zodiac sign determines which thing the fart-power is used for, and of course the strength of the fart determines how much power can be harvested.

But the thing is, the humans don’t want to donate their farts. So the aliens start zapping the humans instead of each other. But this is unsatisfactory for everyone involved- . Eventually a comporomise is worked out in the form of an impromptu “battle-economy”: the humans agree to fart on the UFOs, and in return,after the UFOs transform the fart into powers, they give humans back a certain fraction of that power. Thus, the human rafts eventually start flying, shooting lightning-light raygun blasts, deploying shields and sperm-bombs TOO. But predictably, the humans wind up with too much power, and use their new power to demand increasingly higher percentages of the fart-power. Which means that the UFOs have to start shooing the humans again, until a new equilibrium is reached.

I should point out that both humans and UFOs have a vested interest in coming to an agreement because if a human farts without a contract, very little of the fart’s power can be harnessed by ANYONE. So what happens is this: Humans and UFOs will trade fire until they agree on a fair percentage superpowers to kick back to the humans ? fair at that given moment, given who is winning the battles around them ? and then the humans will start farting. Then that UFO can finally start shooting at its UFO enemies, (which, remember, is the whole point). But this fart-harvest ITSELF changes the balance of power of the OTHER human-vs.-UFO battles around it because now the first human-vs.-UFO team has more resources, so the other teams have to re-negotiate their own percentages, while being shot at.

After waking, I realized that the whole Zodiac thing makes matters even MORE complex: if one raft of people is all Capricorns, then UFOs can’t trade farts-for-power with that raft forever, because Capricorns can only produce one of the four powers (no idea which one). This is a systemic instability which means UFOs must constantly migrate from raft to raft, like farmers rotating their crops. Sometimes, I guess, this would even mean leaving rafts full of really powerful farters for rafts of only mildly gaseous people.

Anyway, these starting conditions lead to an endless all-against-all struggle, which is also a self-sustaining equilibrium! Pretty good for a night’s work. Anyone wanting to catch my fever email me and I’ll cough on you.

suppose I should stress that I don't ACTUALLY think this would be a "cool game," - I don't even think it's in particularly good taste. But if you look at it as a dream, it is kind of a trip.

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