Dream Logic

[davywavy]

It's been said that there's nothing more boring than other people talking about their dreams, and if you agree with that you'd better stop reading right now.

Still here? Sucker.

I'm aware that dreams have their own internal logic which makes sense at the time but not upon waking, but sometimes one awakes with teh nagging feeling of "That must make sense."
Anyway, last night's dream. As a farmer, I owned a huge herd of cattle spread across a massive field. In order to save time bringing them back to their shed at night or to be milked, I installed teleportation pods into which the cows would be herded whenever I wanted them back to the their shed. Every time I did this one or two cows would simply mysteriously vanish, but the herd was so big it replenished itself fast enough for this to be an acceptable loss.

Anyway, after a while of teleporting cows (with acceptable losses), I discovered that doing so was putting me in terrible danger, and that danger would not pass 'for some time'. And then I woke up so I never found out why but with that nagging feeling that it all made sense in some way.

So, question for the day: why did my cow-teleporting activities put me - and the world - in terrible danger?

Comments

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

1) Where were the disappearing cows going? Conversion to pure energy would be bad for whereever that energy ended up, as indeed would a simple living and intact cow if it were to land, for instance, in a china shop.
2) What would happen if you accidentally stepped into a teleporter yourself? Are you still an "acceptable loss"?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I did get the impression that the cows were going to another dimension. Possibly like in Half Life.

[thegreenman.livejournal.com]

If your cows rematerialised inside solid matter then the resulting bang would probably be near planetary in nature....

[(Anonymous)]

I once did the sums for that, and it's more 'big nuke' than planet wrecking.

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

They are returning to the uber-cow and they shall return from space to wreak alien bovine vengeance on us all!

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

Clearly the spirits of horribly murdered cows lost through the teleportation process were growing in number, pressing their collective bulk against the fabric of reality and threatening to tear it open, spilling forth a multitude of immortal, monstrous cow-ghosts and the indescribable horror from beyond space and time who they had been worshipping.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

That's very similar to what I came up with.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

Cow event horizon.

[(Anonymous)]

They were all disappearing into the Milky Way! Ho ho!

H

[(Anonymous)]

People talking about the role-playing characters is even more dull.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I had a dream about my character the other day. Would you like to hear about it?

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Yes, I probably would :)

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I came to the conclusion years ago that it is physically impossible to make character/game stories interesting or funny to people who were not there - if you've ever read "tale from the table" in KODT you'll know what I mean.

There's stories I could tell - the time I laughed so hard during a game that i had to go to hospital, or the time I got Dwight Schulz out of The A-Team to NPC a game I ran - but I've yet to find any way to translate these into writing without making them seem really quite sad and boring.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

There are exceptions
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Jul/gazebo.html

Then again, there's the Dragonlance "novels" :(

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

http://uknc.livejournal.com/5652.html

See? Couldn't make it funny.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Although now I say that...

http://davywavy.livejournal.com/209391.html

http://davywavy.livejournal.com/380091.html

http://www.b3ta.com/questions/fans/post406927

And the best one (the top answer): http://www.b3ta.com/questions/witness/

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Yes, it can be done. I tihk the problem isn't that stories about gaming are inherently boring, it's that story-telling is an art, it's harder than it looks, and most gamers who want to tell their tales aren't very good at it.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the generic sword-and-sorcery fantasy settings they've come up with for said characters to roam.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with the Dreadlands of Xargathrax? Hmn?

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

They tend to be rife with what I call King Steve Syndrome. Every young GM has, at some point, sat down and decided to write the best, most inspiring, most epic history for their fantasy setting that man has ever seen. Then they've stuck arbitrary dates on paper, and after every date they've written a sentence that goes a little like this: "At the Battle of Bogwood Cove, King Steve defeated 10,000 orcs."

And then we never learn who King Steve was, why the orcs were there, why Steve's victory matters to anyone, or indeed anything truly setting-relevant about said battle whatsoever. Rinse and repeat for five hundred times, and voilà, another prospective Tolkien-killer sees the light of day, only to crash into a wall of player apathy. Even as a player, I don't generally care about King Steven, because his story tells me nothing about the setting or why it's the way it is. It's not a history. It's a group of tangentially related sentences, some of which happen to be about marauding orc hordes.

And elves, except then King Steve gets called S'tevenithèl, and he lives up a tree.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

If LJ had a "like" button, I would be using it. The last time I saw this done, it was by an adult - and one who now claims to be a professional in the game industry.

[supermouse.livejournal.com]

Musing on the general message:

Cattle historically - and still today in some cultures - represent wealth - mobile goods of high value with a near-guaranteed return which can be traded. I know finances and the economy are in your circles of interest.

'Acceptable loss' over time can really add up to an unacceptable whole. Things which seemed small and insignificant at the time can add up to a big whammy later on that comes back to hit you.

The general destruction of humanity probably won't be one large event, but the cumulative effects of large numbers of very small actions and tiny, 'acceptable' immediate consequences which combine. This could be financial, or ecological or social.

[(Anonymous)]

I kinda came to the same conclusion overnight. The dream is clearly deeply Freudian and significant. The cows represent Gordon Brown's artificial "bull market", the vanishing cows represent real economic losses which were miraculously "disappeared" into the future, while we were assured that their disappearance would be more than "made up" by the economic legerdemain of more cows being conjured out of thin air, or "endogenous growth theory" to use the once-fashionable term. David's growing sense of unease during the dream represents a dawning fear that trouble lay in store at some point down the line when all the cows that had earlier been vanished off the balance sheet came home to roost, as it were.

And that's how it happened.

H

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

That's pretty good, actually. I'll take that one.

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

Should we now call you Magical Davy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au3-hk-pXsM

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'm rather hurt you don't already.

[moomin-puffin.livejournal.com]

Every time a cow disappeared it landed on the roof of a building, said building housed some sort of explosive device. Too many cows on the roof and boom!