Dreams are useless. They’re just random firings of neurons that consume my precious energy, energy I was saving for a big day sitting in a chair behind a desk and lounging on the couch. Imagine if, in place of dreaming, we could recuperate 10% faster, wake 45 minutes sooner for an extra 1.5 years of conscious life. We could—every night—watch that one extra episode of Shadow and Bone [1]. We could—each morning—behold sunrise. But what do we get instead? The novelty of randomness in dreams. Is it really worth trading a year and a half of your life for those occasionally remembered, somehow-believable images of your relatives with beaks? And why waste time on nightmares when the waking nightmare of daily life is so much more enthralling? “But, Joel,” I hear you say, “my dreams are so fun.” *giggle* “But, Joel, my dreams are so novel.”
No, no they’re not.
They may seem novel to you, the dreamer, because you’re the one experiencing them. But when you explain your dream to someone else, you’re just sapping them of life. Sure, when someone recounts their horseback ride through Wollies, it’s kinda fun, maybe worth sharing. It might deserve a chuckle or snort. But when you go on to describe all the weird flavours of tuna on the shelves (Spicy Pineapple, Mango & Cucumber, Chicken, Pickle, Sand & Grass) and all the wacky sizes of the tins (extra-extra small to extra-extra large skipping medium because that’s just two extra-small cans in this dream) and all the names of all the patrons in Aisle 4 (including Donald Bradman, Aretha Franklin and Naomi Watts who is definitely Naomi Watts but looks nothing like Naomi Watts, more like an oversized pencil) and how the horse is suddenly mechanical and branded Harley Davidson and how there are balloons on the roof and how there are blue potatoes and then you include a slew of other random details that have nothing to do with the vague dream-plot and you say there are five-leaf clovers etc., the dream becomes boring to me. Along with our additional 1.5 years, if we extinguished dreams, we would wipe away their drudging recounts too.
And don’t try to tell me that dreams are psychosexual; this Freudian take was discredited moons ago. And don’t try to tell me they’re for memory storage because dreams are hallucinations—random. On the rare occasion they touch on something experienced, something worth logging, they’re always distorted, unreal, nothing like what actually happened. Visualising fantasies obstructs our view of the real thing. So dreams are useless. Well, at least this is what I thought—until a video game changed my mind.
Alright, I’m going to boast (and there’s no way you can physically stop me): a couple weeks back I finished the Nintendo Switch port of Super Mario 3D World. This may not seem worth getting all big-mouthed about but in reality it is, because when I say finished, I mean finished-finished, like all 105 levels with gold flags at the end, all stamps and 380 green stars. This including that last secret-secret unlockable level only accessible when you’ve done everything else, the devilish, frustrating, nigh-impossible (for a casual gamer) 117th level: Champion’s Road (that’s me, by the way, Champion). The course is devoid of checkpoints and power-ups. Mario, with his limited jump set, must navigate platforms a single tile wide, platforms that disappear and reappear on two-second cycles, platforms that skrt-skrt around like racecars. He has to dodge like twenty overlapping lasers whilst speed-boosting above an endless abyss. The music here is grand. There’s a correlation between musical opulence and difficulty in Mario games. It took me 1500+ attempts over several days to land that last golden flag. That’s 1500+ cries from a plummeting Italian plumber, 1500+ fanfares as the orchestral music restarts, 1500+ slaps to my forehead which is now permanently blushing and engorged. (1500+, shit, maybe I shouldn’t be boasting.)
Every night, for two weeks straight, I’d give myself fifty attempts. And every morning, for two weeks straight, I’d give myself the same. And in those hours between sessions, Mario entered my dreams. And in there, he trained me. My morning sessions were always better than the previous night. I was sure-footed, reactive and smart because I had had visions of Mario’s bulbous nose bouncing and flopping like an inflatable tube man, and this helped me bounce and hop further myself. Asleep, the platforms wobbled and tilted and stretched, the magikoopa (wizards) engorged to sizes impossible, the pirana plants melded into impassable pools of spiky green [2], and I would wake and understand the game on a more fundamental level somehow.
It’s strange that these dreams even helped. They were so far removed from the (albeit digital) reality of the game, that I found it difficult to consider these hallucinations as practice. And yet, they were practice, my subconscious generating experience.
The level I was attempting, Champion’s Road, is linear and comprises thirteen distinct obstacles of increasing difficulty. They require dexterity and problem solving to overcome. When awake, I would approach my furthest-to-date obstacle and attempt to surpass and fail and then attempt and fail again. And all I was really learning in these waking sessions was how—specifically—to fail. Each individual trial just another example of a precise thing not to do. I experienced failure after failure and became so hyper-focused on these previous unsuccessful attempts and trialing the same but slightly different method (a quicker a-tap, a 3° shift in angle, a half-second pause) that it was impossible to imagine any out-of-the-box solution (wall sliding instead of falling, high jumping instead of long jumping, running around the corner instead of cutting across). I couldn’t fathom a solution that wasn’t what I thought the solution would be. So I slept, and I dreamt.
My dreams created these out-there and edge-case and right-on-the-fringes-of-the-bell-curve experiences that I wouldn’t dare to even imagine in waking life. They broadened my data set to avoid overfitting. They inflated my brain to break the walls of the box. They opened my mind’s eye so that within this reality of the Mario game I became omnipotent and all-knowing, a god of the binary, The Creator, Mr Miyamoto himself. Put simply, dreams helped me press jump button better. So, I now realise that they’re useful. They have purpose. Just please, keep your recounts short. And next time you’re struggling with that last-minute assignment, or failing to fix something at work, just give up, go to sleep, and practice in your safe, expanding, ethereal realm. Your subconscious will feed you the experience you need, or it could just feed you with nonsense, e.g. relatives with beaks.
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