Crossing Some Ineffable (But Wrong) Line
Posted on October 26, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 26 Comments
Last night I had a very detailed dream about Photoshopping. Namely, color correcting. I couldn’t tell you what the picture was that I was fixing, but I can tell you that now it looks great.
I suspect dreaming about Photoshopping means something. I fear what that something might be.
It means that your brainpal now has artistic aspirations. Next up your dreams will have you wearing a muumuu and taking part in amateur theatrical productions.
http://i33.tinypic.com/wuib28.jpg ?
Give in to the dark side, Scalzi.
We have bunt cake.
I suspect dreaming about Photoshopping means something. I fear what that something might be.
That you’re getting http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pat070401.html as a nightshirt for Christmas?
Rasterbation is a sin!
When I was trying to run a web design business, I used to dream of writing html and putting pages together. It was kind of creepy, actually.
I have these dreams every night, but that’s not surprising since I work as a digital artist in a portrait studio and photoshop all day. But what really bugs me is when I wake up and realize I FORGOT TO HIT SAVE! and now I have to go to work and do it all over again.
You dreamed about color correction in black and white – weird.
Ian @8:
Are you assuming that Scalzi dreams in black and white? Because I dream in color.
Were you changing the hue of red state to blue?
Yeah, I’ve done that. Several times, actually. Only with digital paint or working in some 3D app or other.
I had a dream I was row-reducing matrices last week. I think a dream about photoshop would be more fun, but then I also had a dream last night about writing emails, so maybe I’m not a good judge of fun dreams.
But were you actually dreaming in color?
[Several years ago, I had a dream about trying to solve the four-color theorem on a torus, and after I awoke, I realized one of the reasons it had been so difficult was that I was dreaming in black & white.]
When I was a janitor I used to have dreams about sweeping a parking lot.
I also had serial dreams about being eaten alive by a giant rat one bite at a time, the bites accumulating through the series.
I found the latter dreams preferable.
> I wake up and realize I FORGOT TO HIT SAVE!
Oh I HATE those dreams. Worse still when they happen IRL. Then the only thing you have to console yourself is, “it’s always faster the second time around.”
Sad, but true.
I’ve had some vivid full-color dreams. The most common component is the bright red ambulance with the siren that sounds exactly like my alarm clock…
I always dream in color… do people really only dream in black and white usually? Wow no way.
I think the dream means you were trying to look at something in a new way, or you are trying to change your perspective on a situation. Maybe it means you are trying to change your view of the world to suit what you think it should look like. Or something.
For the record, “ineffable” is one of my favorite words.
Can’t say why exactly…
I remember as a lad, spending so much time on my Commodore 64, doing BASIC programs, I’d dream about that blue-on-blue screen and writing BASIC in my sleep.
Truly a sign that a certain 80’s-era youth needed to get his ass outside more.
Clearly this means you are now procrastinating in your sleep as well.
Re dreaming in black and white – there was some news only this month about a study* which showed that people over 55 tended to dream more in black and white than those under 55, and those under 25 dreamed almost exclusively in colour, the reason being amount of exposure to black and white TV and films. Although, of course, the world was always in colour the concentration and emotional intensity brought to watching movies & TV appears to have had an impact.
Presumably before movies (and b&w photos) were popular everyone dreamed in colour. I wonder, on the emotional intensity reasoning, if medieval people dreamed in “stained-glass window”.
* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/10/17/scidream117.xml
Wow, I think you’ve tapped into uncharted neo-Jungian territory here. My take on a photoshop dream is that it is simultaneously an expression of the anima in its creative faculties or animus in its editing faculties.
Here’s a cheat sheet for other programs you dream about.
Windows Vista: Father.
Windows 3.1: Grandfather.
DOS: Ancestry in general.
Mac OSX: That asshole down the street who flaunts his MacBook Air.
Microsoft Word: Your soulless life, consisting only of drudgery.
Notepad: Groceries you’ve forgotten to pick up.
StarOffice Writer: Your soulless life, consisting only of grinding poverty and drudgery.
Nero: Your abandoned career as a musician.
About dreaming in color: I’m usually not aware of having dreamed in color, and remember my dreams as having been in black and white. But, every now and then, color actually comes up as being relevant in the dream (like having to choose the green egg, or cut the blue wire, or distinguish a red bloodstain from a water spill. Things like that). Then, I am aware of things being different colors while in the dream. The odd part is that when I wake up, I still remember the dream as having been in black and white, but *also* remember having been aware of colors at the time. It’s kind of disconcerting.
As far as I know, I always dream in color. The ones that have weirded me out are the ones where I could smell or taste things, or feel textures.
That’s an interesting theory about BW media having an impact on coloring of dreams.
I dream about whatever Flash game I’m currently playing. If it’s tetris, there are differently shaped blocks falling down. If it’s Bloons Tower Defense, there are balloons going along a track and popping. If it’s Dragcave dragons (a clickable virtual pet game), I dream about raising and breeding them and watching their lineages lengthen. If it’s Facebook Packrat like I’ve been doing all weekend instead of anything useful >.>, it’s about finding the right cards to put into the right slots and making more cards.
Last night’s dream was some kind of bizarre soap operaish family that needed to marry in certain ways to produce the right kinds of kids, and somewhere near the end there was a Klingon that was impressed with recitations of lineages. I have no idea what that was about. o.O
If you dream in color, is it RGB or CMYK? Or do you dream in Lab? Then occasionally you may only dream the L channel and it would seem like a black and white dream.