I'm not one to post dreams on my weblog, but this one I had on Saturday night just seems appropriate. It's part mystery, part sci-fi adventure, where the year is 2049 and weblogs are a geographic construct. Huh?
The dream starts with me receiving an eight page letter (not email, an in the mail, handwritten, old-fashioned letter) from someone purporting to have attended summer camp with me in the 1980s. She writes for seven pages about our shared experiences, drops names of all sorts of people I know from camp, etc. But oddly, I don't remember the writer or recognize her name. On the last page, she gets to her point: she is writing to me in confidence, her father has been deposed and murdered in Nigeria. She has a large sum of money, which she'd like to entrust me with for safe-keeping, etc.
This is some sneaky spam I think — she's established a very personal connection with me, making it hard for me to turn down her request. But how did she find out about my camp experience? I head to my camp's headquarters to find out. That's when I meet the protagonists in my dream, a man and a woman. The man explains to me that they're trying to, "craft a perfect 3." You see, weblogs are actual buildings in 2049, and we each have our own. The ground floor represents the present, and everyone has access to everyone else's blog/building/mind (the physical world is less physical in 2049) to a certain level/height.
To get more information about a person, you need to get access to the higher floors of their building/blog. To "craft a perfect 3" you needed access to three things: someone's present, something in the middle that was unclear, and "their ultimate personal past." Once you had this, you could craft the perfect 3, which was a type of person (the man and woman were doing it to create ideal mates) who would know everything there was to know about you. The man and I discussed how bot-like these 3s would be, how uninteresting they would be to interact with because they would know too much, be too similar to one's own interests. And then the dream ended.
It was a pretty scary dream because for part of it I was trying to illegally access someone's archives/top floors and had to climb along the outside of a building for many stories. But there was something wonderfully futuristic about the whole dream as well: weblogs as these physical systems by which we organize our lives, hyper-personalized spam, and the strange parallels between weblogs having the newest content at the top of the page (easiest access) and your "present" being on the ground floor of your blog building (again, easiest access). Or maybe it was only interesting to me, as is the case with 99.99% of dreams written about on weblogs.