William Pauley III's 115th Dream

Into the unfolding Digital Minds Collide we release William Pauley III. If you’re expecting this Voices Across the Stack to be just people writing about digital culture ... expect again.

Creative minds process and produce. We’re documenting what this world is feeding us, how we deal with it and what it forces from us.

And in his case, how it splinters dreams and tests sleeping brains from the inside.

William Pauley III: Explainer

I’m distracted by light.

I’m an insect, just as we’re all insects.

The more I realize and accept this, the faster I work, the faster my little insect digits type.

I will continue to spit ink onto pages until all of these goddamn creatures crawling around in my brain have vanished.

Words are parasites, and I’m infested.

Digital Minds Collide 03

William Pauley III’s 115th Dream

Last night, I dreamed I was living inside a computer glitch.

My setting—I recognized immediately—was seemingly inspired by a level from the old PlayStation game Manhunt, however when I awakened and sobered from my dream-drunk state, I realized I was wrong. It was just some mobile home.

Anyway, I had my dog Cosmo with me. He was the first to discover a glitch. There was a noise coming from the outside, boots skidding over rough concrete. Cosmo's ears perked up, and without hesitation, he leapt straight through the wall—unharmed, untouched.

I'm not even sure I was amazed. It didn’t seem important at the time.

I chose instead to go through the door, which created a real problem for me, as the body that belonged to those skidding boots became inexplicably impaled by the top edge of the storm door. Another glitch.

The body seemed weightless as it writhed about atop that impossibly sturdy aluminum door—boneless, as it folded in ways boned bodies can't. This drove Cosmo nuts. He just kept barking at it.

The body seemed panicked but also tired, as if those kinds of things happened to it all the time and it was finally at the end of its rope. I made a true effort to help the convulsing blob, but there was simply nothing to grab hold of. The three of us gave up pretty quickly.

At that point, my eyes opened, and I was back in my glitch-free world for a second, but almost immediately I fell back to sleep.

The last thing I remember was getting dressed for the day, but I was wearing clothes that didn't belong to me, they weren't even suited to my particular tastes. I was dressed exactly like Sherrif Truman from Twin Peaks [which makes sense, given that lately I've been rewatching those episodes for the 300th time].

As strange as it was, I wasn't immediately alerted that I was back inside my dream world. I wouldn't realize until I encountered my next glitch.

I went to put on my cattle hat [I don't know if anyone in real life calls cowboy hats "cattle hats," but I remember insisting it was a "cattle hat" inside my dream], but I pulled the thing down over my entire head, and like the twitching blob stuck on the front door, my face became fused to the material of the hat.

The hat was me. I was the hat.

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