The BDSM SDK

A funny dream last night. Mostly it was guided by a Grand Theft Auto narrative. It was one of those dreams where you’re both observer and participant, both experiencing it and commenting on it. It was exciting and a bit scary.

Towards the end, though, it skipped to me watching (or reading about, or both) a cheesy BDSM-themed musical, which on waking left an impression something like Gay!, from The IT Crowd — well-meaning but horribly clueless.

What resonated after I’d woken up, though, was remembering that in the dream I’d been reading the lyrics for one of the songs, which were printed in a programme or somesuch. My waking memory is, as one would expect, of seeing the complete lyrics on the page, then scanning down line by line. Notably, the lyrics rhymed.

That needs some unpacking, I think, because taken at face value it’s pretty amazing. If one assumes that the complete lyrics genuinely were on the page — such that I could have read them in any order — it entails that my dream created them in a single step. The me in the dream wasn’t hearing the lyrics line by line, or seeing them as if typed out line by line. They were there, fully formed, just as if I might have picked up a book of poetry and turned to a poem I’d never read before.

That’s extraordinary enough to imagine, without the extra problematical constraint imposed by the lyrics also rhyming. Rhyming imposes structure, which requires planning, memory, and all sorts of other cognitive tasks. If (again) the lyrics were genuinely complete on the dream page, available to be read in any order, and they also rhymed, then this amounts to the instantaneous creation of structured language in large blocks.

Or maybe it doesn’t, because I’m deeply sceptical about my or anyone else’s ability to do this, even in a dream. However much it seemed to me during the dream — and in retrospect after having woken — that the lyrics were fully formed on the page the moment I turned to it, it sounds far more likely that this was precisely the illusion the dream needed to convey. Though I felt that I could read the lyrics in any order, it’s more plausible that the dream was furiously laying the tracks as the train steamed forward, making it up as it went along. This is in itself impressive, of course — both the illusion of completeness of the lyrics, and the ability to back up the illusion as necessary. It’s not quite the alchemy of a poem from thin air, though.

As I read the dream lyrics in order, the laying of tracks ahead of the train seemed to work. My memory is that the rhymes were good, if not inspired. I regret that I wasn’t able to fix the words in my head after I woke. Without that, I can’t of course be sure that the dream created rhymes at all, and didn’t just bamboozle me into falsely remembering that there had been lyrics, and that the lyrics had rhymed.

Except I did manage to grab onto the final word, and it convinces me that the dream machinery was indeed frantically making it up as it went along, that there actually were lyrics, which more or less adequately rhymed, and that the whole thing — structure, rhyming and all — hadn’t appeared as if by turning a page. The final word was ‘SDK’. It’s techie jargon for ‘Software Development Kit’, the sort of hardware/software combo that, for example, Sony makes available to developers of PlayStation games. Funnily enough, I’d read a story a couple of days before about how Sony had reduced the price of its PS3 SDK.

Ah well. Like stage illusions, when you look hard enough at dreams the mechanism reveals itself. I guess the point is always to admire the trickery for what it is. Something doesn’t need to be unexplainable to be magic.