I woke up, heart racing, in fear of a little virtual man I had created. He was like a green translucent Gumby, but shaped more like a generic men’s room figure. Thin, maybe an inch think, somewhat floppy, like a giant almost flat gummy worm person. It had no features or expression.
It was terrifying the way things are for inexplicable reasons in dreams. There was no clear threat or danger. Puzzling, too, that a virtual figure could have somehow taken on a life of its own, and equally terrifying was the knowledge that if I chopped or sliced it the pieces then, hydra-like, might multiply into more of the green men. It also seemed somehow a precursor to more virtual events and creatures “leaking” into the real world. Silently entering the world beyond the confines of the monitor. These leaks would be material, but not 100%. Like ghosts, it seems that — if this were indeed happening — the creatures would exist in some in-between world — a world partly of the makers’ imaginations and resulting computer iterations, and partly in a form in which those immaterial forms then take on lives of their own, independent of their creators — sort of as ideas do. If the forms visible on monitors are the result of the meeting of the operators’ imaginations and the algorithms that render them into visible shapes and forms then they are like representations of ideas. They are the physical manifestation of imaginings. And like all imaginings they have a life of their own. Yow.
