An emotional dream and a spent movie script
I had the weirdest dream the other day. It involved time travel, humanoid robots and a medieval setting. And if I would be able to make it into a more coherent story, I’m sure it could make a good movie.
As is typical, I don’t remember too much about the dream, except for one or two essential and emotional moments. I think the tale started of with me being close friends with some immensely advanced humanoid robot (I’m sure triggered by my recent viewing of Transformers). I think the robot resembled, in retrospect, Archie, a character from an ancient comic book.
Somehow, the robot and I were separated. I had to travel a lot and was only able to return and find/see the robot some 500 years later, when I returned to a medieval castle that, again in retrospect, resembled a 3D version of a generic castle from, say, the video game Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins. The place was deserted and my feeling was that science and people had degenerated over time, had lost their previous level of development.
I searched around the castle, in search for a sign of life, and my robot friend, when the first emotional moment happened. I found relics of our (that is, the robot and mine) visit 500 years earlier. They were artifacts cast in gold and included a cape and two statues, which might have been of the robot and of me. I fell on the floor, crying and beating with my fist on the ground.
Shortly after, I pole vaulted (as you do in dreams) over a castle wall and landed on a platform, but nearly missed it, I’m sure because of bad sprite detection, where a small door led to a small open enclosure. The door opened and inside the enclosure was my robot friend, walking around in circles and opening and closing his jaw, seemingly not seeing anything and not aware of his surroundings. In order to dumb down, in parallel with the society he had stayed behind in, he had, slowly slowly, replaced his metal frame/skeleton with a wooden one, losing practically all his abilities.
That was emotional moment number two.
Script
Which brings me to something not wholly unrelated.
Years ago, I had an idea for a movie script which I never sketched out in detail but have always been planning to. As the subject matter is slowly making headlines in international publications, I better throw it out now, before the story line becomes totally irrelevant and common knowledge by default.
The idea was to have a group of kids stumble upon a series of irregularities in reality, like glitches in the matrix. Over time, the glitches become bigger and bigger but it’s only the kids who actually notice them. They build theories around why these occurrences are happening and go out in search for them, until they come very close to the actual reason for their existence.
Then, I did already visualize the final scene, one of the kids is in his street, on the sidewalk, on a bike. He looks up, the camera zooms out and a computer crashes or the game is over. The kid sitting behind his PC is called to lunch or dinner by his mom.
If you didn’t get it, some kid is playing a simulation, think Civilization, but his PC is corrupt or virus infested, hence the glitches in the matrix.
The reason I mention this now is because it has been shown (a while ago, but the article in which it appeared wasn’t widely read) that, chances are, we ourselves are living in a simulation. And, this week, the NYT had an article about it. So I figured it made sense to throw out my idea now (which I came up with before I read the original article), before everyone thinks it trivial.