I'm going to start a dream diary

I've done this many times and I like it because it often gives me vivid, apocalyptic dreams, a bit like Steven Spielberg movies.  Vivid dreams are a rarity for me these days, but one last night has prompted me to recall my golden age of nightly zombie apocalypses, whirlwind romances and nuclear holocausts.

I dreamed that I was in a vehicle—variously a car or a bus—travelling with seemingly agreeable business or research associates to a new laboratory.  As the journey progressed, the landscape became more and more barren and threatening, and we passed a massive white coach with Cyrillic plastered over the side of it and a translation: 'Siberia Facility'.  We entered a municipality called Cheoms and pulled up outside a glass-fronted building reminiscent of my university's flagship computer science building; amid the wasteland it was clearly one of those sinister dam-the-Ganges-type social projects that stamped all over the local population.  We got out of the car, and the transformation was complete: I was now with my family, and our business associate was a former Konzentrationslager Kommandant, obscenely fat and balding, driving an opulent Mercedes Maybach, and carrying a holdall full of Jewish body parts in the boot: the picture of one of those high-ranking Nazis who have escaped justice.  His building was some sinister experimentation facility.  His name was Maisterlitz.

I acted quickly, and removed the holdall from the back of the car and hid it round the side of the building.  I realised how stupid this was, because he'd notice it was missing easily, and find it easily; as he did so, I felt useless and emasculated, and wished I had the mettle of a hero.  However, as soon as Maisterlitz got his hands on the holdall, my nan and my gran mobilised.  Despite being upwards of eighty and ninety respectively, they were representative of the older generation, and their views on the war were volcanic.  My nan ran full pelt after the Nazi and pulled him back by his collar.  I floored him and tried to figure out how to kill him; I stuck my fingers up his nostrils and pulled back until I heard a crack, but then I bottled out and let go.  I looked back at my botched attempt at killing; he was supporting himself on one elbow, blood flowing from his broken nose, and staring right back at me as an accusation.  I'm finding it difficult to kill the Nazi-like bastard that looms inside me, manifesting itself in such passive-aggressive places as Internet fora and in my sexuality, and strengthening with each instance that I am polite and considerate to people in real life.

Guys, guys. Slow the hell down!

Today I've realised something profound, scary and exciting all in one go.  We're living in the future!  First I stumbled across this video on Facebook.



Then I read this article.

Electronics breakthrough that paves the way for disposable e-readers made from paper, Daily Mail, today.

I mean, come on, guys!  Commercially available products that allow you to move a cursor with enough precision to draw stuff in Paint?  I can't even do that with a real pen and paper.  I realise they're waving their arms around quite a lot for comparatively little reward, but let's face it, this is pretty much the same as those screens the police have in films like I, Robot and Minority Report.  Seeing them rotate the three-dimensional cityscapes Google Earth sports, insanely futuristic in themselves, is really mind-blowing when you think that my parents in the 1960s and '70s still spent their maths lessons poring over logarithm tables because calculators were a rich luxury.

And the idea that the trope of electronic paper might come true is even more fascinating.  You can scrunch it up and put it in a bin.  You can scrunch up a paper-thin electronic device, which has freaking videos playing on it, and throw it away.  Do I need to stress the awesomeness of this more?

What's even scarier is that this kind of thing was seen as 'the future' ten years ago or less.  The anime The Time of Eve shows electronic newspapers as part of 'the future', and that was only made a scant year or two ago.  I believe everyone is aware of the reality of exponential technological growth: every eighteen months, or whatever it is, storage capabilities will tend to double, and so forth.   But few really understand what this means.  I can remember reading Fahrenheit 451, where Bradbury, a penniless author tapping on a coin-op typewriter, made his blind prediction of

"the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning."

The next day when I saw the people walking around town in bubbles provided them by their own Seashells, I was unnerved with fear and excitement.  From iPhones to Internet banking, the future tends to grow up all around us like blades of grass.  And we accept it as 'it is what it is'; we never make the connection between the reality and the utopian predictions that futurists of the atomic age made.

Is the technological singularity truly an approaching reality, and is it something to fear or celebrate?