Crashing a Dream

I crashed a dream. In the computer program sense.

I got it into an illegal state and it broke.

Two bits of context necessary, largely because what's true for me isn't necessarily universal:

Context 1

You can't read in a dream. Well, you can't acquire outside information. Or at least I can't.

Years ago I broke my shoulder needing surgery to fix it, and recovering after surgery I was on synthetic morphine. This gave me dream-like experiences that weren't deleted by my brain like dreams are. I was in the hospital bed, I wanted to know something from the surgery paperwork, my backpack was in view, and I kept wanting to reach out to it and get the papers, but I couldn't. As I lapsed in and out of consciousness, my brain would play out a scenario that I got them somehow... but then I couldn't read them; my eyes wouldn't focus, or I'd get the sensation like when you have floaters blocking your vision and blinking wouldn't help, or the contents of the page would swim around.

My subconscious wasn't up to the task of generating even a vague dream impression, of a formatted page of administrative medical paperwork whose contents I wanted to know (rather than, say, confirming something or not. In which case I could have easily hallucinated the end result of a yes or no).

Anyway, since then, I've been aware of this, and sometimes consciously pick up on it while coming out of a dream. I recognise that it happened, and can later remember it even if I couldn't remember anything else. For example, I know I've had a dream recently-ish where I couldn't read a speed limit sign as I stood and stared at it, to know if passing cars were speeding or not (I remember nothing else about that one).

Context 2

There's a common class of anxiety dream where you need to do something or be somewhere and you can't get there, often you can't even seem to make progress, and often the focus of the dream is that it's your fault. This is by far the most common dream I have, or at least that I remember. As a result of personal failings or poor decisions, I get further and further from my goal as I struggle otherwise.

(and by the way I don't dream very often at all, that I know of, and when I do it's usually much more abstract, so all of this stuff is special-case to me)

The Dream

I was in an arranged marriage, with a girl who I didn't know / didn't know me, and I'm pretty sure she was Korean, the important bit for the dream's purposes was a ritualised and polite culture who would find Westerners to be crass and unrefined. Multiple times during preparation (spanning many days by dream time logic) I'd see her or her parents, and always it would be a situation in which I was embarrassing myself - spilling or knocking something over, finding I'd grown too fat for some formal pants, drinking a beer with friends before 11am. So I could see that they had this rising sense of alarm about me. And I was desperate to prove that I was actually a nice guy, not an idiot, not always clumsy, not an unpleasant drunk. The girl and marriage were just props for the setting of this anxiety dream, always distant, I don't think I ever interacted with her or saw her face, that wasn't the point. It's more that the wedding was the equivalent of an exam you haven't studied for in that common type of anxiety dream.

I realised later after waking up, that I got the wedding scenario from the start of that charming Czech movie Kolya. At the start of the movie, our main character has agreed to an arranged marriage to help a Russian woman get Czech paperwork, for money. It was going to require some evidence to get by the authorities, so they hold a wedding, at which he gets hopelessly drunk, acts like an arse, makes crude jokes about giving her a honeymoon she'll remember, etc, while his friend desperately tries to get him under control. And she is obviously confused and alarmed at this all even though she doesn't understand it all (different languages). It's that embarrassment that threatens me in the dream and that I'm working to avoid.

The Problem

By convenient coincidence for this not-very-subtle setup (it seems my brain will never be a skilled script writer), a test emerges for me to pass: I'm to memorise and recite a poem at the ceremony, one that I don't know. My effort to do this will show that I am not a total arse, a chance to make a good impression for a change. I'm given a copy, and I can tell a lot: It's a center-aligned passage with unequal-length lines I guess kind of like a vertical audio waveform. It is size 12 font, about half a page or just under. This is information my brain is happy to provide, because it's evidence of what a challenge it will be; no simple rhyming yet it is still structured prose, and long enough to be difficult to learn all of, yet the wedding is just a couple of days away.

Now it's time for the dream to start torturing me with my inability to compete this task...

...except I can't engage with it. I can't read I can't focus, the text swims, etc. I can't read text to learn a poem I don't know, in a dream. I break from the task to help with tying balloons, folding napkins, wedding preparation stuff, but for the plot of the anxiety dream to continue, I have to try-and-fail to memorise this, and that can't happen.

Since this isn't working, the wedding is brought forward and the ceremony starts (that's not supposed to happen in a distant-goal anxiety dream!!), and if my subconscious had any writing skills this would have been a great excuse to push up the anxiety. But, instead what's happening, is whatever part of me is responsible for creating this narrative, is collapsing, it's failing. Despite its often complex output, it's not really that sophisticated, and its program is only running in a handful of neurons while the rest of the brain is getting its nightly maintenance; bins emptied, cups collected, carpets vacuumed. And this situation is outside of its ability to cope or recover.

Generic-concept-of-friend is now prepping me to walk into the wedding venue, straightening my tie for me, I've had a last attempt to read that poem but I still can't. I turn to enter the hall and

the dream...

...sort of...

decoheres?

The film projector is still running but the reel has ended, there's nothing but flickering white.

I'm aware that time is passing, only for a few seconds, but the dream has crashed and the narrative-generator doesn't know what to do.

Within the dream, I slowly come-to, as narrative restarts, and it's like waking up after falling asleep when you've been exhausted or sick - it takes a few moments to get oriented and check yourself. Generic-concept-of-friend is there, I ask him if I got the poem right, and he says I did, but dream brain slammed on the emergency brakes a while ago, and the waking / reboot process is happening, maybe this last part of the dream is already a sign of that,

and I wake up, wondering who the Korean girl was.