Who Are Your Dream Heroes?

After several iterations of this article, I strangely shall dedicate this to zcer.

To those who do not know me well enough, here’s a confession: I keep a dream diary, and am very anal about it. I record down what I dream as well as what several other people whom I love dreams of. And yes, I dream everytime I sleep, and I dream multiple dreams, and I remember every single one of them. Because I am Superman.

I keep a dream diary because more often than not, solutions to problems I was facing come in dreams. Thanks to me keeping such a rigorous tallying of my dreams, I can tell you that 67% of my problems have been solved in my dreams, sometimes in days before I even faced the problem (don’t ask, it happens and is statistically true).

The best part? These solutions are most often (99%) the best offered solution (i.e. a solution that gives maximum utility in nerdspeak) at that point of time.

In times past, the method of solution is the main character (i.e. me) having to go through various rigorous trials and finally gains understanding of the actual problem and how to solve it.

However, in recent times (i.e. within the last 5 months), I think my mind must have gotten lazy. My dreams would be thus: the main character (played by me) would face a problem, and goes through some rigorous trials, which is then rudely (and most often very cinematically) interrupted by what I would call a Hero character.

These Hero characters are people I know and look up to in real life. They would often interrupt the routine of me having to go through the tough trials, and quite often invite me to tea or for a drink. And I would feel lazy, abandon the tough trials, and go out with these Hero charactaers, and we’d chat.

And as we chat, the Hero characters would give answers to all my problems (again, some even before the problem arose). I’d thank them, and they’d always vanish in various mysterious ways. And if it seems like my dreams have a template, I’m just extracting the 3-acts from my dreams.

Who are my dream Heroes? I’ll tell you mine, and you tell me yours.

In the past these are my dream Heroes who have bailed me out time and again (not in any particular order):

• my dad
• PrettySwallow, the girl I truly love from the bottom of my heart (she appeared dressed in what appeared to be a Greek goddess’ dress)
• Bill Gates (thanked me for using IE7),
• Justin Wolfers (he kinda looked like Chase from House in my dream though, and supplied me a few interesting insights on prediction markets),
• Elanor Tan (provided me with some considerations I never thought about. I asked her the same questions later in real life, and she gave me different answers),
• Larry Page (we just hang out),
• Yoda,
• Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor version),
• Marge Simpson (this one was courtesy of Kelsey who implanted this in my mind)
• Albert Einstein
• Hayden Panettiere (who switched between herself, Claire Bennet, and Adelaide from Shanghai Kiss – This was a result of watching her interviewed on Seven’s Sunrise, an episode of Heroes and watching Shanghai Kiss [read my review], all on the same day. The dream ended with me dating her)
• and so on and so forth

Yes, I dream of having tea/hanging out with people like Bill Gates and Larry Page. Yes, you may say that I have delusions of grandeur. Go ahead. Laugh.

About 2 days ago, Kevin Rose and Sergey Brin showed up in my dream and gave me a math equation: u(b,p)=1-(b-p)² and told me to work on it. It was quite pointless as googling the equation showed nothing. Until I chanced upon the Brier Score the next morning. Yep, those two appeared in my dream (I think zybler and cfgt would know how they got in my head in the first place, LOL) and gave me an explicit equation. Talk about being lazy!

Anyways, the Brier Score, or some variant of it (I suspect its the latter) would be quite useful in what I am doing.

I am blogging this because as of last night, I no longer have any more Hero characters who interrupt my trials and tribulations and bail me out in the dreams. I actually went back to having to solve a majority of the problems myself. A Hero character still appeared though, and gave me sage advice (but didn’t give me directly what I needed to solve the problem). The Hero character last night was Yoda, whose face has been replaced by the face of a friend of mine (she’s a Buddhist nun).

And in case you’re wondering what the dream was, it was like Luke Skywalker’s encounter in the cave on Dagobah, except with a very modern setting. I checked into a hotel which offered me a lot of interesting delicacies, and the cave was actually someone else’s room. I went in her room as a test from this Yoda-nun friend mixture to retrieve my laptop. Inside, I found my laptop has been fiddled with (someone changed my laptop wallpaper to the pink haired girl from Lazytown, and some of my Python scripts messed with).

I was bubbling with rage, because I really really don’t like people touching my stuff, and I found that someone who messed around with my laptop. And then I attempted to kill that person. Once I cut off his head (with a lightsaber no less), I discovered the disguise, and that it was me. (Which makes logical sense, with all the crazy amount of security I put in my lappie, there should only be one person who can access it- me)

Then the Yoda-nun mix came in and explained the dream to me, and explained the things I needed to personally overcome (yes, its very much like what Luke had to overcome – fear, but mine was a specific fear: over the loss and death of a specific girl)

So… tell me who’s your dream hero?