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Dreaming in HTML
By Candi Strecker |
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Also by Candi Strecker:
Career Contrarians
Don't Let Them Laugh at Your Résumé
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A funny thing happened to me on my way to the Web.
I was almost ready to create my first homepage. I'd assembled all the information I wanted to post there, and written that crucial "Hi, here's who I am" essay. Now it was time to learn how to encode it all in HyperText Markup Language.
A friend tipped me off to a useful site that provided an online tutorial in HTML. The tutorial didn't cover everything, but it did explain the fundamental operations and offer a step-by-step tour of the basic tags, all broken down into easy-to-digest short lessons. The first lesson went so well that I stayed up late working my way through two more, and went to bed feeling like a high-tech smarty-pants.
But in my sleep that night, the HTML lessons went on and on. All night long (at least that's how it felt), I kept on programming in HTML. I would tinker with graphics and colors, and rearrange blocks of text as if playing with a set of those refrigerator-poetry-magnets. I'd add and remove links to non-existent sites. I'd think a dream-thought, then...
<CENTER> <B> watch it appear on the "screen" of my mind with HTML tags around it. </B> </CENTER> <BR>
I continued to dream in HTML as I spent the next week completing the tutorial. I learned how to think like a Web page by day, and dreamed through the procedures I was learning by night. When I asked around among my friends, it turned out that many had experienced something similar. "It's happened to me before" said Al Hoff. "Spreadsheets, databases, German topographic maps — it's always learning something technical that sets it off." Julee chimed in, "I usually dream about something when I'm learning it. Last week after a particularly long computer session, I kept dreaming the keyboard shortcuts over and over. When I was learning typing in high school, I used to dream about the keyboard." And Jerod's dreams sounded like sci-fi cyberspace: "When first learning about computers I used to dream in flowcharts and some bizarre nocturnal representation of mainframe assembler."
Most vivid of all were Jim Morton's game dreams: "When I started designing crossword puzzles, I had dreams with interlocking blocks of letters in them. When I learned chess, I not only started dreaming chess moves, I also saw them in everyday objects. While sitting at the breakfast table I'd see the salt take the sugar bowl, putting the fruit basket in check."
My friends and I aren't the only ones who have noticed a connection between learning and dreams. Researchers in the new field called cognitive neuroscience are now able to track the activities of different parts of the brain during each stage of sleep. Dreaming appears to be directly related to the crucial process called consolidation, in which our newest experiences are examined for their importance, then either discarded or moved into long-term memory storage.
Using new tools like PET (positron emission spectroscopy) scanning, neuroscientists can now observe the brain at work during REM sleep, the rapid-eye-movement period closely associated with dreaming. By measuring blood flow to different parts of dreamers' brains, PET scans show that while some parts of the brain shut down during dreams, others are intensely active. For example, the frontal lobes, which integrate input and help us make sense of the waking world, are "off-line" during dreams. This may explain why dreams seem so disjointed and illogical.
Another sector of the brain that shuts down during REM sleep is the primary visual cortex, which in waking hours takes in and processes an amazing torrent of sensory input. With this barrage of new information turned off, other parts of the brain take advantage of the relative "quiet" to do the things they do best. The brain zones that consolidate memories are especially active during REM sleep, shuffling through the latest memories and filing away the most important ones. You might picture the dreaming brain as an office, where some productive workers have learned to get more done by working through the lunch hour, when nobody's around to interrupt and the phones aren't ringing.
"Though still speculation, there is mounting evidence that one of the reasons we need sleep at all is to permanently encode our memories," says Dr. J. Allen Hobson of Harvard in his book The Chemistry of Conscious States. "We sleep, and the past day's memories are reactivated as we dream, which changes their status; it advances them from short-term memory into long-term memory." Dreams, he suggests, may be just a by-product of the brain's "playing back the tapes" of recent experiences and deciding which memories to keep.
So there's a reason why I was dreaming in HTML, and my friends were dreaming in chess and spreadsheets and flowcharts. We were all engaged in the process of memory consolidation, as our brains reviewed and stashed away new skills for future use. And surely this process isn't limited to technical lessons. Artists must learn by dreaming in brushstrokes, and soccer players by dreaming in kicks, and linguists by dreaming in irregular verbs. But in everyday life, most of us don't learn new arts, new sports, new languages. What we do learn are new programs, new data formats, new computer skills. It's the nature of the wired world we live in, a world in which even poets and painters use computers.
Once upon a time, people survived by learning one key skill and using it all their lives. Shoe-making, bread-baking, wooly-mammoth-spearing — these were trades that could support a person for a lifetime. But modern people know that the programs and systems and machines they work with today will probably be obsolete a few years down the line, and there will be new hardware and software to learn.
Luckily, our brains seem to be hard-wired with the super-skill of learning new skills whenever necessary. So welcome your dreams, if you're dreaming in HTML or Java or C++ — they're proof that you'll be able to dream your way into the future.
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Raised on a gladiolus farm in Ohio, Candi Strecker now thrives on double lattes, Vietnamese food, and flea-market shopping in San Francisco. She is currently a freelancer for publications including the San Francisco Bay Guardian and SLANT, after many years of polishing her writing skills on her zines, Sidney Suppey's Quarterly & Confused Pet Monthly and It's A Wonderful Lifestyle (the definitive zine on the 1970s).
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