Dreaming of Zimity

By Alan Bradley

They say there are only two constants in life - death and taxes. That's wrong. There is a third, something that's part of every human being's life and yet it doesn't cost a penny. Dreaming.

Everybody dreams, but invariably those dreams are fleeting, flimsy things, snatched memories which don't last. But what if somebody invented a way to allow you to create and mould dreams to your own design, by building in elements of your own choosing. And what if you could then save and record those dreams to play them back in the future?

Dreaming of Zimity is a novel describing how this amazing feat was achieved; of the science behind the studies of the brain that lay behind it, and the development of the processes that allowed the creation and then the recording of dreams.

And then the story of the fantastic changes that this technology brought to everyday life all over the world.

And the terrifying flaw at the heart of the technology that brought it all crashing down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Bradley
• Release date: Apr 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458191083

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DREAMING OF ZIMITY

by

Alan Lawson

Published by Laverna at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2011 Alan Lawson

Dreaming of Zimity

Some men see things as they are and ask why?

I dream things that never were and ask why not?

I was the man who started it all, the man who first thought of making dreams real, of turning those transient technicolour visions into blockbuster entertainment. Into a new form of immersive entertainment that surpassed everything and anything that had gone before – books, radio, tv, movies, computer games – because zimity made the user part of the experience, an integral part of the entertainment. Nothing before zimity had been able to do that, and for most of mankind’s existence no-one had even dreamt of zimity.

And the overwhelming reason for zimity’s success, on a level that made names like Gates, and Jobs and Abramovich mere bystanders, was that zimity was accessible to everybody, every human being on the planet. Not everybody has or wants a desktop computer or a laptop or an i-Pad or a Mac.

But everybody dreams. Every man, woman, and child belonging to this pathetic carbon-based lifeform.

And for most people there are long periods of dreaming for several hours every night of their lives. The perfect dedicated captive audience.

So I found the way to transmit dreams, or rather at first the skeleton of dreams into people’s heads as they fell asleep. We let people choose scenarios – westerns, romances, soap operas, sc-fi etc – and we’d set them up with those scenarios and off they’d go to sleep and appear in the scenarios, in the subsequent adventures.

It was crude when it started. We had to attach electrodes to the head and, even when people weren’t nervous about sleeping wired up to one of our consoles, it could still be uncomfortable. Then we figured out a wireless rfid transference and it became much easier for people to use.

That was the first major breakthrough, where it all went hyper and I became a multi-millionaire overnight and the first craziness began. We started upgrading the filmic quality of the scenarios and worked out how to use gaming and animation technology to introduce real figures into the scenarios. The result was that someone could choose to have an outer-space romance featuring Elvis Presley or some crap like that. I could have cared less about such stuff. It was my invention, sole patent, and our banks started to complain about the amount of money we were making. The noughts went off the end of the page!

The first trouble came when people started making unusual requests that seemed innocent so we gave them what they wanted, but it was only later that we realized that we’d spawned a whole new wing of the porn industry.

That became more important when we finally cracked the big one, the technology to record the dreams and sell them back to people on neat little grey hard discs. Our accountants reckoned that one night back in February over two million people bought or rented one of our zimity dreamscape units and then played back their personal dreamscapes as private entertainment the following day!

Two million people! In just one night! It’s hard to get your head round it all.

And then everything started to go wrong………..

CHAPTER ONE

My earliest memories are distinctly technical. Messing about with kits like Meccano and Scalextric, trying to make things and create something new. Nothing revolutionary or world-beating. I was never quite that bright or sharp but I found the whole process of technical construction to be far more interesting than the mysteries of geography or history or English literature

As I got older I became fascinated by technology. Dabbled around with building and repairing early models of computer and games hardware. When my mates were out practicing useless chat up lines on smirking girls, or swigging down £1 bottles of rough cider, I was back in my bedroom writing open-source code and communicating with other Geeks on MSN. I had little social life and, in truth, few interests outside computers. I wasn’t bothered. I was happy enough with my life and even though my mum and dad would have liked me to be out playing football or buying CDs they were probably happier that I wasn’t injecting myself or smoking crack or some other stuff.

No, computers were my religion, my passion, and through school and college they were my bedrock. I never thought of making a living from computers but I remember some wise guy in the past saying that if you could make a living from something you’d happily do as a hobby then you were a fortunate man. That was me. Fortunate, indeed.

Through school and then university I made some good pocket money from computer-based activities. Creating web sites, coding various projects, taking advantage of my status as a bright kid who understood this allegedly exciting new world.

I even made a sentimental trip to Manchester to visit Alan Turing Way, the road named after the genius who arguably was responsible for the computer industry as we now know it. I didn’t realize that Alan Turing Way was nothing more lavish than a snide little bypass in front of the stadium where Manchester City play. You’d think that the guy that gave the world so much deserved more than roadside pollution and traffic jams, but at least Manchester remembered him. They even put a statue up to him in a little park in the Gay Village in Manchester. It’s a bit shabby and nondescript, but at least it’s there, and at least his importance isn’t forgotten in Manchester. Unlike everywhere else.

Yes, computers, and software were my obsession as far back as I can remember. Even before I met and married Claire I was obsessed with computers and I watched the achievements of men like Jobs and Gates with admiration and a fair amount of envy. All that money, all that fame. Fuck ‘em.

I’ve heard some of my friends say that it was computers that caused my marriage to fail. You know the model – computer nerd, Johnny-no mates etc. There might be a grain of truth in that but the reason that Claire and I split up was down to a whole number of reasons and Mr.Dell had very little to do with it.

But it’s true that I spent too much time messing about with computer stuff, and attending those pathetic Computer Fairs held in draughty scout huts round the country. I did it as a hobby not as a diversion from an increasingly fractious home life. It didn’t help that Claire, and particularly her family, regarded me as a dreamer. To make it worse they often called me by that name, both behind my back and to my face. It didn’t bother me, not really, but I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy that night when I was featured on This Is Your Life and I wore that snow-white t-shirt with the line from John Lennon’s Imagine

You might say I’m a Dreamer…

Still, that was a long way in the future, when Claire and I split up. By then I was well into computers and programming, and I’d even started getting interested in neural networks, and this was the concept that eventually opened the world to the dream world and to zimity.

Of course I knew a bit about dreams. Everybody does. All that Jung and Freud stuff, you know, dreaming about a magenta-coloured washing machine singing a selection of Barry Manilow songs actually means that in truth you wanted to have oral sex with your mother. I never went for all that. Life’s too short for dreams about washing machines anyway.

Like most people I’d experienced the mild frustration of waking from a dream and trying to recall it, only to find the last traces of the dream fading like a slight frost in bright sunlight. Trying to claw back a clear recollection of a particular dream was brutally annoying. I often wondered if there was…might be any way to compress those faint impressions into a clear, technicolour vision. Still, I used to wonder about the chances of peace in the Middle East as well.

Of course I’ve got to admit that much of my early thinking about dreams and what we could do to induce them was prompted by a fascinating short story by one of my heroes, Isaac Asimov. Back in 1955 he produced a short story entitled Dreaming is a Private Thing. I’d first seen it in a collection of his stuff called Earth is Room Enough although I later discovered that he had first published it in an American science fiction magazine.

I loved Asimov, his books and his short stories. Always a good story underpinning the science, but generally a lot of science and thought in all he did. Claire used to tease me about science fiction, and I suppose it was a classic nerd prescription – computers and SF. But people like Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke often wrote science fiction about things that later became part of every day life, stuff like communications satellites, so I always justified my love of science fiction on the thin basis of the genre’s science content. Science rather than fiction.

I never thought much about any influence the Dreaming is a Private Thing story had had on me but looking back, after Zimity really took off, I could see the links between what Asimov imagined and what we created. That was the difference though. He was great, but he was just a writer. We….I had created something incredible and wonderful and real.

Not fiction. Fact.

Round about the early spring of the last year Claire and I were together I began to wonder about if there was some link between neural networks and the way dreams get started. I’d been working on various neural network projects for clients and, as ever, I couldn’t stop thinking about the subject once I’d finished my nominal working hours. I began reading up on the subject voraciously. Looking back I can see that part of the time I was using the research to fill the growing emptiness between Claire and myself. Pretty pathetic, eh? Filling up the time with books and scholarly journals to hide the pain. It’s so trite I’m sure I saw it as a plot sometime on Heartbeat.

It doesn’t matter what the stimulus was. The simple fact was that I loved the topic. I could see a real relationship between the process of dreaming and much of the intricate patterning which underpinned the computer work I was doing. Even some of the terminology was the same or very similar. REM sleep is the state of sleep where brain activity is most like wakefulness, and many researchers believe this to be when dreams are strongest, but this could also be the state from which dreams are most easily remembered. REM was very much like RAM, and RAM memory had been one of the staple elements of computing since the eighties.

REM sleep was first observed and described back in 1953 by Eugene Aserinsky who stumbled on the phenomenon while he was working in the lab of his PhD advisor, Nathaniel Kleitman. Their astonishing findings were published later that year in the journal Science which was produced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This learned journal became my meat and drink, the oxygen to my very slight flame. I devoured everything I could on the subject of dreams and dreaming, frequently blessing my good fortune at being alive at a time when so much of the world’s great knowledge was available at the mere click of a mouse.

One breakthrough in this field of science led rapidly to another and I surfed doggedly through later theories from J. Allan Hobson and Robert McCarly, and subsequently by Mark Solms.

The research by Solms claimed that dreams are generated in the forebrain, and that REM sleep and dreaming are not directly related. This theory came from his work in the neurosurgery department at hospitals in Johannesburg and London, which allowed him access to patients with various brain injuries. He began to question patients about their dreams and this line of questioning confirmed that patients with damage to the parietal lobe stopped dreaming, a finding consistent with Hobson's 1977 theory.

Yet Solms didn’t discover instances of loss of dreaming with patients suffering with brain stem damage. This realization brought him to question Hobson's prevailing theory which marked the brain stem as the source of the signals interpreted as dreams. Solms viewed the idea of dreaming as a function of many complex brain structures as validating Freudian dream theory, an idea discounted by Hobson. The main importance of Solms’ work though can be summarized as REM can occur without dreaming and dreaming can occur without REM.

This realization pushed me away from the simplistic linkage of REM and RAM but for me though the real breakthrough came when I stumbled on the work of Jie Zhang, and his various theories which culminated in the Continual-Activation Theory of Dreaming. Ponderous title I know, but my life and, with all due modesty, the lives of millions of others was changed irrevocably by the Continual-Activation Theory.

For reasons I’m too dense to articulate, this theory hit home with me in a way which married with much of what I had been doing with computers.

Zhang imagined a temporary memory stage existing in the memory process as a bridge across the gap between short-term memory and the long-term memory. This led him to propose that during our waking time, the memory formed from the working memory is not saved directly into the long-term memory; instead it is saved into a temporary memory. Thus in Zhang’s theory the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer data from the temporary memory to the long-term memory.

Temporary memory and long-term memory are major elements of computer processing, one of the central building blocks in the journey from Turing and Babbage to the Internet and the unimaginable wonders, and terrors that computers are now delivering.

Short term and long term memory were concepts that I understood from my daily work. Once I began thinking that way it all fell into place quickly and surprisingly easily.

In Zhang’s theory most dreaming experienced by humans is the result of the memory replay when the declarative memory is transferred from the temporary memory to the long-term memory during NREM sleep. A more intense, a more dream-like dream, mainly occurs when the procedural memory is transferred from the temporary memory to the long-term memory during REM sleep.

So, I mused one night over a particularly obnoxious kebab, what would happen if images or animations could be inserted into that temporary memory? Would those images or videos or animations then be transferred again into long-term memory?

Would….could they become the stuff of dreams?

* * * * *

CHAPTER TWO

Theories are fine. Testing my various theories on dreaming was difficult especially as those tests inevitably involved messing with someone’s head. The usual route of animal testing was out, not just on ethical grounds but also (and probably mainly) because there would be no accurate way of proving things one way or another. Although many eminent scientists, and not a few pet owners, believe that animals do dream there is no way of proving it. More importantly there would be no way for test animals to articulate what the dreams were and how they had operated.

No. For this purpose there was no real alternative to a human guinea pig. I wasted several weeks mentally examining and vetting my friends trying to decide who might be suitable but reluctantly I was forced to rule each of them out. The couple of individuals who might have been suitable on medical grounds wouldn’t have anything to do with it: the ones who were willing to have a go were completely unsuitable on medical, moral, religious grounds – indeed on any sane criteria I could imagine.

This left me in a real and desperately frustrating spot. The more I battled through the labyrinthine writings of Zhang and the Continual-Activation Theory the more I was convinced that it could be possible to create a physical unit which would allow the transfer of graphics into the temporary memory of a brain.

Once again my years of playing with computers proved essential. I had massive experience of transferring complex material from a device into a storage unit. In the instance of the brain the process was the same. The only difference was that the receptor would not be a storage unit like a hard disc or memory card; instead it would be part of the human brain, but it’s an accepted truism that the human brain is just a computer, albeit a far more complex unit than anything yet fashioned from silicon and graphite.

None of my intensive background reading of Zhang and his colleagues provided any clue as to how to actually transfer the material into a human brain, even if it were possible to find a willing receptor. By this stage I think I had secretly accepted that I would, in fact, become that human receptor. There simply wasn’t anybody else.

It’s easy to misread this as me being courageous but I don’t believe I was being especially brave in thinking this. Of course all the subsequent awards for bravery and valour that came my way were very nice but a bit stupid and misplaced. At the time, trying to work out the best technical solution, I couldn’t imagine that anybody would be foolish enough to describe me as brave, but again that lay in the future.

In the classic computer model material is transferred in one of three ways. Directly, via a cable connection, or without wires on a wireless link, or via the web. Trying to fabricate a means of transferring material directly into a human brain was difficult and daunting enough but I initially ruled out the second or third options. The reason was simple. With a direct cable connection I, or my accomplice, would have some control over what was happening. With wireless or web transference it had the potential to go very, very wrong, and I didn’t want to take that chance.

I was fairly clear in my mind about the process. After all I’d been thinking about it for long enough, but I took the opportunity over the course of the next couple of months to pick the brains of colleagues and associates. I couldn’t let them know why I was asking the questions of course, but I got to be pretty good about sounding vague and quasi-intellectual. Through all the discussions I was able to tease out enough information to enable me to start to work out the best way to make the transfer process.

Once again I was very lucky. Siobhan, the sister of a chap called John with whom I played rugby, was training to be a doctor and I was able to bribe her with white wine and curry to educate me about the medical aspects of brain and memory.

Although it wasn’t her speciality she was able to enquire among friends and colleagues to extract the information which confirmed the findings, or perhaps the suspicions, thrown up by my research.

I’d spent long periods reading everything I could about dreaming. I wasn’t at Zhang’s level – never would be – but I had dragged myself to the level of highly-informed amateur. Add to that the professional expertise supplied by people like John’s sister, Siobhan, and I felt confident that it might be possible to transmit graphic information from an external source into a brain. Once again the problem was whose brain, and all roads seemed to lead back to me.

I know I was biased…am biased, but the brain really is fascinating. Every human being has one, it contains all the functionality that identifies and separates us as individuals, but there is still so much unknown about many of the brain’s mysteries. I had educated myself to be able the grasp the basics, like the difference between working memory and long-term memory. Working memory happens at the front of the brain in an area known as the prefrontal cortex. This type of memory links long-term memories to sights, sounds and feelings so you can respond to events as they happen.

Long-term memory for events and experiences are processed deep in the brain in a spiralled area called the hippocampus, which is the Greek word for seahorse.

The outer layer of the brain, the cortex, is just a few millimetres thick. Here the deep creases of the cortex contain 70% of a person’s 100 billion brain cells which are responsible for the highest level of cognition which includes all thought and memory.

The dark-coloured top of the cortex is called grey matter while the inner lighter layer is called white matter. Grey matter gets its colouring from the dark nuclei of the cell bodies of the brain. Spreading out from the cell bodies are long white extensions called axons which comprise the brain’s white matter. The axon of each brain cell reaches out through the brain to establish connections with other brain cells. Through these connections billions of brain cells relay information to billions of other brain cells creating a communication network that makes thought possible.

A communication network which in its dazzling complexity makes even the largest man-made super computer seem like a Toys R Us special offer.

I’d also educated myself about the various stages of sleep, the stages which lead up to dreaming. There are reckoned to be four stages of sleep, and the first stage is very light. This stage usually lasts just a few minutes and if the sleeper is not disturbed by anything, he or she will quickly pass on to stage two sleep.

This is a much deeper sleep than stage one and it is at this stage that dreams first start to develop. Clear images are rare, but vague thoughts and ideas drift through the sleeper's mind. If the sleeper remains undisturbed, he or she will drift off into stage three.

This is another deeper sleep than stage two. By this point the sleeper's muscles are all relaxed, and the heart rate has slowed down. The sleeper's blood pressure is also falling, and breathing is steady and even. The sleeper is very difficult to wake now. Only two things can wake the sleeper at this point, a loud noise or regular calling of the sleeper's name. Before long, the sleeper will drop into stage four sleep.

This is the deepest sleep of all, and the time and point at which the dreams occur. It is virtually impossible to wake the sleeper now. If there is a loud noise or if the sleeper is shaken, it will take him or her several seconds to wake up. Both the sleeper's blood pressure and heart rate fluctuate, and, crucially, the sleeper's brain becomes appreciably hotter. Then comes the REM, or more usually known as rapid eye movement. If the sleeper is woken up during this time, he or she will be able to remember a dream which has recently been experienced. The first REM period will last only about ten minutes. After that, the sleeper goes back into a deep stage four sleep. Again, the sleeper goes into a REM stage after a short period and cycles through REM and stage four until the sleeper is woken up.

Although I found the process of learning all of this fascinating it was the REM aspect that most excited me simply because of the obvious RAM associations with computers.

I’d also begun to suspect that the stress hormone Cortisol might have some part to play in my plans for the future. During REM sleep, the flow of information between the hippocampus and neocortex is reduced. Increasing levels of the stress hormone Cortisol late in sleep, often during REM sleep, are the cause of this decreased communication.

And it was in reading up on Cortisol that I inadvertently stumbled onto the breakthrough, the thing which opened my doors to perception (sorry, dreadful cliché, but it’s very hard to avoid).

I read about an Austrian scientist named Otto Loewi who discovered the first neurotransmitter in 1921. Science has since identified norepinephrine and serotonin as two neurotransmitters known to be essential for various mental activities while we are awake, but these