I find a computer lab hidden in our house, a shadowy hall of indeterminate size, with that hot-circuit smell and video squeal. My friends Zooop and Dawn are there, working on virtual reality programs. The simulations they're composing are all teaching programs or expert systems, on one subject: how to love!

In a way, that's what many of my penciled dream-cartoons address... but these programs can render images in overwhelming full-motion full-color solid and richly textured images... of love. Not just sex. Love. The programs scan you, question you, figure out what makes you tick.

Handmade art is obsolete. I am obsolete. These programs really are better! Clearer teachers of love. I give in--immerse myself in the programs.

The one I decide gives the best results is a 3D rendering program that creates models of your ideal self--then your ideal lover. Instead of wireframes, the realtime model you work with is a black and white translucent NEGATIVE! A 3D equivalent of photographic negative. Strange at first, a smoky ghost, but luminous in a way. Soon I like it.

The program scans me, and calculates its best model of me. Must get clear who I am before it can extrapolate to my ideal mate. But the machine's view of the real me is a shock--so familiar from dreams, and so unlike the portraits left by others as samples. I'm not human. The screen shows a feline man stalking through the dark halls of this very computer lab! Literally feline: big slit eyes, a tail, pointed twitching ears...

And he's not a computer artist. He's a shaman. No question about it. You can feel the power around him, even in this colorless negative quick rendering. In his journeys through other realms he's become this mixture of human and... other. My true self is not fully human.

But fully me! And all that's left is rendering.

MORNING NOTE

I've been depressed at how even a little stress sickens me. I can't really work or date. I've been talking myself into trying Prozac. Yet in the dream when I try high-tech intervention, what emerges as my real self is just a richer 3D model of the same part-animal shaman I am now!

I just need to fully realize who I already am.

NEXT NIGHT

I'm given a sacred message or plan to implement. It blesses me--or will if enacted.

But when I wake up, I forget. So I fall back asleep and make a terrible effort...

...and get it again. Still forget most of it when I wake. But I do get some...

...and then I wake again. I was still asleep. Lost all but the fact I got some of it on the second pass.

"All that's left is rendering", yes... but that's not always so easy.

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