You take me up and down through emotions

[austin_dern]

How about another little installment of rather hard to explain dreams? This is one that was set at least initially in the canteen/food court of my old and Singaporean university, somewhere around the Japanese food stall. As so common for dreams it wasn't a single location but was also the entrance walk to an amusement park ride; I suppose if the dream went on long enough the whole campus would have been like that. Working at the stall was bunny_hugger, who was selling first the various foods there as well as tickets to the ride.

The ride was a sort of roller coaster, I believe with the kind where seats hang ski lift-style from a raised track. It was a pretty tightly looping sort of thing, without many long straight stretches but plenty of chances to go spinning around. As the special gimmick for this ride the coaster somehow had multiple tracks, and the people getting inline for a particular ride were to select directions for various branching points so that the ride would be unique up to the extent of the two to the N combinations. I don't remember how this was supposed to work; my impression was that somehow the riders were expected to pick directions while on the ride, but I can't think of any way to make this rationally work unless the branches are picked ahead of time.

For some reason the dream needed some slightly arbitrary source of tension and here's where it was: I felt the compulsion to get something to eat at the combination food/ride stand; it may have been prerequisite to getting on the ride. But with bunny_hugger present I felt like I ought to get something vegetarian, and there weren't any options that way. There wasn't even anything sort of vegetarian. It was one of those strange amusement park stalls selling mostly meat in bread products. Somehow I was left unable to think of any proper way to resolve the problem, although I did wake up thinking a branching-path coaster would be neat and perfectly unplayable on Roller Coaster Tycoon.

Trivia: When the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, it had 6,562 regulars available for duty throughout the army, including privates, noncomissioned officers, and musicians. Source: The Class Of 1846, John G Waugh.

Currently Reading: Spaceland, Rudy Rucker.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I can't think of any way to make this rationally work unless the branches are picked ahead of time

If every branch takes the same amount of time to negotiate, or if you don't mind a few collisions...

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Equal-time paths isn't a bad notion. Collisions, well, that's a little too Action Park for my tastes.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

There's really no reason that wouldn't be in principle possible. Roller coasters already have ways of diverting the train onto another piece of track in order to add or remove trains, or for maintenance. I would think, though, that a ride like that could only safely run one train at a time, and although there are roller coasters that get by with one train operation, anything reasonably popular and long would develop insufferable lines. I suspect that a cost/benefit analysis would lead most parks to simply build three separate coasters if they had that kind of money.

It seems very tempting to interpret this dream symbolically -- it almost demands to be given a fairly obvious interpretation -- but I'm not convinced that the meanings we ascribe to dreams are anything more than our natural tendency to find patterns in chaos.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I could kind of see it working out if the path were picked ahead of time. Selecting it while the ride was in motion would be a logistic catastrophe, I think, if nothing else because of how many people on the ride would be too busy screaming or, in my case, laughing to bother with finding the buttons or whatever gimmick was used for selections.

I think I can pin down some of the source of the dream, though: one of those ``how things are built'' shows did Disney amusement parks and mentioned one ... ah ... an ``elevator of terror'' ride or something like that which added rotations and twists randomly so that rides wouldn't be exactly identical. That's not too far off this branching-paths idea.