Dreamt I watched this whole thing on TV as a movie...
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A man tries to save an actress/influencer friend from a dystopian psychological ward.  The influencer normally has a very active online presence but recently went missing and silent from social media.  The man finds her at the ward after much detective work, schedules a visit, but she looks different, disfigured, etc but clearly still her.  When the man tries to talk to her, she is confused, doesn't speak, has a blank expression, and does not seem to recognize any of her online profiles/content he shows her on his phone.  It becomes apparent she's either drugged out or mentally incapacitated / disabled.

He breaks her out only for them to both get caught and separated.  He gets held in a separate room and questioned by doctors.  He demands they release her and that he'll expose them, but they seem relatively unphased and largely ignore...[More]

Sometimes it feels like I spend all day just to get somewhere.  I can't help but wonder - where are all the people on this train? And then I realize-

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Dreamt of finding this note left on a train, but woke up before I finished reading it. :O

This is more of an open question we're curious about and not something we're claiming should work or is accurate, so apologies in advance if we butcher any terminology or concepts.  Credits to Waterflame for posing the initial question that gave way to the rest of the idea - if quantum entanglement is actually the result of a hidden variable (4th spatial dimension), we wonder if a shift in center of mass/gravity might be a way to test it.

The implication is that if the center of gravity or mass shifts, then there may be something physical connecting the two particles but through space we are not aware of (ie 4th spatial dimension).  A 2D analogy would be to have two seemingly separate dots on a sheet of paper moving in synchronization, but zooming out in 3D, you would see the dots are connected by a compass or other tool.  What we are asking then is whether we can detect the existence of that connection from the point of the view of the 2D paper by measuring the...[More]

A black screen, soft nature ambience, and a sudden ominous thump against the wall.

Unfade to a person waking up pinned against the ceiling of a house.   The camera is close up and upside down initially before rotating to instill a sense of disorientation.  Heavy panicked breathing.  Throbbing low ambience.  White light from the cloudiness outside.

The person struggles to stand or move.  They call out for help, but there's no one around.  Cut to a distant shot looking up to the person from the ground.  Nothing else is upside down, and things fall to the ground from the person.  The person fidgets with a cell phone only to drop it.

The person...[More]

Another dream that played out like a movie...

We start at a conference where everyone wears UV filtering glasses because the world's been infested with giant invisible insects that either eat you or bite into the back of your head to control you.  There are also smaller hand-sized ones more everywhere, but only the big ones kill and mind-control. People are actively gathering again, such as at this conference conference, because the buildings are flooded with UV light which, in conjunction with the glasses, lets you see the creatures on the walls and ceilings.  

Security is constantly killing any of the larger creatures that get close enough to the floor or crowds, keeping the creatures at bay at the upper edges of the walls.  However, people seem to not make an effort to avoid the creatures themselves, grouping up near the walls when there's a creature right above them and occasionally getting swiped.  One of the organizers we're talking to lament this,...[More]

"Imaginary friends made real through AI."  

A new AI tech company sells robots for those wanting their imaginary friends made real.  The tech breaks all limits for how human and intelligent it is with no other tech coming close, and no one can understand how it came to be.  All this comes to a halt when one user ends up dead in the most gruesome circumstance.  

The scene starts with an android child befriending a human kid until it turns sociopathic and murders the family.  The android ends up missing and continuing to kill in new murder cases across the city.  

The tech firm...[More]

A man is working late in a museum with a white mask propped up on a table.  He notices the mask has very human-looking eyes, and when he gets closer to look, they suddenly move to look at him.  He quickly realizes this is a person wearing the mask behind the table, but when he shoves the table away, there is no one there, just the mask floating and staring back at him.  It starts to move, and when it turns, it goes invisible as if there is no back side to the face.

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Another one that was a dream for me.

Opening credits with the beeping sound of someone on life support in a hospital.  Once the beeping stops and flatlines, there's a power shut-off sound, and things go dark one by one except the body on the bed, leaving a spotlight in the dark.  Everything is silent.  A glowing, formless, non-humanoid spirit rises from the body, and the body disappears into the darkness.  There's a moment of peace while the spirit looks at itself and its surroundings, like a child discovering the world for the first time.  There are faint specs of light in the darkness, like stars, as if having risen to the heavens.  It looks like a stylistic choice to only show the character in darkness, but we later realize it's not.

Suddenly, bright-white eyes appear one after another in the dark surrounding the spirit.   A green, grainy overlay appears over the scene, and a booming voice announces, "There it is.  Capture it."

Cut back to...[More]

Had this one as a dream that felt somewhat like a murder mystery...

Someone is trying out a VR game that looks and feels extremely real.  They wake up on the floor in a bluish green tiled room that seems to have had a commotion and is abandoned.  A strange cat/tiger hybrid strolls by with a fruit in its mouth.  There's a constant sound of something dripping nearby.  Once out of the game, the person tries to ask if the place seems familiar.  A friend looks up the tiling and room pieces and confirms they are actual pieces that exist in real life.  At first, they think it's just really good photo capture, but over time, they start to notice things that are too coincidental.  It eventually turns out the room is one that actually exists, as they stumble upon it in an alley way.  The same cat hybrid strolls out the open door as they go in to explore it.  It eventually turns out that it's not just a photo-capture of the room but actually...[More]

Guy punches himself in the mirror and hurts his fist.  He gets pissed, punches his reflection's face, and knocks himself out.

- a dream I just woke up from. If anyone wants to do this as an animation on commission, let me know lol

1. Kid watches people fly on TV. Parent: "Humans can't actually fly. Our bodies are too heavy. It's just a myth."
2. 1000 yrs later... Extremely fat kid watches people run on TV. Parent: "Humans can't actually run. Our bodies are too heavy. It's just a myth."
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Just a random idea for a comic that came to mind.
(but I do secretly believe we used to be able to fly)

Another mystery/horror story that came as a dream (and somewhat terrifying one at that)...

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A group of friends are traveling to a new city and staying there for a bit. It is a tropical beach city - a sandy, walkable, small town with low-rise, shack-like residences.  They play video games as a team online the first night and joke about why they bother to name the group if they can't beat anyone yet.  After midnight, they order food delivered on GrubHub, since it's too late to go out and fall asleep after eating.

The next morning,...[More]

Had an idea for a story recently for if society found a way to make someone naturally like the taste of healthy foods (like vegetables, etc) - imagine if what you liked and craved lined up with what was good for you.  It sounds and all seems well, everyone eating better diets and enjoying better lifestyles.  Then imagine one day unexplained animal attacks start leaving people dead and torn up, seemingly at random and in generally urban settings with no dangerous wild predators.  As the story goes on, footage and evidence start to reveal the attacks seem to come from not any animal but a human.  The authorities track down and arrest one suspect, but the killings continue, seemingly at random and with no motive.  It turns out not to be any one person but people at random who suddenly go mad for human meat.  The commonality is they've all been genetically modified to like the taste of whatever is good for them, and it worked too well.  Because the healthiest...[More]

More an open-ended question here.  Prions, or misfolded proteins, are the cause of mad-cow disease when eating meat.  The animal itself is more likely to be produce misfolded proteins when eating brain tissue, but sometimes it's also just luck (or perhaps environmental, stress, etc).  The prions themselves cannot be destroyed by heating or other means once created, as it's more a mutation than a "disease." Once in the body, it causes other proteins to be misfolded as well in a tumor-like fashion.  

With regards to new synthesized foods like vegan or lab-grown meats,  I wonder what ways (if any) are there to unintentionally create misfolded proteins in the process as well.  Right now, it seems that they try to mess with the vegetable ingredients as little as possible when creating the meat flavor and texture.  Some of these opt for an organic and non-GMO label to make it distinct, but a concern would be if something like lab grown meats...[More]

Imagine if you could make any wish come true but would cause the death of one random person.

A man, known as the Baron, lives in a castle atop a hill and is suspected of having a supernatural artifact that does this, causing many mysterious deaths in the nearby town for his own gain.  Each death is similar, with each person becoming suddenly frail and ghostly pale before dying within days.  The story initially seems one of despair, as no one can really prove this to authorities and people at random just keep dying.  Many supporting and likeable characters have their arc abruptly ended in this manner.

An investigator tries to solve this mystery but doesn't believe in superstition.  He's an outsider to the town and tries to bring science and reason he believes the townspeople lack.  He suspects more likely the Baron created this rumor to hide something more nefarious.  A friend of the investigator gets frustrated with the investigator's calm...[More]

This is essentially a shorter version of one of my points from the longer Three Tiers of Mind and arguably an extension of the discussion on Inductive vs Deductive Reasoning.  What bothers me lately is there seems to be a general shift away from why racism is bad in the first place and more towards just any mention of race is bad or that any difference in advantage is bad (aka "privilege").  What makes racism bad at its core is that you are ignoring a person's individuality and making an assumption about that person based on association to a category.  In other words, you are not seeing the person in front of you but treating that person as just one of many belonging to some arbitrary label.  That person is no longer a person with their own agency and ability to cause change in the world but just a thing, an object, something that is not you.  That's the real problem that leads to all other acts someone may commit, which everyone then reacts to as racism or other crimes.

You see this immediately in any situation you normally associate with racism.  The reason slavery was able to make sense in people's minds was the ability to ignore the individuality of any person branded under the slave label.  Removing race would have made the act no better if the hierarchy still existed (and it did/does even amongst populations of same ethnicity).  The reason there is conflict between the rich and poor is because each side uses the other as only a means to an end, treating the other as just that - an other.  Removing money or other material differences makes the situation no better if people still view each other in terms of what they have, their demographics, or other population-level traits - in terms of association and value instead of as individuals (some will recognize this as the concept of dignity in Kantian theory).  Objectifying, commoditizing, treating someone as merely a statistic... these are all different names and outcomes for what is essentially the same thinking process deep down.  They judge you on where you come from instead of why you came, what you represent instead of what you actually chose to do.  You're X because you're a Y, and Ys are X.  It's the act of being too lazy to think about the full context and just reacting on a trigger word, of trying to think in broad-brush rules and sweeping generalizations instead of being willing to look at each situation case-by-case.  The flaw is thinking the abstract grouping more real than the individual the abstract was created around.  

This same manner of thinking pretty much leads to any other social aspects we consider "bad." An unfulfilling job - being a cog in a machine, working under someone's thumb - happens when your individuality is disregarded and you are treated as just a faceless number amongst many.  A friend or relationship feels false when the other doesn't actually listen to you specifically but just says what could be said to anyone else.  Someone is patronizing if they give advice without knowing anything about the person they are lecturing and just assume advice is warranted.  Someone is pedantic if they are ignoring what you're trying to say and only caring about how you said it.  Even the murderous psychopath - the difference between him and a hero soldier is that he does not think about others as individuals, just objects, a kill count, again a number.

When taken...[More]

Another one that came to me in a dream. Made more sense right after I woke, but I unfortunately started losing details as soon as I got to writing it down.

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The story is essentially a sci-fi thriller movie, where the founder tries to create AI from a math perspective similar to induction instead of the more common approach of fitting to data.  It's counterintuitive but rather than try to create a general algorithm that adapts to specific cases, the founder wants to start from one case and solve for the rest of the world - ie letting the AI define the rest of world on its own volition. In other words, instead of adapting or being an agent in the world, this algorithm plays God and creates it from scratch.  The idea is similar to trying to understand or simulate the current universe by instead creating a new one altogether via man-made blackholes in a lab.  It's also similar to what you do in theoretical math where you define hypothetical systems or...[More]

This could either be an animation or short film. The imagery of someone walking upsidedown against the night sky is what stuck in my mind.
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Scene starts panning down from a cloudy, moonlit night sky to a girl standing on the edge of a highrise rooftop with her arms out.  It looks like she is about to fall, but as she goes over the edge, the camera rotates to instead show her walking down the side of the building, apparently sleepwalking.  There is a wistful element as her hair is constantly flowing and her arms are out to balance.  The elements seem to whirl around her as she walks, as if animated by what she is dreaming.  The iconic scene is of her walking upsidedown on the bottom of a plank between two highrises against the backdrop of the moon and night sky in the background.  

Eventually...[More]

Another story that came as a dream, ironically as a movie I was watching in the dream.

The movie initially starts as a horror film about boy initially trying to escape the home of a crazed family with a murderous cyborg child.  The home is more or less a cave with no open windows or exit (all boarded up).  The parents are human but very old and clearly insane, sort of like the fake grandparents from The Visit.  The cyborg behaves more like an animal and is Frankenstein-like, with loosely pieced together scrap metal for arms, blades for hands, barely functional prosthetics for what's left of the face (doll-like eyes, unmoving lips, etc), etc.  Often it crawls on all fours or climbs the walls, staying in the shadows.  It is unclear if it was once human at all or entirely machine to begin with.  The pacing and feel is almost like a Saw movie at first, with no indication how the we arrived here or why things are.

After about halfway through...[More]

Premise of a horror film I thought of while staying up too late.
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Imagine every night you hear the loud humming of what you think are street sweepers driving by.  One night, you get tired of it and venture out into the streets to complain, except there's nothing there.  You run towards the sound, but it just keeps getting louder and louder, with nothing in sight for as far you can see.  The sound eventually starts moving away and goes quiet, like it does every night, and you go back home confused.

The next night, you run out again when you hear the sound, trying to get to the center of it before it goes away again.  This time, you keep running towards it as it tries to get away from you.  At first, you are barely able to keep up with the sound as it is moving away.  At some point, you realize the sound is suddenly getting louder and louder than it ever has before.  You get so caught up running towards the sound that you don't...[More]