The Charlatan - August 10, 2015TL;DR: You can't out-crazy my vivid (and remarkably coherent) dream.
The dream starts in an elevator. The walls are made of glass and I can see that elevator is servicing a cylindrical skyscraper with a twin skyscraper less than ten meters away. The two buildings are connected via glass catwalks. The elevator has doors on both sides but no buttons. The east doors open briefly to face a catwalk when the elevator reaches the top floor, and the west doors open to face a lobby on the bottom floor.
I know somehow that my goal is not to leave via the lobby, and I figure there are only four possible stations: top and bottom in the west tower, and top and bottom in the east tower. I ride to the top of the west tower, cross the catwalk (which for some reason is so narrow top-to-bottom that I have to crawl through it), and ride the east tower elevator down, finding myself at a dead end. Confused, I ride elevators up and down, crossing catwalks randomly until I eventually exit into a small, dimly-lit amphitheater with tiered seating.
Here there are a handful of young adults (age between 20-25) who take note of my presence, and a middle-aged man sitting behind an imposing desk at an elevated position in the center of the room. The man at the desk is clearly an authority and an academic. I stand in front of his desk, which is flush against the edge of the tier it sits on, requiring me to stand two feet below on the next lowest tier. He picks up a portfolio and says something to the effect of "Your work on [
can't remember this] was really impressive. I was also impressed by the boldness of your commitment to 'changing the world'."
At this point my brain (who I'll call "VB" for "Virgil's Brain") reveals several more pieces of the puzzle. Firstly, that the man I'm speaking with is the CEO and chief innovator of a powerful multinational. His name is Ross Cook. [
Obviously "Cook" calls to mind Apple CEO Tim Cook, but I know what he looks like and the dream CEO definitely wasn't him.] Secondly, I realize that I'm a young adult invited to a highly competitive once-in-a-lifetime entrepreneurship seminar for brilliant young innovators. Thirdly, Cook has mistaken me for somebody else. It's not that I'm not supposed to be at the seminar, it's that I'm one of the charity cases they let in to fill a quota. Cook ordinarily wouldn't look at me twice, but he's evidently mistaken me for one of the brightest and most promising young minds.
[
I can guarantee you that in real life the first thing I would do is clear up the misconception, but in the dream I recall thinking, He hasn't said anything fundamentally inconsistent with the real me, hence I'll let him continue to believe I'm special, and if the truth comes out later, I have plausible deniability.
Dream Virgil is considerably less ethical than real Virgil.]
The last thing revealed to me is that the elevators were a test. The complex that we're in is in fact three identical skyscrapers disguised by optical illusion to look like two. [
Don't ask me how this would work since VB wasn't forthcoming with the details.] The relevant fact is that hypothesizing the existence of a third building provides insight needed to solve the elevator maze, and the order in which attendees arrive provides Cook et al. an early indication of how intelligent attendees are relative to each other. I've evidently managed to solve the maze by sheer dumb luck, and I'm the sixth attendee to arrive out of 120, which is consistent with my new identity. I'm aware that the individual I'm impersonating is going to be arriving shortly, but for some reason this fact doesn't worry me.
The dream now skips ahead to where the other attendees and I are filing into a much larger amphitheater, twice the size of a concert auditorium, with giant panoramic screens running around the periphery and wide cherrywood desks set up in a series of arcs facing the front of the room. Each desk comfortably seats two people. Like the previous amphitheater, the room is dark and sparsely appointed. I find my seat, which has a portfolio and a placard with my surname sitting on the desk in front of it.
I look over to my right and see that the station beside mine bears a placard with a surname very similar to my own. The attendee hasn't arrived yet. I hypothesize that Cook's earlier confusion may have been due to mixing up similar surnames, and so I brazenly swap my portfolio with the one at the station next to me. [
Again, this most definitely isn't something I'd do in real life, and it doesn't even make logical sense.] I open the portfolio and discover that it's my orientation package. It contains a personalized letter from Cook detailing "my" (as in, the individual I'm impersonating) accomplishments that qualified me to attend the seminar.
When I move on to the second page, I discover that a large passage is written in Arabic. Just as I think,
Oh crap, this guy knows Arabic, the attendee next to me (whose identity I've usurped) asks me excitedly, "Oh, you know Arabic too?". He's evidently seen the writing in my letter.
He's a fat, pale fellow, roughly 21 years old. He has blue eyes and a ruddy face with bunched-together features. His hair is blonde and almost crew cut. I take his nationality for Swedish. At this point VB tells me that my earlier hypothesis was correct: this fellow is a genius and is the person Cook mistook me for. It also tells me his name is "Connor". [
...which is a Swedish name, apparently.]
I lie to Connor and tell him, "Yes." He asks me what other languages I know, to which I honestly reply that I'm fluent in French and I know a little bit of Italian and German. He gets excited by my mentioning Italian, and he launches into an earnest presentation of one of his lesser theses that "all but two Italian morphemes are [
can't remember] indexable". [
After waking, I had to look up the term "morpheme" online to discover that "Connor" was using the term correctly. Although my subconscious apparently knew what it meant, I consciously couldn't have told you. It's also worth pointing out that there appears to be no such thing as "indexing of morphemes" in real life.]
I'm hopelessly confused by Connor's thesis, but also genuinely determined to understand it. I paraphrase of as much of it as I can remember. As I look up, I realize that Cook has come over to our station and is looking at me approvingly. He also apparently knows a great deal about indexing theories for Italian morphemes, and so he makes a relevant statement that goes over my head. Connor takes on the discussion with great gusto. I can see that Cook is trying to involve me in the dialog, but the subject matter is so alien to me that I wisely stay silent.
Eventually the conversation reaches a point where I have to say something. I make a vague statement about how human language structures might be informed by research into representation theory (a mathematical field), which I do based on the belief that neither man will have any significant knowledge of representation theory. To VB's credit, it immediately realizes how ridiculous my statement is. Connor jumps in with a "I think I get what you're saying. That..." straight-out-of-a-sitcom rescue, thus sparing me embarrassment and exposure.
[
Something else significant happens next, but my recollection is too vague to put it into words. It involves another conversation between Cook, Connor, and myself, where I'm desperately trying to not look like an idiot.]
The dream skips forward to where I'm now in a well-lit room with all 120 seminar attendees. There's a giant island (in the sense of a kitchen island) in the middle of the room. It's a 50'x30' rectangular bar with no seats and all but the outermost 3' filled in with ferns, flowers, etc. like a planter. Around the island are hundreds of 5"x14" cards with symbols on them. The other attendees and I are walking counterclockwise around the island single-file. The atmosphere is pleasant and full of energy.
VB clues me into the situation: I'm taking part in an exercise that, like the elevators, is an early test of intellectual prowess. I'm participating as part of a team with some unknown number of members, and I've been appointed "group leader". Only group leaders are able to pick up cards off the table to inspect them. After a card is inspected, it can either be selected or returned to the table. The objective is to inspect the cards and replace them until a pattern can be deduced. Once a group leader is clued in to the pattern, (s)he selects them on a first-grabbed basis until no more cards are left.
The group leader must devise a stateful "pass-back algorithm" that specifies which cards will be passed back and which cards will be kept by each team member. Finally, the leader will be given a "certain function" accepting the group members' sets of cards as inputs and outputting a score. The higher the score, the better. The team with the highest score wins.
I'm initially excited because this seems like a challenge I could excel at, but as I start picking up the cards, I realize I only have a few seconds to look at each one and they contain only meaningless glyphs and diagrams. VB tells me they're structure charts relating to various real and synthetic languages. My emotions turn from fear (I have no clue what I'm doing) to anger (how do they expect anyone to know this?) to self-reassurance (knowing all these languages is just rote memorization, one of the lowest forms of intellect; just because I'm clueless doesn't mean I'm stupid) to fear again.
I desperately try to make sense of some of the cards, but I can't remember the symbols after I set the cards down. I sense the selection phase of the exercise is almost over. I start selecting cards randomly and keeping them if their symbols look "synthetic". My reasoning is that the synthetic language cards will be the hardest to decipher. When I inevitably fail, I can blame the failure on having selected the most challenging cards.
[
After waking up: I contemplated whether a human intellect could possibly conquer the exercise described above given the time frame. My sound conclusion was 'no'. Score one for my conscious mind because it was faced with an impossible challenge. Score -1 for my unconscious mind because it couldn't be bothered to dream up a realistically solvable challenge.]
I discover to my great relief that devising the "pass-back algorithm" is in fact a team exercise and that Connor is on my team. He starts looking through the cards I've selected and generally seems pleased. It appears I've prevailed by sheer dumb luck again. He shows me one card in particular covered with circuit diagrams in boxes and asks me, "Which three did you take out of this one?"
I don't recognize any of the circuits, but I notice one that contains only linear components and sources. First year electrical engineering teaches that any such system can be reduced into an equivalent circuit with a single linear component and source, hence the circuit in question stands out as needlessly complex. I pick it. I pick a second circuit because it appears to have a short-circuited voltage source, which is a modeling error. I can't think of any good reason to pick a third circuit, but I notice that one model has a round component labeled "HOME", which I don't recognize and doesn't seem like it should be in a circuit diagram. I pick it too.
Connor gets extremely excited by my third pick. He says something to the effect of "That one I really had to think about." and proceeds to explain how he came to his own revelation of its significance. I tell him, "I don't know what the 'certain function' is." He replies that all the group leaders were supposed to meet with Cook 20 minutes earlier to have functions assigned to them, but all is well because another one of our team members filled in for me. Our team was assigned the function 'MAXVEL'. I figure this is "maximum velocity".
It occurs to me that we could treat the card score of each individual team member as a distance, in which case instantaneous velocity would be the difference in scores between two adjacent members, and maximum velocity would be the maximum computed over all pairs of adjacent members. But the optimization is trivial in that case: I should just keep all the cards myself. For no good reason, I decide to minimize velocity instead of maximizing it. This is also trivially solved: make sure every group member has a set of cards with a common score. But for some reason I'm convinced this is the better approach.
I explain my reasoning to Connor, who accepts it without question. I hang back as he brings our team over. [
The dream gets very fuzzy at this point. I can tell you that the team had six members, and that's about it.]
The dream skips ahead to the final 'scene'. I'm back in the smaller amphitheater next to the elevators. Cook and Connor are with me. Both are happy because our team was victorious in the first exercise. Connor is being characteristically enthusiastic and humble, crediting my leadership for the win. I'm feeling anxious and inferior.
I'm still pondering the exercise (only a few minutes have passed in real time). I wonder if 'MINVEL' (which was previously 'MAXVEL') has some relationship with the elevators. Then I wonder what the implications of setting MINVEL to zero would be, and I conclude (wrongly) that setting velocity to zero would cause division by zero and thus result in an elevator moving infinitely fast. I decide to watch what happens when my team members get into the elevator.
In the next moment, I'm situated where I can look inside the elevator at a downward angle. My "infinite velocity" hypothesis turns out to be correct and I see my team members instantly turn to puddles of clear goo on the floor as a result of being subject to infinite acceleration. I briefly wonder about how infinite velocity is possible in the context of relativity, and conclude that the elevator must only have been moving at the speed of light. Then, to my credit, I feel guilty that I made no attempt to prevent my team members from getting into the elevator.
Cook is unconcerned with the deaths. He reveals that what I was watching was just a simulation. My team members are still alive. The simulation was a warning that the testing never ends and I can never let my guard down.
The dream ends.
