I have a recurring anxiety dream about computers - specifically, about the clinical system I use every day when I'm working at the doctor's surgery where I earn my living. In the dream, I'm trying to do something simple like make an appointment for someone, but instead of the appointments screen or any of the familiar parts of the clinical system, I'm presented with lots of peculiar, highly-coloured and rather surreal graphics, like landscapes out of Super Mario brothers or some other digital game. These are meant to be either alternative layouts for the clinical system, or 'splash screens' you see when you first log on, before you get to the system proper. I keep trying to get past them to a screen which has actually got some useful functionality, but each screen leads to another one which is yet more bizarre and distracting - and I'm not just looking at these screens on a computer terminal, I'm kind of getting lost inside them, trying to play my way through them like a character in a digital game - while in the meantime, patients are queueing up at the surgery front desk, getting more and more impatient because I can't book them in, make them appointments, print prescriptions for them or do anything else to help them.
It's a classic anxiety dream, of course. When I was at school I used to dream of getting on the wrong bus, getting off at the wrong stop, trying to walk it but taking all the wrong turnings, catching another bus which took me in the wrong direction, getting further and further away from where I was supposed to be, and more and more conscious of the fact that I was already late and missing lessons. Nowadays my dreams use computers and digital technology instead of bus-rides and twisty roads to flesh out my anxiety. Does anybody else dream about computers, anxiously or otherwise? - Edward --
_______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
