Real Life and Second Life Paredolia

Real Life and Second Life Paredolia

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Recently I have been working on a few things. One, is the manuscript for Dream Syntax, consisting of 5 years of transcribed dreams and maps of dream spaces. Two, is this game we call Russian Jogging Roulette, or “Ruskijogelette”. Basically we pick a time and two of us in separate continents HAVE TO GO JOGGING at the same time (OR OTHERWISE DIE). Three, is a slight increase in the time I’ve spent playing Second Life, because I’ve been trying to learn to build and script. (We bought the land, now we have to make it. And oh yes I have “Grandiose Designs” for it….)

It should be obvious why Second Life attracts me so much. I suppose I like dream spaces and virtual spaces as much as I like real spaces. I was uploading my daily phone pictures along with some of my SL screenshots to Flickr (a somatic reflex of self-documentation), when I realised two of images from different sources – coincidentally uploaded one after another – had certain similarities. I’m not sure about you, but for me it is a curious case of the two having a similar composition and alignment, made apparent as my Real Life and Second Life become indistinguishably mashed up online.

I know it is a human impulse to find similarities even where none truly exist (pareidolia), but after having transcribed and written out my dreams so extensively, and in real life having all this strange physical distance between me and you whilst we do virtual things together and talk as if we are in the same room together, it sometimes feels like the real life things I write about are not so very different to the imaginary things I write about.

Now, what I would really like is for Snapshots in SL to be automatically embedded with its SLurl in the EXIF data for each image. Then doing the documentation of my virtual life would be… (pardon the pun) like a… dream?