A dream I had...

I've been dreaming more than usual lately. And I've also been spending a lot of time with the works of Laurie Anderson lately, which can yield some rather, uh, quirky combinations.

For example, I was up late last night, reading Laurie's latest book, exactly one week after seeing her perform at Sadler's Wells (when I met Brian Eno -- but that's another story). Well, I say "late"; perhaps I should say "early", because it was around 5AM when I got to the section: "Songs and Stories for the Insomniac". I eventually fell asleep.

I had this strange dream. I dreamed that Laurie was telling one of her weird stories again. And the story was:

You know, I haven't been in New York much lately, because I've been travelling around on various tours, promotions, and so on. But recently, when I was in town, I decided to sit in on an academic conference, you know, just kind of check up on them, see what was going on. I chose a science and technology conference on the subject of Artificial Intelligence. And at this conference, they were discussing how they could make machines more like people.

After listening to these people go on for a while, I was reminded of something Wittgenstein said:

	   "Science is the study of all imaginable worlds".

And then I thought: "Well, I guess that rules out a science of this world then".

A dreamed joke

Just thought I'd tell you about another dream or two that I had. Two nights ago, I had a dream that had a joke in it. After dreaming the joke, I thought: I must remember to write that down. Not because it was particularly funny, but just because I thought it up in a dream. Anyway, I forgot to jot it down, so last night, I had a dream where I told someone at dinner that I had dreamed a joke the night before. When I told them the joke, they didn't really laugh, but said that it wasn't what they expected. They thought that it would be unfunny because it would be too simple and cliche, not because it would be too obscure.

Anyway, the joke is:

Someone had been complaining about their electric bill. So I said, "Yeah, electricity can really get on your nerves".

I told you it wasn't funny. But jokes I dream don't count against my sense of humour if bad, just for my sense of humour if good.