Hammer Dream (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
This morning, I heard my daughter stirring in the next room, and I fell back asleep, knowing I only had a few minutes before I had to start getting her ready for preschool.
In those few minutes, I had a dream.
I was showing my daughter a hammer. It had a squarish head, like a metalworker’s square hammer. It had a foam padded handle, that was decorated with a realistic-looking woodgrain pattern. I was trying to amuse my daughter by poking dents in the foam padding, pretending that I was strong enough to make the wood handle squish.
When my daughter realized the trick, I pulled off the foam sheath, revealing the real wood of the hammer under the woodgrain-printed foam covering. I did so in a dramatic fashion, expecting my daughter to laugh, which she did.
Then I noticed that the woodgrain of the hammer was actually a cheap vinyl covering, like you find on cheap office furniture (or the furniture I see all round me here in my basement study). When I peeled off some of that covering, I saw that the handle was actually made of that wood chips-and-sawdust amalgam that makes up the core of plywood.
I wondered how useful a hammer could be if its handle was made up of this stuff. But when I looked even closer, I saw that instead of wood chips, the handle was composed of intricate and detailed little decorative boxes, stacked like Russian dolls. As I watched, the boxes started unfolding, spilling out into geometric patterns like an Escher print. So much wood was involved that I couldn’t imagine how it could have all fit into the space occupied by the handle.
The last thing I remember before I woke up was how I could somehow reproduce this event for the benefit of my students.
It was only an hour or so later, after I had driven my daughter to preschool (and was helping her write a page of letters) that it finally hit me… My daughter had given me a hammer for Christmas, and duh, Hammer is the name of one of the 3D design tools I’ve been using.
Tonight if I have a dream about geometric shapes pouring out of a blender, I’ll let you know.
And now you know what kind of dreams/nightmares I was having all semester. It depended on how class was going as to what kind of sleep-vision I experienced.
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<br/>You should try looking in one of those dream books for fun. I'm sure this dream would say something interesting about the layers of the hammer.
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<br/>Oh, and I enjoyed the reference to Escher. Very vivid.
Heh… that's amusing. I did write down an interesting dream I had back in September, and I started coding it in Inform. I was thinking of using it as part of an I7 tutorial sometime.
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Very interesting dream. Have you ever dream in IF code? That would be something. Examine hammer. “The woodgrain of the hammer is actually a cheap vinyl covering.”