So I woke up at 2:30 a.m. because of some excruciating left upper quadrant (LUQ) abdominal pain, with some referred pain to the neck. The abdominal pain was a burning, almost boring, continuous sensation. I wasn’t short of breath or diaphoretic, and this was pretty typical for the problems I’ve been having with my GI tract, which I’ve basically written off as either really bad GERD or quite possibly some peptic ulcer disease. I blithely entertain the notion that I’m having a heart attack, but since the only symptom is this quite caustic sensation in my belly, I don’t buy it. In any case, the neck pain goes away after some Tums and ranitidine (Zantac) 300 mg (4x the over-the-counter dose.) But the acid pain is still there, and I figure I may as well eat. And since I’m eating, maybe I should go to the grocery store.

I’m done with groceries by just after 6 a.m., and while the pain has abated, it still quite annoyingly there. I end up buying some omeprazole (Prilosec), too, and gobble down 40 mg (2x the over-the-counter dose.) In about half-an-hour, the pain finally goes away to the point where I can get some sleep.

I end up having some really vivid and intense dreams. At first, it just starts out with me doing rounds with the new interns on internal medicine. It so happens I’m also taking call for the neuro service at the same time (which is completely nonsensical.) And my neuro attending is doing some really weird-ass research.

It turns out that, through sheer accident and some fucking around with the functional MRI scanner (fMRI), he has stumbled upon a region of the brain that lights up specifically when we’re trying to predict the future. (Would it make more sense to call it the Feynmann area or the Schroedinger area?) With a few other weird techniques including hypnosis and such, he has figured out how to get a snapshot of what this future prediction looks like, and essentially, the patient is able to make her imagined future environment persist, so that she can always go back to that timeline she predicted and make changes and do whatever. It’s like the ultimate immersive experience.

In slightly clearer language, basically the test subject is prompted to imagine something about the future, and then induced to dream. The test subject will then find themselves in a vivid dream set in the exact future that she imagined. Say that you make a prediction about Tokyo in 2038. Your brain does some calculation that includes the Feynman center, and spits out a likely scenario from which you can extrapolate whatever it was that someone wanted you to extrapolate. What my neuro attending’s contraption allows you to do is not only figure out the extrapolation, but actually make the Tokyo 2038 scenario you envisioned persist, so that you can return to it whenever you want and see whatever it is you want to see.

Now, since he hasn’t been doing this research long enough to figure out whether or not there’s anything to the futures his test subjects are predicting (no winning lottery numbers, sadly), all he’s really been doing is dutifully recording the extrapolations and scenarios. Well, it turns out that he figured that this would be really lucrative in the video game market, what with the extraordinarily fanciful futures that some of the test subjects have predicted.

As time goes on, he also figures out how to actually read the visual cortex and the images that flicker through it, and he can turn it into a computer model that can be manipulated and navigated in three dimensions. In this way, he becomes less dependent on the test subject’s recall, and it becomes easier to actually build a game this way.

Some of his results are particularly interesting, many of the test subjects evoking this world that feels like some weird melding of Japanese manga/anime tropes that are replete with mecha, cyberpunk dystopia, and interplanetary travel. One of the first games he manages to develop in this manner is a standard fighting game a la Street Fighter where you can choose to be various samurai from the Genji era, a few fight club participants from America in the late 1990s, or some kind of futuristic high-tech mercenary a la Boba Fett.

But a lot of the games are merely just background worlds. For example, there’s a future where the world has been totally wrecked by eco-disaster, and most of the world’s surface is covered by water (a la Waterworld.) But civilization hasn’t collapsed quite as much as in Kevin Costner’s movie. Naturally, the Japanese, being island dwellers who are used to extremely limited tracts of real estate, manage to survive quite skillfully, by building environments and habitats that are not only mobile, but can actually transform into mecha.

The also manage to either find a new fuel source other than hydrocarbons, figure out how to mine hydrocarbons from the Saturnine moon Titan, or actually discover an anti-gravitational force. Because, in addition to the mecha/habitats that roam the oceans of Earth, some people have actually taken to living on air-borne arcologies.

The world I enter is extremely dystopian. I have images of Depression Era 1940s, coupled with images from the [Spanish Inquisition]. Conservative Christianity holds sway over the entire Western World and the Reformation never happened. Islam enjoys the same niche compatibility that Judaism has, and the real ideological enemy becomes the East. The See of Rome intends to convert the believers of Hinduism and Buddhism to the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

So I find myself at a construction site which kind of reminds me of Mission Valley but in reality has no similarity to it at all. In fact, the mall reminds me almost of a favela. But some construction workers are building another parking complex, and some bizarre accident happens so that a really young black guy with cornrows wearing a wife-beater falls five stories and gets improbably impaled on a steel spike. Somehow, he manages to still have a pulse, although part of the steel spike has apparently penetrated into his brain, and he really isn’t saying much. Some of us assert that the guy wouldn’t’ve wanted to live brain-injured, and we try to cajole the on-site physician to at least give the guy some morphine until EMS arrives. However, because the Church has his fingers on everything, the on-site cleric puts the kibosh on that, saying that that would be euthanasia. I end up registering my disgust and try to get off the work site, knowing full well that I make myself an excellent target for the now 1.75 century old Inquisition.

The attending neurologist’s prodigy, however, is a 15 year old kid who is half-Japanese, half-French. His name is Shinji Yakamura, and from his labor alone, they have been able to sell two blockbuster games to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, basically securing funding for further research.

Another alternative future is something of a transportation dystopia. The world has apparently been, quite literally, paved over. We don’t notice the environmental catastrophe that ensues mainly because most of our environment is almost completely artificial. Roads and freeways run in and out of the Grand Canyon. Rivers are wantonly redirected to make road-building easier. Everyone drives their hydrogen-fueled cars with retrofuturistic features like the fiberglass hatch and afterburners.

Even the air-borne environments which I mentioned previously have roads going to and coming from them, so much so that most maps have to be rendered holographically, because it is nearly impossible to draw a usable map in only two dimensions.

I would love these vivid dreams if not for the fact that they leave me completely exhausted.