Dreamer

Dreaming inside the Dream

I have learned something about Infinity while playing with 3D animation programs.

Infinity is really big, is incredibly detailed and has gone on for an amazingly long time. That’s a wee bit of an understatement, but then again, what isn’t an understatement when talking about Infinity?

There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the Universe, than to try and build one of your own. Whether by drawing or painting, writing, photography, or by building a little scene in a 3D animation program, It forces an appreciation for the vast, intricately knit complexity of it all. These activities ask us to conceive of a reality of our own or try to capture a fleeting moment of realty.

It's really big!

No matter which medium the creative person begins with, we are continuously confronted by our limitations. In photography, the camera can capture only light within a certain range of frequency andluminance, within a predefined angle. Even specialty cameras which rotate to provide a 360 degree panoramic view are confined to a single plane. While the camera can scan the horizon, the Universe exists above, below and beyond its vision. The Hubble space telescope (a glorified camera) keeps discovering that the material Universe extends beyond anything anybody had previously imagined. Our awareness has grown, in the past few hundred years from conceiving of the Universe as a flat plate around which tiny stars, sun and moon orbited, to well, what Hubble is showing us. And if we're honest, we have to admit, that we haven't advanced very far in our ability to conceive it all. After all, scientists think that everything is expanding away from us in all directions. Does that mean that we still think we're the centre of the Universe? Let’s face it, no matter how big we think it all is, it’s a lot bigger than that.

It's got incredible detail

While one set of scientists are reaching further and further out into space, another bunch is probing ever deeper into the heart of the atom. We're talking teeny tiny here, folks. If the nucleus of an atom was the size of the fountain at Stanley Park, it's first electron would be about the size of a pea somewhere in Abbotsford. (OK, I don't have the exact stats, but you get my drift.) It turns out that the electron is composed of minute waveform patterns about the size of, (are you ready for this), a thought.

It's been going on for a long, long time

Some progress has been made in our ideas about time, too. High speed photography can stop speeding bullets, and compress months into a few seconds of film. Not too long ago (you may still find some people who still believe it), a Biblical scholar dated the beginning of time at a few thousand years, B.C. Now we date local planets in billions and trillions of years. If you compare the Universe to a person of one hundred, the life of our solar system wouldn't add up to a twinkle in old man time's eye.

Perhaps less progress had been made going the other way with time. Which is to say, how finely can it be resolved? Atomic clocks are used to tell us precisely how late we are for our appointments, but how "small" does time really get? That question may be better answered sooner because of the intense interest in faster computers which in turn require finer and finer time slices. Actions within the computer are timed with reference to the internal clock. The IBM PC of about 12 years ago had a clock speed of 4 Megahertz, or 4 million oscillations per second. Pretty fast. Todays computers are capable of over 2000mhz, with still faster speeds on the horizon.

The dream, the dreamer and the dreamed

At some point at the extremes, it all starts to converge. Distances can be measured in units of time, (light years); time is measured in units of space, (one revolution around the sun is a year.)

So what has all of this got to do with a 3D animation program revealing the Mind of God? Well, my efforts on the computer seem pretty puny by comparison. I'd just like to get a leaf to look real in 3D. They keep coming out looking like deformed plastic. Animations of even a few minutes require Herculean efforts and Leviathon disk space from my computer.

When I consider that the Universe exists only as a dream in the Mind of God, I am, to say the least, impressed. One Consciousness spanning not only vast stretches of time and space, but also capable of such intricacy.

A question arises: When I dream or "create" an object like a leaf on the computer, or as a sketch, am I getting closer to the Original Mind or am I getting further away? Simply put, if I dream that I am dreaming, am I getting closer to or further from Reality?

Am I not already a dream dreaming?

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