This early morning I had this dream where I was playing an old side-scrolling type videogame, a bit like Super Mario Bros. I was speed-running it, so I must have played the game many times before. The creatures I encountered were unusual, or at least unfamiliar. They were alien creatures. I must have gotten the inspiration for these creatures from this sci-fi novel I’m reading right now: Diaspora by Greg Egan. It’s an amazing book. So I speed-ran through all these weird creatures, just jumping and avoiding them. Then the perspective shifted to the first person. It was me jumping and avoiding these obstacles in this alien jugle setting. I remember falling back first onto this raging river. It was so intense I could feel the moment the water closed in on me. The next scene in the dream I’m talking with this academic guy. I think in the dream he wrote a book, I remember the title because I thought it was super-interesting: The Psycho-pathology of Ontology. He was explaining it to me, and I was really impressed and amazed. It explained so much, I thought in the dream, especially the current dilemma with PRRD.

I am about eighty percent finished with Greg Egan’s Diaspora. It’s an amazing book. This book has the vastest scale in a sci-fi novel I’ve ever read, time-wise and geographic-wise. It covers billions of years, and the geographic scope is so vast I can’t even explain it (I literally can’t. The science is too complicated for me). That’s another issue with this book: it’s hard science fiction, which means it uses actual scientific theories to explain things. It’s difficult to understand most of the time if you’re unfamiliar with the science, at least with me. Nevertheless it isn’t all science and explanations, there’s also character and pathos. I especially love how the concepts of consciousness and identity, psychology and personality are explored in the context of post/trans-human conditions. There were some really intense dramatic moments scattered all throughout. I love how time and memories play so much of a role in creating pathos. Overall, this book is definitely my best read of the year.