User:TJlive800/Dreams

You know those times when you look at a scene or setting (usually outdoors) and it immerses your mind into this surreal, dreamlike vision which looks so familiar yet it's impossible to pinpoint? Something you usually dream of and it's a vivid, creative, surreal, ideal setting for a work of imagination? It feels as though you've seen it before and your mind has been wandering among that image for such a long time, yet providing an explanation pinpointing every detail is impossible? It's because the mind wavers - the brain contains over 30 billion neurons and each of them sends multiple signals, so it's impossible for your thoughts and visions to stay focused on a static setting with the same details per imagination of them. It's why when you try to explain this to someone you probably won't remember "which tree goes where" in an example forest setting, and your next imagination of a scene matching that tone likely won't contain trees, or it may have a different lighting, etc.

What the hell did I just say, you ask. It's 4:30 PM as I write this, and it's wintertime. The Pacific Northwest's daylight is short-lived during this season and the sun is setting as I type this. I just came back from a walk around my neighborhood and it was the most new, different thing I've experienced. Last Sunday I took a jog around the neighborhood and went pretty far and again it was the same thing, the same feeling. Your mind lost in imagination, with everything around eclipsing another part of another dream illustrating a world which seems simple but is somehow so complex to express in words. In a car I pass by these places almost every day, but running down the sidewalk and seeing the trees' ornate patterns of branches loom over me as I pass by and feel the rush of the vividly colorful plants standing out against the cloudy day, zipping past and staying so constant that your mind can't escape it - it didn't make me feel trapped, but rather, in some sort of heavenly state.

It goes without saying that this may sound a little crazy, and that's fine, but it really isn't. When I explain such things it requires quite deep-delving context to truly share the same feeling, but everyone experiences this everywhere they go, so you probably know what I'm talking about. Ever been in a long car ride down a highway and observe the trees in your boredom, allowing the color of the sky or the suggested details inside the forest to take your mind to some sort of fictional setting you want to see come to life?

For me, the surreal aspect of it often matches the tone set when exploring one of those "glitched areas" in an open-world videogame, the area outside the map. For example, in Batman: Arkham City, a glitch is present in which the repeating throwing of Freeze grenades while sitting on a ledge can make Batman somehow rise in the air, and when done enough, can make you rise above the normal limits of the game world and fly out into the surrounding city, which is all just a low-resolution texture serving as a background skin, with Batman being able to pass through the buildings since they're only texture sheets. Here's a video. Similarly, in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, you can get your character out of the game world by crashing this vehicle called the "Hydra Tank" while two players are inside, and then explore the surprisingly detailed texture-sheet background world that lies ahead. It feels quite weird, and awfully surreal, allowing your mind to be plugged into a world full of imagination. These surreal dreamlike qualities to my visions usually revels in the tone cast by these game worlds. Back when I would play Minecraft, going out shopping, etc. would feel fun when imagining the city surroundings to be a world within the game - it allowed for what I could only perceive, such as what's further behind the mountains (thoughts structured around the imagination), to have a much more colossal, surreal quality to them. It's amazing.

Quite evidently I'm in that state right now :D and writing about it for more than one reason - for one I just want to get this out and express it so it could be condensed down to something I can more easily comprehend, know how to express, and be able to describe something so unfathomable, granted the fortune of every human being experiencing these things. There's no denying it's amazing, the way such a normal place can turn into the subject of a visionary fantasy all through the power of the imagination.

A picture like this is an ideal example of an image that takes me right into a world of Minecraft. It's one of those long and boring weekends in which I spend my time on the game wandering the world, running far away into the deepest trenches and stumbling upon this lake. Minecraft's normal world of biomes, where you haven't built anything, or aren't playing a capture the flag game on a server, and it's just you and world, surrounds you with such a lost feeling that it's mesmerizing. In that picture, following the reflection into the lake pleasuringly takes me back to a particularly vivid dream I had one night of waking up in the middle of a vast lake, surrounded by a ring-shaped body of land covered in colorful flora and humming with surrealism. Really felt like the Lego Marvel glitch world but to this day I remember everything that happened before I woke up. However, the real image, especially that riverbank colored yellow when bathed in sunlight, reminds me of my days in the tennis club last year and the year before in school, when our games were often during the sunset time (the duration of the club lasted all fall for the boys' team.) The shadow cast on the ground underneath that large, round orange tree cropped off at the right of the screen reminds me of Minecraft's forest biomes, while the sky and the horizon line created by the tops of the trees, and the lighting on them, remind me of hiking in Mount Rainier, observing the sunlit forests on the sides. The smaller green trees in the center among the colorful ones remind me of a park close to where I live, while the grass below makes me think of the picnic spots around the mountainside hikes near Snoqualmie, etc.

That tsunami of text, all for a few damn trees, should hopefully give you some insight on what I'm getting at. Searching up any image sets a tone much, much more vivid than just "summer days". It doesn't necessarily sum anything up in this context since the details vary so much, and there's just so many things you can get at within one image. Recording them down is nice but I fear it may cause the mind to fixate on a memory of reality rather than dream, thus stifling the pleasure of letting your brain wander freely and take you to new, beautiful worlds. Other times, some images speak for themselves and may be agonizingly close (nothing is entirely exact when concerning this topic), to what you imagine, thus leading your mind right back to what it comprehends on a shallow scale. But thoughts like these don't induce any desire for an "answer", to be honest - what I just described about an image matching your thoughts can be more boring than you'd expect.

HOWEVER, my POINT, yes, there's a point to all this, you could say condradicts the statement above, though it acts on these thoughts in a more positive - favorable, if you will - manner.

My POINT is that I'm going to translate these induced fantasies into Heroes of Evolution episode 8, titled "Coin, Bill and Bullet". Yes, it's a lot to live up to, and yes, pitted with a story and characters and a sense of direction, I will be rather limited when I contrast direction with its polar opposite, the subject of the wandering mind. The keyword there is "wandering". Visions and thoughts like these are so free and so impossible to detail exactly, as I mentioned in the first section, that it won't feel like a full-blown mind-fantasy, but my goal here is to utilize the other elements of the episode: tone, music, character, etc., to collectively make up the remainder of this visionary world I move into every time I look at images like this, this or especially, ESPECIALLY, THIS, the image I immediately envision when thinking of this episode. Here are a few more examples: here, here (this one is particularly close as well), and maybe here, though the lighting a bit too dreamy. That last one still matches the architectural basis of what I'm going for.

Now, you all are likely wondering how I'll incorporate a futuristic metropolitan neo-realm into a show as down-to-Earth as Heroes of Evolution, but my answer to that comes in the form of a spoiler: '''90% of the episode will be set in another planet, called Kryzeen: it's a gritty, corporation-controlled metropolis humming with a suave, futuristic and unexpectedly dark vibe to it. '''Ben will travel there in pursuit of old black market foes he hopes will direct him to the next step of the Devil Watcher's plan.

Every time I look at images like those futuristic cities, I always imagine a variety of things - one of them is definitely a lot of overhead shots, as well as more nighttime than daytime (Kryzeen's skies will be permanently set at night, and its population is entirely diverse with seldom native species). I also am able to go a little more intimate even in a setting as grand as this - in terms of something suspenseful and along the lines of a large-scale sci-fi thriller, I've always envisioned it to be within a very suave, sparsely-lit and barely furnished living room - the image that always enters my mind in the same form every time is an empty, unlit room, its source of light being the blue intensity of an implied metropolis outdoors, the light coming in stripes since it's through the shutters. It illuminates a couch on the left-hand side. I've always imagined it to be the setting of something very intimate, ranging from hiding out from danger, or even a love scene eclipsing a rather tragic or grim tone among everything.

"Coin, Bill and Bullet" won't be as emphatically dark as the scene described above, with much of the grit feeling more shallow and direct, boldly defined by setting and reinforced by character. However, what will revel in a surreal sense of dark, insightful imagination is really just the whole vast, deep tone of Kryzeen's city - Ben will be more lost than one would expect and within what I plan to be a more humorous, smooth episode, will be scenes of surreal obscurity and will often plug you into a "middle-of-nowhere" feel - this comes with the fact that the episode will be very fast-paced in that the futuristic and suave tone will loom above you in most scenes, but not distract you from the events depicted, as I plan to put a major emphasis on directing and describe every scene in such a way that it reinforces the surrealism and smoothness of the surroundings.

Yes, this is quite ambitious, and it's quite a feat to take on the visions induced by the power of the mind, but it feels great to write an article like this to express a very special and personal feeling in a profound light with the beautiful notion that it's celebrated among every human being around the world. The idea can be universally recognized yet stay closer than ever within you - my goal is to implement the richest glimpses of the visions I experience in moments of surrealism, and in a way, celebrate this idea of a powerful imagination and enclose you within my personal world for the duration it takes to read this episode. I hope you enjoyed reading and understood what I've had to say.