I'm walking through a downtown mall. The cross-streets are covered by raised pedestrian arcades with barreled glass arches. Two alternating types, one sunny and green, the other lined densely with shops. At least... they were built to alternate, but each time I visit they've moved around a bit. As all things do these days! You see, a small minority of people can change reality by shifting their expectations. One in a thousand, perhaps even one in a hundred.

But it used to be one in millions! A lot of people have been reading "The Holographic Universe" and similar books, and they're coming unstuck at last. Just like lucid dreaming or the four-minute mile, miracle-working turned out to be partly just a psychological barrier--hard, but not THAT hard. Now someone on every block in these downtown crowds is a two-bit Buddha.

I walk up into a parklike arcade and find it's just been changed to the other type I don't like. Sense the next one's been changed too. Spot a Changer or two in the crowd. Interesting--I always know them, I always have. The nearest is a teenage girl dressed a bit like Alice in Wonderland. Kind of attractive, but if she's the one who scrambled the mall, I guess I'm gonna ruin my chances with her right now. I exert my own expectations and change the arcade back to the park type, with no shops.

I didn't check to see if I matched the architect's alternating plan. But does it matter? Someone will scramble it again, soon. Probably her, if she's seriously shopping.

We can't go back to brick and mortar. One in a hundred! It's Dream City, from now on.

So we better be clear what we want.

DREAM NOTES

• Girl in mall = I was in the Kabuki Theater and Japantown Mall today, and saw teens everywhere, scoping each other on the stairs and by the fountains. Of course it's also the Net and the coming global shopping-mall...
• Girl I'm attracted to = a test! Will I defer to her? No, I still did what I should, enacted my true preferences. Good!
• The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot = a very convincing model of the quantum world, in which reality is basically a dialogue. Observers bring their needs and expectations, questioning a physical world that responds BUT has its own inherent nature too. He's systematized Einstein's remark that we don't see nature, but the aspects of nature revealed by our line of questioning. Neither purely objective nor subjective, Talbot's model lies neatly halfway between Newton's clock and Buddha's dream.
• But my dream suggests that the online world is shifting our viewpoint to a more fluid one. Which implies both miracles and... annoyances. Annoyances requiring direct action. Patient, repeated direct action, to maintain structure against human erosion.

Or, as the Red Queen told Alice: "Around here you must run fast just to stay in one place."

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