Dreamtime

I had a couple dreams this morning:

Some people and I were visiting a house. The inhabitants of the house were German, and German was their first language. So I tried to speak with them; I had to use circumlocution to get some of my ideas across. At one point, one of the Germans asked which languages I spoke/studied, and I counted them on my fingers: on my right hand were school-based languages – Spanish, German, Russian (and English). On my left hand were languages that I studied on my own – Japanese and Klingon.

In the second dream, a group of us were trying to solve a puzzle made out of lego bricks and ham cubes (see picture above). It basically was a typewriter-like construction, and part of the puzzle was moving the ham cubes along a tiled track. The upper right section is a bunch of grey tiles, along which the ham cubes were slid towards the top, according to certain rules. The bottom left was another section of the puzzle, which everyone was saving for later (since the ham cube section was tougher). The bottom right was a keyboard for typing.

Most of us had taken a break/given up on the puzzle, so an android was trying to solve the upper right section still, but was getting a little frustrated. Then I tried using the keyboard on the bottom right. When the keyboard was typed on, it apparently interacted with an artificial intelligence, which would respond by displaying lego-lettering on the bottom edge of the construction.

After typing a few questions and getting responses from the AI, I spoke a question or two outloud. The ‘AI’ answered “no” on the bottom edge, which made me very suspicious. Using the keyboard (so that nobody else would hear my comment), I indicated to the ‘AI’: How did you know my question when I didn’t even type it?? The ‘AI’ text responded with “Oh, you got me!” I realized that it was just a person remotely answering my questions by just listening/watching what I typed. To confirm this, I asked him to indicate what keys I was typing, and then pressed keys made out of a lego belt and a lego minifig, without hitting ‘enter’ to ‘send’ the message. The answers of ‘belt’ and ‘person’ were displayed, confirming my suspicions.

I then typed, asking who/where the AI really was, without hitting enter, and then deleting the question. (This way, the AI-impersonating person would still be able to read my question, but it wouldn’t be recorded for anyone else to realize the truth.) One theory that I had was that there was a tiny video camera built into the inside of the lego construction and recording/transmitting what I typed from the inside. The camera would capture audio, which would explain how my spoken questions were recognized. The bottom display responded with “5k33z175” – 1337speak for “Skeezits”. It turned out that the ‘AI’ was some guy named “Skeezits” that was hiding behind a nearby sofa, and just watching what everyone typed on the keyboard from there.