I used to dream in pixels. I mean it.
I would When I was in middle school and high school, I’d sit and sketch in the margins of my notebook, filling up the empty spaces with layer after layer of graphite. I used a 0.5mm mechanical pencil which seemed unimaginably fine to my hands. I’d watch the graphite sloughing off layer by layer as I worked the margins into an even, shiny slick of dancing wolves and ornate designs of swirls and chains, woven knotwork and fanciful arabesques. Each dot, each stab, each shade was one hint of a pixel that I’d lay down later. After class let out, I’d meet up with my friends by our lockers or in the library. We’d walk up Park Avenue, six lanes of traffic rushing by as we waited for the stop lights. On sunny days, we’d lounge under the cherry blossoms planted on the avenue’s median, enjoying the islands of greenery that popped up between tracts of asphalt and concrete. And, in time, when the shadows got longer and the day started to wane, we descended into the 96th Street subway station and got on the 6 train. We got home in time for dinner. We were good kids. We studied hard, listened to our parents, and were ready to be successful in our world.
I had further to go than most of my classmates. In order to get to my neighborhood right on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, I’d have to take two trains to the second-to-last (or heck, even last) stop on the line. By the time the 6 train slid into Brooklyn Bridge or Canal Street, I was on my own and deep in thought. Clutching my backpack on my knees, I’d imagine carving a path up a grand isometric mountain made of agate boulders, the shimmering dapple of pixelated shadows moving at one frame per second. I’d imagine orchestrating an entire world from start to finish, from the quickening rays of the first gentle sunrise to the terminal plunge into stars and darkness that would occur at the very end of the world. Sometimes, the train would whisk me around to the uptown side of the platform–technically an easier stroll–and I’d walk up the dirty concrete stairs, half dreaming, half sleeping, excited to get home. I tried to step on the odd stairs, the ones which hadn’t been worn smooth and shiny by the endless passage of commuters, by so many shoes that had come before mine. Plus, sometimes you could slip on the smoother steps, slide and scrape your knee against the filthy pavement. Less convenient, but probably a safer bet to take the steps less traveled. The subway steps were crosshatched like steel emery boards, and each little diamond was itself like a pixel. I’d imagine them like that, each one a different color, a different value, put it in gray and yellow and a weird shade of blue in order to make it remappable. It felt fucking brilliant.
The walk from the subway station to my house was just three blocks, but it sometimes felt like forever. In the morning, I’d sprint the entire way, through sleep deprivation, to get to school consistently ten minutes late. At some point my teachers seemed to take pity on me and let the lateness slide. In the evening, I’d walk slowly back, dragging my feet, taking in the sights and sounds of the neighborhood. There was the deli, Mike and Maria’s, on the corner, the deli that’d been there longer than I’d been alive–it’s still there, as much as I can remember. There was the house with the container garden in the front yard, where the neighbors would smoke and drink cheep beer and watch as commuters streamed back home. The trash bin that someone left as a pseudo-public trash can after the city took away our trash cans. And there was the house with the albanian flag with the neighbor kid who loved to yell coca cola asshole at everyone. Then there was my house, covered in vines and fronted by a jungle of container plants that looked like something out of a children’s storybook. Do you remember Madeline, the little orphan who lived a life of adventure from her house all covered by tangling vines?
If it was early enough, I’d open the door to the relief of a quiet house. No one else was home. No one else’s shoes under the old fish stand that we kept by the door. And nobody sitting in front of the creaky old Dell computer that sat upstairs in our home office, crammed between a broken air cleaner, a stack of laundry, and a drying rack that was perpetually draped in my dad’s old sweaters and underwear. I’d sit in the creaky wooden dining chair in front of the computer and fire it up, pretending to work on my homework while meticulously constructing the wold I’d dreamed of all day long. My dreams did not come with sleeping: they were fully digital, mapped out in pixels and on an X, Y grid.
My dreams were written in Dragonspeak, the proprietary coding language used by the world’s oldest, longest-running massively multiplayer online role playing game: Furcadia. The premise of the game is pretty simple: you choose your species and write a verbose description of yourself, an anthropomorphic animal (or furre). Then you, like you did when you were a child, play pretend. Navigating around maps in isometric perspective, you jump feet-first into portals to individual dreams cooked up by your fellow players. Once inside, you get to have your own scripted or unscripted adventure–it all depends on what that dreamer had created for you. In one dream, you might be a wolf with wings; in another, a squirrel in fancy knee-high boots; or in yet another, you might find yourself transformed into a massive vermin or nightmarish Lovecraftian horror, replete with tentacles. You might stroll beneath sparkling mushrooms, drawn pixel-by-pixel, or in the depths of a lush rain forest. Anything could happen, and you could just as easily yes-and yourself into someone else’s design.
I remember more about the worlds of dreams than I do about the world that I lived in at the time. In my waking moments, I had already been folded–without my consent–into someone else’s fantasy of the world. I went to a rigorous public prep school, one of the most competitive in the entire US. I’d been told that if I studied hard and played my cards right, if I milked the right kind of connections and sucked up where I could, that I’d too become a Wall Street hustler, a good mind, a strong hand of empire. I was taught that capitalism was cool and not cruel and that I’d be able to win. That the world was more open to me than it ever would be. That I had the ability to choose my own dream and catch it. If I let myself get too distracted, I’d surely fail, and the whisper of possibility would slip out between my fingers.
But given all the bounty that the world of HCHS–the same world that spawned Lin-Manuel Miranda and Elena Kagan and Martin Shrekeli–I would rather take the endless night of the end of eternity and the possibility of a new horizon coalescing out of all the chaos than saunter down the easy path to success that we were told laid in front of us. There’s only one dream that I remember really well–there was a whole world where the Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter moons were personified as celestial fox avatars, each desperately trying to realize their own idea of sense, of balance, in the world; an inherently unfair and conflict-ridden prospect. The two that were most powerful were the ones that personified times of change, the Spring and Autumn. Then, locked in a battle for the ages, something happened: a desperate attempt to regain control, manipulation and persuasion, until the world itself plunged into darkness.
I can’t remember enough of the story to provide more than a vague synopsis. My memory is hazy. Most keenly, I remember all the time that I spent carefully altering the edge tiles pixel-by-pixel, in order to create the sense that most of the world’s earth had dropped away, with formerly lush terrain transformed into dark, unwalkable abyssal paths. I wanted, so badly, for a character to stand at the very edge of eternity and look over–only to be grounded by an automated, gentle push back from the brink. From what I can recall, the entire story arc was a way of justifying a completely revamped map, one with new “patches” and designs, since the whole thing had come a long way from its very first iteration. I’d become better at coding and writing complex, multi-day story arcs, too, so I was able to orchestrate the change with masterful keyboard strokes and kludged-together triggering events. It was great fun; I remember the long trudge up a sacred mountain carved out of realistic-looking agate stones, the wind filled with gentle chimes and harmonic background music. When things had come to an end and returned to a start again, the formerly powerful creatures had been demoted down to a more simple existance, one in which their powers would have to be earned back.
Playing. Earning. Making something happen. That’s what I was convinced could happen if things were done in the right way. I’d be able to make things happen. On my own. For real. Not just imagined: there was hope. Hope for control. Control that I didn’t have yet. Hope for safety and rightness. Hope that there was a future from which the past could be banished, where what had happened in real life could fade into nothingness and memory.
When we’d go out to Long Island to visit family, or up to the mountains in New Hampshire, I’d tell my friends that I’d be offline and spend the rest of the time cooking up a new chapter for us to play through in our own little world. I remember the hours that I’d spend in the car, fighting back motion sickness on the long drive into the White Mountains. painstakingly re-shading, editing, coding, and testing my dreams out. I went away to the wild for a time, and came back to my stable internet connection with new dreams, new quests, and a circle of friends to share them with.
I stopped playing Furcadia after my first year of college. The world seemed bigger, the possibilities seemed more real and tangible. I began to find out that the rest of the world didn’t run under the same rules that I’d gotten used to. Things felt more vivid. I had new experiences. One night, in my first year, I went to watch a meteor shower with my friend Linnea. We sat out on the sports field by the college pond and a huge meteor streaked overhead, so huge and low that we could smell the electrifying scent of ozone in the air. But I can’t tell you much else, besides the fact that things were so radically different that each living moment was a pulse of constant revelation. I can tell you that the first night that I spent at my college’s dormitory, I cried myself to sleep. I cried for hours. I cried until it felt pure, and I drifted off gently into sleep.
I cried out of relief.