In this one, I was an older recruit for the Army. I remembered my own real-life history in the dream, remembered the physical training and weapons training from my own era of the mid-eighties. This was very different.
I remember looking around and wondering how these young people were going to handle it, they didn't seem very tough. However, I quickly found out that I was the one being outmatched. There were some similar issues, the whole BS of having to be in perfect uniform and the relentless scheduling that drives you nuts.
What was different was that this was an information based force. These guys had electronics on everything. they were controlling miniature and large sized drones and sucking in logistical and tactical information all while communicating constantly with peers and superiors. I remember thinking, "what the hell is going on?"
It was my first distinct feeling of being too old to get it. We've often heard people opine that the youth of today are better trained for combat in some ways because they spend so much time playing video games. This was a twist on that theory. In this version, these people were good at this form of combat because they were always plugged into their i-phones and social media. The skill set was that you had to be able to constantly juggle all the input while keeping each individual thread as a distinct data stream. I wasn't completely out of my depth, I could track a lot of what was going on, but I was totally distracted.
One odd element to the dream was a strange representation of the uniforms they were wearing. There was some kind of virtual screen each person was watching, so they looked like they were all watching their own computer screens. At the same time, you could see other people's screens. When I looked at other people's uniforms, and my own, for that matter, it was strangely pixelated. There were little elements in it that looked like computer chips. But instead of being plugged into a fixed point on a circuit board, these chips were crawling all over you like ants or spiders, plugging into different parts of the uniform, then getting up and moving to another. It was like those videos of the guys that smear themselves in honey and the bees swarm all over them, only it was in green/black/brown camouflage and they were little rectangular chips.
I woke up fascinated by the dream, and even had a strange experience of being able to close my eyes and plunge back into the dream a couple of times. When I woke up, it still felt like the dream was going on. It was as if it was in my active memory, but slowing down to a stop. I felt like the dream was interrupted, we were going to go on a mission once we got our skills down, and I found myself looking forward to it.
I think there are a couple of things that melded together from real life that sparked the dream. I'm turning 50 soon, and I've been thinking more in terms of being on the downward slide of life, where your skills and abilities erode and it becomes harder to keep up. I was also listening to some programs that had combat zone scenes in them, which was more high tech than it used to be. I was talking to someone a few days ago about powering equipment that soldiers carry, and this was similar to that. We've been looking at cyberwarfare as a concern, and that, too has been on my mind. We also had the Sandy Hook school shooting last week, and part of me was wondering if the spate of shootings these last couple of years had anything to do with young men's total immersion into computer games like halo, and the other first person combat games. These shootings have a feel a little like that, as if the goal is to rack up a high body count, there's no repercussions for your actions and no morality or permanence to it. We also had an office Christmas party this weekend, and for the first time, people were zoning out on their phones at dinner. This trend of people not being there with you is something that I notice, something that I tire of, so it has been on my mind.
However, regardless of the inspiration for the dream, it seems to have a bit of prophecy in it. I can see a time where controlling and communicating through your computer network would be highly integrated into a battle scenario. It makes me wonder how much it already is, we just don't know about it. Special Forces would be the place to flesh those systems out, and keeping a battlefield superiority with those skills would depend in part on keeping them secret until you had a chance to figure them out.
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