What is this?

I tend to have (somewhat intermittently) recurring dreams, and I realised a while ago that the landscapes and places in my dreams seem to be consistent across entirely separate dreams. i.e. I have visited places in one dream that I previously visited in a different dream. And in the course of a single dream I have even travelled from locations I visited in that dream to locations I previously visited in an entirely separate dream.

On top of this, all my dreams seem to take place in Scotland, with cities and towns that mirror cities and towns from the waking world. Only, the dream versions of these places vary from being very similar to their waking counterparts, to very different from their waking counterparts.

The strange sense I get that my dreams exhibit a consistent, shared geography, one that mirrors the waking world according to a logic I don't understand, led me to start recording the places I have visited in my dreams.

This site is a record of those places I have visited in my dreams, with hyperlinks to document the connections between different places. The today's dream link will serve up a page chosen randomly based on the current date.

Technical details

I've been documenting my dreams as markdown files in Obsidian, stored locally on my harddrive (and mirrored to my phone using SyncThing). This site is effectively a custom static site generator written in node.js that generates html pages for each markdown file. The idea is that updating this site should be as easy as just uploading a new markdown file whenever I document a new place.

License

dream geography was created (and will be sporadically updated) by Niall Moody

The site and its source code is released under the Anti-Capitalist Software License. You can read the full text of the license and its rationale here, but if you're looking for a summary, the important part is:


          This is anti-capitalist software, released for free use by
          individuals and organizations that do not operate by capitalist
          principles.

You can view the source code for this site on glitch.

Infrastructure Credits

dream geography is built on the following platforms, frameworks, libraries, and fonts:

Glitch - The web hosting platform the site runs on
Node.js - Javascript runtime running on glitch
Fastify - Web framework to serve pages from glitch
fastify-static - Fastify plugin to serve static pages
Handlebars - Web page template engine
point-of-view - Fastify plugin to support template engines like Handlebars
markdown-it - Javascript library to render markdown as html
markdown-it-wikilinks - Addon for markdown-it to support wiki-style links, as used in Obsidian
sanitize-filename - Used to transform the markdown places names into a URL-friendly format
Leaflet - Used to draw the secret map
Alike Angular - Site font

Secrets

For the curious, there is a hand-drawn, irregularly updated map of the places documented on this site, but it will only appear at certain times...

Spoilers

A link to the map will appear on the front page during the Nth hour of the Nth day of the Nth month. i.e. It will appear at 1:00 on the 1st day of January, 2:00 on the 2nd day of February, etc. (all times in GMT/Coordinated Universal Time)

Last Updated

This site was last updated on Sun Jul 16 2023 12:47:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)