Another world within a dream
Jul. 14th, 2024 01:16Content warning for a double-fictional double suicide (a fictional movie that only exists in the fictional world of my dream)
I dreamt that I was watching a movie called "Sandra and Maria Die".1 It was one of those low-budget straight-to-streaming service indie movies that didn't have a lot of buzz, but I watched it because it sounded interesting. The titular characters die about 30 minutes into the movie, and the rest of the film is filling in details about the events that led to their deaths, and the other characters dealing with the aftermath.
I found it really well-done and affecting, and as is my wont with new media I take a strong liking to, I re-watched the movie two more times shortly after the first time. But on the second re-watch, something was different. Sandra and Maria didn't die. The movie is exactly the same up until the titular scene of the movie, but then things start happening differently.
The event that leads to their deaths is a phone call. The women are sisters, roughly college-age, and hosting a get-together at their home. When they're getting ready, they both receive phone calls, the details of which aren't audible to the audience, but it's heavily implied that they did something together about which they were being blackmailed, and the terms of the blackmailer lead to their taking their own lives.
On the third viewing of the movie, however, the call never comes. They get ready for the get-together and have a great time with their friends. At one point, one of the sisters tries to call one of their friends to see why they're running late, and the cell phone network is too jammed for their call to go through.
It's revealed that the network was jammed because some sort of 9/11-esque catastrophe had occurred. In the hazy way details often reveal themselves in dreams, I'm uncertain whether the event was similar to 9/11 or actually was 9/11. If the story was taking place in 2001, that would explain why the characters were primarily communicating with telephone calls. The main version of the film, in which Sandra and Maria die, takes place in a universe where 9/11 (or whatever) was prevented; in the alternate version, the catastrophe happens, indirectly saving the lives of the titular characters but leading to a host of other dramatic tensions. It wasn't like, a Final Destination situation where the characters were supposed to die and now the timelime is messed up (that would be unacceptably grim in a serious story about trauma and abuse); it was just: here's how things would have happened if one of the great coin flips of the universe came up tails instead of heads.
It would be impossible for me to reconstruct the details from the dream into a coherent narrative, much less two, but I'm fascinated by the idea of a story that sometimes, quietly, gives the observer an alternate universe version of events. This sort of thing would be pretty easy to do in text, at least on the technical side: write a short story on a webpage with a tiny bit of javascript that performs an invisible die roll when the page loads. Give it 75% odds that it'll load the Universe A version of the story, and 25% odds of Universe B. The first page's worth of text would be identical, so even someone refreshing the page over and over wouldn't see a difference unless they happened to be scrolled far enough down for the difference to be apparent. If someone has scripts disabled, it would default to Universe A. Nobody would even know that there was anything unusual about the story unless they re-read it enough times to have rolled both versions, or if the story became popular enough that people talked about it. Or if someone looked at the source code, but how often do people look at the source code of random short stories they find on the web?
The web could be full of stories, read by small handfuls of people, which are sometimes imperceptibly different, and I find that idea exciting. What a cool medium!
1. Almost certainly inspired by the webcomic Anders Loves Maria, which I'm looking up for the first time in awhile and am excited to learn is back online! Hooray! (edit: well, partially back online. It appears the author started reposting the strips in real time in the middle of last year, then abruptly stopped a couple months in. How frustrating 😔)
I dreamt that I was watching a movie called "Sandra and Maria Die".1 It was one of those low-budget straight-to-streaming service indie movies that didn't have a lot of buzz, but I watched it because it sounded interesting. The titular characters die about 30 minutes into the movie, and the rest of the film is filling in details about the events that led to their deaths, and the other characters dealing with the aftermath.
I found it really well-done and affecting, and as is my wont with new media I take a strong liking to, I re-watched the movie two more times shortly after the first time. But on the second re-watch, something was different. Sandra and Maria didn't die. The movie is exactly the same up until the titular scene of the movie, but then things start happening differently.
The event that leads to their deaths is a phone call. The women are sisters, roughly college-age, and hosting a get-together at their home. When they're getting ready, they both receive phone calls, the details of which aren't audible to the audience, but it's heavily implied that they did something together about which they were being blackmailed, and the terms of the blackmailer lead to their taking their own lives.
On the third viewing of the movie, however, the call never comes. They get ready for the get-together and have a great time with their friends. At one point, one of the sisters tries to call one of their friends to see why they're running late, and the cell phone network is too jammed for their call to go through.
It's revealed that the network was jammed because some sort of 9/11-esque catastrophe had occurred. In the hazy way details often reveal themselves in dreams, I'm uncertain whether the event was similar to 9/11 or actually was 9/11. If the story was taking place in 2001, that would explain why the characters were primarily communicating with telephone calls. The main version of the film, in which Sandra and Maria die, takes place in a universe where 9/11 (or whatever) was prevented; in the alternate version, the catastrophe happens, indirectly saving the lives of the titular characters but leading to a host of other dramatic tensions. It wasn't like, a Final Destination situation where the characters were supposed to die and now the timelime is messed up (that would be unacceptably grim in a serious story about trauma and abuse); it was just: here's how things would have happened if one of the great coin flips of the universe came up tails instead of heads.
It would be impossible for me to reconstruct the details from the dream into a coherent narrative, much less two, but I'm fascinated by the idea of a story that sometimes, quietly, gives the observer an alternate universe version of events. This sort of thing would be pretty easy to do in text, at least on the technical side: write a short story on a webpage with a tiny bit of javascript that performs an invisible die roll when the page loads. Give it 75% odds that it'll load the Universe A version of the story, and 25% odds of Universe B. The first page's worth of text would be identical, so even someone refreshing the page over and over wouldn't see a difference unless they happened to be scrolled far enough down for the difference to be apparent. If someone has scripts disabled, it would default to Universe A. Nobody would even know that there was anything unusual about the story unless they re-read it enough times to have rolled both versions, or if the story became popular enough that people talked about it. Or if someone looked at the source code, but how often do people look at the source code of random short stories they find on the web?
The web could be full of stories, read by small handfuls of people, which are sometimes imperceptibly different, and I find that idea exciting. What a cool medium!
1. Almost certainly inspired by the webcomic Anders Loves Maria, which I'm looking up for the first time in awhile and am excited to learn is back online! Hooray! (edit: well, partially back online. It appears the author started reposting the strips in real time in the middle of last year, then abruptly stopped a couple months in. How frustrating 😔)
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