Last night, I dreamt of LEDs... but not just any LEDs....
I was waking through the woods. A creek was nearby, with a rocky beach, and a dammed-off swimming hole upstream. I carefully made my way down a series of boulders, all the way down to the rocky beach, and watched the gleaming ripples in the stream. The sun was setting, but it was an overcast day, so the light reflecting off the stream made the rocks a steely gray.
They weren't all steely gray, though -- some were brown with speckles, a few with bits of quartz, and the occasional jet black. I crouched down and toyed with a few handfuls of them, feeling the smoothness of their worn, dusty surface, and letting the bits of sand among them fall through my fingers. I moved down to the water's edge, attracted to the deeper colors of the stones resting underwater.
I reached down for a dark brown one, with yellow speckles. But what's this? Right next to it, caught on its upstream side, was a LuxIII. No star, no solder, just a bare emitter. It looked strangely natural nestled there, with the shiny silver back, pale yellow phosphors, and tiny golden wires, all encased within the crystalline dome. Just like a shiny rock. One would expect the black plastic casing to look unnatural, but instead it looked almost mineral. The obsidian sheen of wet plastic.
I ran my fingers through more of the stones, and noticed more LuxIIIs. Then a few SSC P4s. Over by some larger, whiter rocks, entangled in algae, were some Crees; silver-backed, so P4 or newer... Then a slightly larger one caught my eye. Four dice. A P7? No, this wasn't that big... and it was on a tiny rectangular PCB...
Holy S---! It was an MC-E! What else could it be? Each die was a bit bigger than I expected, but it wasn't the size of a P7. It *must* be an MC-E!
But wait a minute. What were all these emitters doing here? Finding bare emitters scattered in a creek in the woods is hardly an everyday occurrence. Unless...
In the way you gain knowledge inexplicably in dreams, I suddenly learned that there was a lab or a factory upstream. They were working on something. Perhaps by accident, perhaps by negligence, they dumped some of their emitters into the stream, which then flowed down here. The current had gently urged the emitters downstream, with time, under the rippling water. Like the polished stones they shared the creekbed with.
My newfound knowledge informed me that the MC-E emitters were tests, or perhaps engineering samples. By sheer luck, I was the first to see these coveted jewels -- beacons of light available to no-one outside the lab/factory. Pre-release treasures. They glittered in my hands.
At this point, the dream becomes murky. I remember setting up the MC-Es in a tangle of wires and a benchtop power supply, which sat on a little desk in the center of a bridge that arced high over the creek. I was never able to test the LEDs, though, because the desk tumbled down -- by this point, the dream-world had become a literal sinking ship, on which myself and a small community were frantically trying to find ways to survive drowning. And the ship was on fire, perhaps ignited by my toppling MC-E setup. Most of us escaped our watery grave, though, and somehow, I managed to save every last one of my possessions (including the MC-Es) by stuffing them all into a giant Santa-like sack, and pushing that through a hole in the wall onto an escape raft. After escaping the ship, the whole community relocated to a network of houses above the ground, held up by trees. Once settled, I met several childhood friends, and found one deathly ill from a grisly disease. Somehow, the disease was named after dogs.
The creek was probably inspired by Memorial Park in Northern California; the beach in question is right below the swimming hole, down a stone stairway. I went there a lot when I was little. The upstream lab/factory may be related to a time when I was 10 or 11 that my friends and I paddled a rubber raft for hours upstream from the swimming hole, eventually realizing that we were miles outside of the park. One of the friends was the one who I found deathly ill at the end of the dream.
So... uh... yeah...
I was waking through the woods. A creek was nearby, with a rocky beach, and a dammed-off swimming hole upstream. I carefully made my way down a series of boulders, all the way down to the rocky beach, and watched the gleaming ripples in the stream. The sun was setting, but it was an overcast day, so the light reflecting off the stream made the rocks a steely gray.
They weren't all steely gray, though -- some were brown with speckles, a few with bits of quartz, and the occasional jet black. I crouched down and toyed with a few handfuls of them, feeling the smoothness of their worn, dusty surface, and letting the bits of sand among them fall through my fingers. I moved down to the water's edge, attracted to the deeper colors of the stones resting underwater.
I reached down for a dark brown one, with yellow speckles. But what's this? Right next to it, caught on its upstream side, was a LuxIII. No star, no solder, just a bare emitter. It looked strangely natural nestled there, with the shiny silver back, pale yellow phosphors, and tiny golden wires, all encased within the crystalline dome. Just like a shiny rock. One would expect the black plastic casing to look unnatural, but instead it looked almost mineral. The obsidian sheen of wet plastic.
I ran my fingers through more of the stones, and noticed more LuxIIIs. Then a few SSC P4s. Over by some larger, whiter rocks, entangled in algae, were some Crees; silver-backed, so P4 or newer... Then a slightly larger one caught my eye. Four dice. A P7? No, this wasn't that big... and it was on a tiny rectangular PCB...
Holy S---! It was an MC-E! What else could it be? Each die was a bit bigger than I expected, but it wasn't the size of a P7. It *must* be an MC-E!
But wait a minute. What were all these emitters doing here? Finding bare emitters scattered in a creek in the woods is hardly an everyday occurrence. Unless...
In the way you gain knowledge inexplicably in dreams, I suddenly learned that there was a lab or a factory upstream. They were working on something. Perhaps by accident, perhaps by negligence, they dumped some of their emitters into the stream, which then flowed down here. The current had gently urged the emitters downstream, with time, under the rippling water. Like the polished stones they shared the creekbed with.
My newfound knowledge informed me that the MC-E emitters were tests, or perhaps engineering samples. By sheer luck, I was the first to see these coveted jewels -- beacons of light available to no-one outside the lab/factory. Pre-release treasures. They glittered in my hands.
At this point, the dream becomes murky. I remember setting up the MC-Es in a tangle of wires and a benchtop power supply, which sat on a little desk in the center of a bridge that arced high over the creek. I was never able to test the LEDs, though, because the desk tumbled down -- by this point, the dream-world had become a literal sinking ship, on which myself and a small community were frantically trying to find ways to survive drowning. And the ship was on fire, perhaps ignited by my toppling MC-E setup. Most of us escaped our watery grave, though, and somehow, I managed to save every last one of my possessions (including the MC-Es) by stuffing them all into a giant Santa-like sack, and pushing that through a hole in the wall onto an escape raft. After escaping the ship, the whole community relocated to a network of houses above the ground, held up by trees. Once settled, I met several childhood friends, and found one deathly ill from a grisly disease. Somehow, the disease was named after dogs.
The creek was probably inspired by Memorial Park in Northern California; the beach in question is right below the swimming hole, down a stone stairway. I went there a lot when I was little. The upstream lab/factory may be related to a time when I was 10 or 11 that my friends and I paddled a rubber raft for hours upstream from the swimming hole, eventually realizing that we were miles outside of the park. One of the friends was the one who I found deathly ill at the end of the dream.
So... uh... yeah...
