Life purpose, milestone #1

Wed Jan 4 2023

After more than 20+ years of hard procrastination and casual work², dreamingsheep is finally online!

I am grateful to everyone who helped make this project a reality. Special thanks to:

@nmilinkovic for the early backend explorations i had no clue about,
@laslo.antal for the ingenious sheep design that i fell in love with from the start,
@adamshovav from Dreamers Inc. and his backend team, especially @zbrukas for the insigtful technology stack choice, the CRUD skeleton and all things devops; and @rachelpurba for her enthusiasm in tackling the never-ending requirements until the very last pixels were in place.
My university professors, Đorđe Herceg, PhD, who didn't accept a first draft of the project as my diploma work in its early phase and Miloš Racković, PhD, who did.
A special shoutout to OpenAI's ChatGPT for the proofreading and grammar assistance.
Last but not least, Stepen LaBerge, PhD, whose research and book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming inspired it all.

After falling in love with lucid dreaming (see part 1: Backstory - the beginnings) i knew that i wanted to create an online dream journal. But one day, during a flash of insight while washing dishes, it occurred to me that it was indeed my life purpose (milestone #1 :-), however cliche that might sound.

My idea back then was that the world is hurtling toward a dystopian future with no humans in it but dreamingsheep would survive ’in the cloud’. Some future androids/replicants³ who stumble upon it in the information-ocean might start scratching their heads after discovering that in the past there lived some kind of humans who were capable of ’dreaming’. That would trigger an irreversible switch in their algorithm starting to doubt their own programming. The rest of the story and its variations are familiar...

Since then, many things have changed and the current status quo is that regardless of utopia or dystopia, the show must go on⁴.

I never would have imagined what doors (of perception⁵) would open by following my dreams over the years. Now, after milestone #1 has been completed, the journey has just begun!

1 - cover photo © Tóth Tamás
2 - not your typical ’fail fast, iterate quickly’ software release cycle
3 - Blade Runner
4 - Queen
5 - Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception

Long time no sleep?