I had a dream fragment last night involving the Odeyssey system — the first home video game console. 

Background: as I was growing up in the 1980’s I spent many hours and many quarters at the video game arcade. One of my earliest ambitions was to open and own the “coolest” video game arcade. Sometime later, I was gifted the Magnavox Odeyssey home video game system. This changed everything. I also recall how slick the design and font of the console was. I was later to then be gifted the Texas Instruments 99 (TI-99) where I wrote my first computer programs in BASIC. And then I was introduced to the Apple II computer … a radical influence.

Dream: In my dream last night, I was traveling through some country side, and came across some type of garage sale or bargain shack where an older man (a “fatherly” type”) had for sale an Odessey game console system. Somehow, it felt as if the man and I already knew of eachother–not real well, but well enough that he allowed me to take the hardware components out of the packaging to inspect them. The feeling was (at least from the man) that the system components–as totally old, worn, and outdated as they were–were very valuable. He pointed me to the price tag he had on them, which read something to the order of $76,000! I knew that I would not buy, even at a much lower price. Yet I was mildly facinated.

Upon reflecting on the dream this morning, the first thing I realized was how the entire design aesthetic around the Odessey system seems to have inherently influence my overall design aesthetic: very clean, scientific, cosmic, and somewhat “groovy”. Smooth, simple, rounded buttons and Star-Trek-like interface.Upon deeper reflection, I can also see some connection of this old hardware system of my adolescence in the dream as symbolic of some of the innate psychological “hardware” of my youth. As just yesterday, I successfully passed through a significant psycho-emotional threshold in my primary relationship [too intimate to mention further here], and broke through for the first time, a fundamental karmic loop in my adolscent programming involving intimate relationship. After last night’s processing, I had felt (and literally thought to myself) as if I had accomplished a significant “hero’s journey”. What I had to battle was my own “retarded” and ignorant resistances to intimacy [see Killer Retard dream from the night before], and give up some adolescent-type romantic fascinations.In the dream, I see that the investigation of the “Odessey” system points to this. I had completed an “Odessey”. Although I was vaguely intrigued to see and investigate the old and virtually useless hardware again–I realized that I would not want it again, and especially at that ridiculously high price ($76,000). The cost would be too high to try to reclaim an old, worn-out, and radically outdated harware processing system. I left the place, and traveled onward.

Good bye Odessey, hello SecondLife … and hello to a new life of non-virtual super organic intimacy!

*Note: interestingly, upon immediate research of the Odessey console before writing this post, I came across this link, which contain reports of faulty eBay sales of the Odessey system.