THE DREAM OF THE WHITE CHAMBER

One night when she was offline, Talila Liu dreamed of waking up in a pure white room.

“It was a large, empty room,” she tells me. “Everything was white except myself. I had one table with one lamp, completely white. I had one window that didn’t show [the] outside; it just kind of ended at white. I don’t understand a lot about it, but it left me [with] a major feeling of emptiness. I believe I had my face planted in a pillow crying in the dream.”

In it, she was terrified, and when she really woke, that was still the case.

“I think that was the same night I had a panic attack,” Talila says, “feeling the exact same thing, but flooded by many other emotions at the same time.” She frowns. “I probably should have cried in real life, but I couldn’t.”

The reasons for her conflicted feelings were many—her studies at college, for one thing, but perhaps more than that, a relationship that had gone bad.

“The relationship was here in Second Life,” she tells me.

I’m amazed. ”And it affected your dreams?”

“Yes.”

“How could it, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” says Talila Liu. “Because I want my Second Life to be my real life.”

So with the dream of the white room still fresh in her mind, she went into Second Life, to recreate it. “I think [it’s a gift]," she tells me, "being able to remember dreams so vividly; most of the time it’s not a dream, it’s more of another life, one that is choppy, and strange at times, but nice.”

First, she created the room from her dream, “[a] simple texture, a white box with lines on the edges, since in Second Life if I made everything white, it would kinda blend together. Then I made the lamp-- I had a lampshade already made so I used that. I made the alarm clock and the picture frame, and the little table to put them on. I then asked a friend for a bed I could use and re-texture… I put up the walls and I used a pose cube (me sitting on an invisible cube doing poses) for all the pictures.”

At the end, she had a series of images, a visual narrative that recaptures as close as possible the dream she had. “I took about forty pictures to get those nine I liked best, and I brought those into Photoshop, touched them up a little bit and re-uploaded them.”

“So basically,” I realize, “you had to re-enact the dream, to get those pictures.” I wonder what that experience was like for her.

“It helped calm me down, actually. Get my mind off of my other problems. Usually when I’m depressed or felling crappy, I build [in SL] to get my mind off of it.”

So she built her dream in-world, and re-experienced it in a place that she spends much of her waking life in, already. (She estimates five to eight hours a day in-world, on average.) And while I’ve often described the experience of Second Life as a kind of collective lucid dreaming, this may be the first instance where a resident has brought her real dreams to it. (Though it’s not the only instance where someone has recreated the landscapes of the mind here-- as we’ll see in a future entry.)

While Talila and I talk, she takes me through her new home in the winter region, where her windows look out on snowy peaks. Friends stop by to have a look at her sculptures, amazing in their intricacy— like a hollow cube, comprised entirely of whirling metal arcs.

“It’s all primitives,” she announces proudly, “only 184.” (“Primitives” are the essential building blocks which make up the substrate of every object in the world.) It took her an hour and half to make it, she says, “and that includes planning or thinking up each side one at a time.” She’s learned a trick for shrinking prims down to the size of a single pixel, she tells me, allowing her to build larger sculptures as intricate as the cube, and miniatures that are equally detailed—including the tiny silver angel she wears in her navel.

Far as her projects that require her to first be in a REM state, Talila has more plans for them, too. There’s a creature from another dream she had recently, and she’d like to instantiate into this waking life of hers, in-world. “I was going to try and recreate it in a 3D program like 3D Studio Max,” she says, “since I can’t do fur really well here…”

She walks me through her home, still being built, which she describes as her “dream house in real life”, until we’re at the rooftop, where she shows me one last sculpture, embedded within a glowing sphere. She’s joined there by a friend from England, an in-world tattoo artist named Pandora Greenacre. Talila herself lives on the West Coast, 9 hours behind Pandora; it's close 2AM, Pacific Standard Time, when they meet.

“I haven’t seen you in the longest time, Pan.” Talila hugs her. “I missed you.”

“You’re never around,” Pandora complaining, frowning.

“I’m always working, or sleeping,” says Talila Liu. “You had to live in the UK.”

So they stand there and chat, and catch up.

“I’ve had a few dreams where I’ve actually been in Second Life,” Talila tells me earlier, “and my friends were there, too, but we were in our real life bodies.” Recreating that dream in-world, however, may have to wait.