DREAM

Early in my education in the World Wide Web as viewed through Mosaic, I had a dream in which I was in second grade again, playing soccer. I was in the stream of legs scrambling, and the colorful ball on the grass in my dream was a node that linked to some other place, a lake where I fished in high school, years and miles away from that soccer game. In my dream, I need only mentally "click" on the ball to get to the lake, and then the lake was a broad expanse, rippling in sunlight, the smell of summer hot and languid, the crickets chirping in the early evening.

I use the symbol set from Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine in this article.

Nothing about hypertext I've learned since then has made as strong an impact on me as this dream. I've found no over-arching theory which has laid bare hypertext's essential nature; the books I've read about hypertext seem oriented to another kind of language, a brand of hypertext intended for stand-alone proprietary systems, hypertext that is very different from the open, global, chaotic, dynamic play of meaning and association on the World Wide Web.