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Go Dreams
    Keywords: Humour

Is your obsession with Go limited to your waking life, or does it transcend normal consciousness? If so, this is the page for you to describe those encounters in the Go dreamspace.


hello. i will set the ball rolling with the following story: I found myself to be chief administrator of Limbo, in fact it was my job to decide whether people went to heaven or hell. The previous occupant of my position had used the criteria of 'physical attractiveness.' I chose to determine people's fates by their knowledge of Go. Strong players obviously went to heaven, then i widened my approach: i simply sat in front of an empty board and waited for a person's reaction. Whether someone placed a stone, or threw the board against the wall in anger, it was fine - i was just looking for some genuine interaction. Anyone who tried to talk their way around, or pretend some knowledge, went 'down'. Eventually i, in turn, was replaced. Unfortunately i discovered the doors of heaven closed to me, so i waited in a more subterranean line. There i had time to reflect upon the nature of the people with whom i would be sharing eternity. So ask yourself the question - which is a worse vision of hell - a place where no-one is interested in Go, or one where everybody is unattractive?

Jan: I had a Go dream quite recently. I don't recall my dreams all that well, but here's what I remember. In my dream, I was playing in a lightning Go tournament: 15 minutes per player, on a 19x19 board. However the players I had to play against didn't know the game, so the tournament director ordered me to explain the rules in the time allotted for the game. To make matters worse, we weren't playing with normal stones on a normal goban, but on a cardboard goban with those black and white pins you use in Mastermind turned upside down. Needless to say they fell over all the time. In the end, I got very frustrated and started kicking up a ruckus - and from then on I can't remember...

I'm probably a bit nervous about tomorrow's Go tournament :-)

Alex Weldon: I guess I'm a purist when it comes to Go dreams. I dream about Go often, but there's never any story to it, like a tournament or anything. All I see is a board, and moves being played on it.

Jenny Radcliffe: I don't get Go dreams as such, but when falling asleep I get life-and-death scenarios playing out just on the edge of my consciousness - so that I can't actually concentrate on them and work them out, just see them faintly. Very irritating.

Charles You have to narrow your eyes. It makes a change from narrowing your opponent's.

Hyppy: I see go stones occasionally during the waking hours. I'll slip off into a momentary daydream, and then suddenly, ceiling popcorn, or paint chips on the wall, or whatever is convenient, suddenly takes on shapes of life and death problems and fuseki exercises. I've even begun to see shapes within paragraphs of text that I type. . . . I am Jack's daytime hallucinations

Dieter: I had a dream ... once, but I try not to think about it anymore.

Bill: I have a dream:

 That one day
 All the little Black stones
 And all the little White stones
 Will play together
 In harmony.

(With apologies to Martin Luther King. But, hey, that go dream has already come true, hasn't it? :-))

frs: I play turn-based Go on DGS, which enables me to submit moves deep in the night. In a game I struggled very hard to recover from a daring, but failed invasion. Wondering about the time I had submitted my moves, my opponent finally asked: Do you ever sleep? I replied: I have dreamed of good moves ...

connector Often when i've been studying go for a long period of time then abruptly move on to something else I will still be thinking in terms of go.. for instance, if I watch a court tv show and the defendant has just been caught lying I might think 'oh! atari!'... sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me feel a little bit crazy. :)

klay: After playing go long into the night, I've definitely woke up to my alarm clock beeping and my brain actively denying it: "it can't be beeping, then i cut and this is atari and it will lose." I then have a fuzzy-picture of a go-shape in my mind for a minute until I really wake up. The real scary part is that it has happened more than once.

connector That's exactly the kind of thing I mean. It's reassuring to know that I'm not the only one.



This is a copy of the living page "Go Dreams" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.