I didn't know John Maeda was Asian

Recently I have been regularly watching lectures from TED talks. I watched one on simplicity given by John Maeda, a name that has been in in the background of my life for awhile now. His name seems to serendipitously appear whenever graphic design, information aesthetics, or programming is concerned. You can't escape his name when thinking of Reebok, Pentegram, or the Media Lab. It was surprising to me to learn that he is Japanese-American. The image I had in my mind had always been that of an old white man. I am pleasantly surprised although I know I shouldn't be.

Heroes Dream

This dream will only make more sense if you have watched the series Heroes. Otherwise, it's just gory and weird. Basically the whole plot of the show was altered and none of the original characters were in my dream:

In my dream I had powers like Peter Petrelli from Heroes. That meant I could collect all sorts of powers by being exposed to other people's abilities. In this dreamworld, there were two main factions factions. The first was the "company," that was represented only in my dream through an eevil guy who was once a normal person. This once normal guy had gone through a lot of painful surgery and treatment to become this deformed, partly robotized, Sylar-like, power stealing machine*. He once had been part of this evil conglomeration, but had gone renegade by the time my dream started. This guy had a powerful injection and pill form drugs (to slip into people's drinks) that could disable one's powers just long enough for him to slice off your brain. The second faction was a fanatic and crazy group of powerful people who wanted to purge the earth/use their powers for genocide/conquer the world. Between these two groups there was me, other people with powers, and other people with various agendas.

I pretty much spent my whole dream running from the scary dude who wanted to slice my brain and staying away from the crazy people who wanted to recruit me. Since I was very powerful, this should have been an easy task... however, everywhere I turned, people's brains were getting sliced off right in front of me. Every time I tried to help someone else with abilities, they ended up dying. I spent half of my dream invisible, but this guy was somehow could track my movements (even through a surreal Chinese grocery store).

At some point, I went to a lecture by some researchers of the mutant phenomenon. It was a lecture given by a fringe group that was highly secret and mobile. In the seminar, we learned about a hidden lake where people with abilities could adapt to live underwater. I was very inspired by the whole talk and made it my mission to set off towards said lake. With my flying friend we set off towards our new destination. After narrowly escaping once more from the grasp of bionic dude, we flew off hand and hand against the backdrop of a city nightscape.

Soo, I really just wanted to remember this dream for that last part when I flew off. It's weird but sometimes in dreams I have stronger feelings for people and things than I would in real life. At that moment there was nothing better than being in love with faceless flying dude, the cold night air, and the city spiraling smaller and smaller as we flew away. Then I really had to wake up and pee.

*he cuts off people's skull caps to steal their powers.