I explain the way
In a dream, I meet the American author of a book I’ve just read in front of my mother’s house. I tell her I missed the reading but just read the book and thought it was great. She visits the neighbors a bit (to whom she is distantly related) and then wants to continue to Hildesheim.
I say, at the risk of explaining to her what is obvious even for American women, that you can now use Google Maps on your cell phone as a sat nav. Getting out of the residential area isn’t easy, so I’ll explain it to her quickly. This is what it looks like as we take to the air – not the real air but the Google Maps satellite view that looks exactly like reality in this dream. It’s just that you can hover around in it and, with a little more effort, you can also zoom. To zoom, you do this two-finger grip with reality, which I use a fork for in my dreams, also works.
The movement in the Google image is very slow, perhaps because of the very detailed zoom level in which everything looks like we are floating through the streets (which are the streets of a completely different city) at the level of the first floor. Once I get my face caught in the plastic tarpaulin of a scaffolding and poke a hole in it so I can levitate through. It’s always so uncomfortable, I say. So it seems to be more common. Then I think, and I say this thought out loud, whether someone has to come along to create the hole I created in the picture in reality in order to bring the two together again.
I have a bad conscience because the author could really just drive off and let the navigation system guide her, and I offer her the opportunity to do so several times. But it’s so much fun floating slowly through the streets instead.
(Kathrin Passig)