My dream about a Treo, iPhone, Bloging, and an earthquake. Very silly. It shows that my subconcious is furiously trying to understand the implications of the iPhone.
Or perhaps it was just a “bit of bad beef”.

Last night I had a terrible dream. It was a very very vivid dream – in rich color and hi-def. I dreamed that I was at home with my family and an earthquake happenned – it was a MAJOR earthquake – so major that the house was pitching as if we were on a boat in heavy seas.
After a few seconds I realized that we were in no danger – the earthquake was high magnitude but the rolling was very gentle (remember – this was a dream). So with everything pretty safe I decied that the next thing to do was to use my cell phone (Treo) to take a video of the undulating ground out the window.
It was amazing – the ground had 10 foot waves of dirt slowly going by my window while we gently rocked back and forth in the house.
So I grabbed my Treo to blog the earthquake with some video. But someone had changed my Treo into some “super user friendly mode” with pop up help and lots of onscreen prompts. (With my current Treo, I can take a video and send it almost with a set of key presses without even looking at the unit.)
Back to the horrible dream – I *could not* make the Treo work for the life of me – I pushed buttons and nothing I expected happenned – I remember thinking that the graphics were really pretty with pretty pictures in the background and that all the menus scrolled very smoothly (kind of like a Sony Camcorder or my Sony DSC-W50). The fonts were very smooth and very pretty.
I was frantic bcause I knew that earthquakes were short lived and each second that I could not get my Treo to work seemed like the quake would be over – I started crying as it felt like the earthquake was subsiding and I still had no video of the the awsome quake to put on YouTube and my blog.
After the quake was over I sobbed for a while at how I did not get the video.
The dream now cuts to a bus tour where we are surveying the damage – I am still sniffling and trying to figure out my Treo – now to take pictures – my son Brent tries to help me to no avail. I am sitting by a lake looking up at a mountain with a large hunk broken off and cannot even take a Treo picture of it – even with all the time in the world I cannot figure out this new “hyper friendly” Treo phone.
End of dream.
Interpretation
Apparently I must be subconciously terrified that the iPhone will have no buttons and will require constant staring at the screen doing precise gestures to do the simplest tasks. I do lots with my Treo with one hand and by feel. This will not be possible with only a gesture interface.
As a simple example, I bought my daughter an iPod for Christmas and by the time I *figured out* the combination of gestures and clicks to use the iPod UI – I had switched the language to Swedish! Of course this was my first non-shuffle (which does have butons) iPod experience.
Of course I will badly need an iPhone the moment it is available – not so much because it is a great phone – but because it is a great computer – it will be the most awsome piece of hardware in the world – it will end up being a “shuttle craft” and remote control to all of the larger computer equipment that you have like your macBook Pro, iTv, iStereo, iPictureFrame, iRefrigerator, iCoffeePot, iGarageDoorOpener, iAutoMobile etc etc :)