Dream - Using a computer that shows a list of news stories

I've had lots of dreams at various times in the past involving working on a computer in a room that was frequently on a second story, or sometimes higher, of an apartment building. Sometimes the place had tiny rooms and sometimes the rooms were very large. Generally there was some difficulty of access, such as narrow steep stairs, or frequently a hole in the ceiling of a lower story with a steep narrow stairway or even a ladder, perhaps something that sometimes that had to be pulled down to climb up on.

The computer had a screen with DOS-like elements. I tried to use it to access a site I used to go to frequently in dreams and hadn't for a long time. Sometimes, perhaps frequently, I had trouble accessing it, had trouble finding it or determining if it was actually the same site. It seemed part of the communication was through sound or music. Finding the site was something like tuning a radio dial to a channel. In the old days, perhaps usually then on the first (or only) floor in a large darkened room, it showed a list of news stories that scrolled up and stopped on a DOS-like screen, and I thought about how I used to access it all the time.

Actually using a radio was sometimes part of the experience, at least in some later dreams, and sometimes after fiddling with the radio to find the right channel, I had trouble finding it again later, and wondered if the program I was looking for had been canceled or moved, to a different time or even a different station. It was important to find the radio program, because it was connected to the news website, and sometimes talked about it, sometimes even having coded messages or even special access codes for it.


Near the end of April 2009, it occurred to me that the Whitley's World website (by Whitley Strieber) used to have a screen that was somewhat similar, as it had a centrally displayed long list of news stories on a dark background, interspersed with things he wrote, some of which later became journal entries at the unknowncountry.com website, which replaced Whitley's World and was laid out entirely differently. This list of news stories may have been in part an inspiration for the dreams, particularly since he did the Dreamland radio program, which later became available only over the internet. However, the voice I heard in the dream wasn't his, which may be because I usually fall asleep listening to the radio, which would have something else on it. Unlike the dream, too, the news stories didn't automatically scroll into position, though there were some delays in displaying parts of the screen because of the slow dial-up connection. I think though, that the dreams may have started over ten years ago, before I ever accessed his website, so the original inspiration must have been something else.

Other possibilities are the iwon.com and myway.com websites, which have pages with lists of news stories. I used to access them a lot years ago, but the lists have white backgrounds and don't resemble the lists in the dreams, and they don't scroll unless I make them scroll. Also, I think I was already having the dreams long before I started visiting the sites, though iwon has appeared in some later dreams in a different way.

Yahoo.com also has lists of news stories, but has the same problems matching the dreams.

I did write a program many years ago that showed a scrolling list of equipment, color-coded by operational status. The list didn't stop scrolling, though, unless a command was given. It was also much wider than the list in the dreams, and was in various colors instead of just white, though I did have an almost never used black and white setting.

It's possible the original inspiration for the dreams may have been an actual website that I accessed for a while over ten years ago, but can no longer quite remember.