Chapter 19. Gossip
In late 1981, Dr. Alan Kay recruited me into Atari Research and challenged me to dream. Most people take a lazy approach to dreaming. They put their feet up on the desk and engage in idle mental forays for half an hour, and they call it dreaming. To me, dreaming is a much more deliberate and difficult process. Dreaming is hard work!
I see dreaming as occupying a middle ground between fantasy and planning. A fantasy is the free indulgence of human desire, unconstrained by the limitations of reality. A plan reduces human desire to a pedestrian statement of objective, and then posits a sequence of steps that will attain the objective. Fantasy springs from human desire, where planning hews to reality. Dreams live in the gray zone ...
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