He has a dream. He goes downstairs to share it. However, it fades from memory before he can.
I get this – both what the cartoon is about and the experience (and I think it is xkcd). I often have fantastical dreams that are like adventure films, sometimes very vivid. Occasionally I can hold onto quite a chunk of the memory of the dreams, if the circumstances of waking are good, but more often than not the vividness and any apparent logic soon fades once my eyes are open and my brain is flooded with brute reality.
This cartoon is just someone walking up from an amazing dream, rushing downstairs to share all the exciting drama of it, only for it to have faded to almost nothing by the time they are able to speak.
I even had one dream with a nuclear explosion… I was responsible for setting off a nuclear test blas out to sea. I looked out to sea though a window, pushed a button, then ducked out of view behind the wall. The explosion caused massive floods.
https://xkcd.com/430/ – “Every Damn Morning” is the cartoon. The mouseover is “There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill…”
My second comment with a link to the orignal at xkcd 430 was blocked, maybe as spam, because a link, or moderated for a supposed rude word in the xkcd title. Mouseover: “There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill…”
Thanks for tracking it down!
Since that’s a better image quality than what we have in the CIDU post, here it is embedded too:
Y’all’ve already got it, but I just wanted to mention for those who don’t know: There’s an entire site dedicated to explaining xkcd strips, making CIDU somewhat obsolete when it comes to that comic. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/430:_Every_Damn_Morning
And in case you don’t know it, the mouseover text is a quote from one of the Narnia books, Dawn Treader. Lucy reads a book that makes her feel happy, but she can’t remember the details.
Because I dream constantly, whether in novel, novella or short story form, I COMMAND myself to forget my dreams, and that often works. I do this because, as Haley Joel Osment said in ‘The Sixth Sense’, “I dream of dead people.”
@Xine Fury, on the one hand, thanks for alerting or reminding readers about the invaluable Explain XKCD project! On the other hand, pfffftt! to you for saying it makes CIDU obsolete when dealing with an XKCD — the goal, and entertainment value, of CIDU is not restricted to arriving at a single best answer. Yes, the Explain site does have a semi-open Discussion area in each comic’s entry; but semi-open is not going to get you a robust tangent culture.
Thanks, Pete, I would not have known!
It’s the dreaded Dream That You Forget As Soon As You Wake Up But Are Cursed To Remember Was Really Good thing.
Two of us answered with references to Explain XKCD. (N.B., all comments at WEIT currently are moderated, and approval is slow, so I would not have been able to see there was already an ExplainXKCD answer in the pipeline when I made mine. Anyhow, mine was better, as it pointed to the particular entry and not just to the front page of ExplainXKCD. ;-) )
Despite correct interpretations of how “1-to-1 scale” functions here (from me and from Explain site), other commenters invented nonstandard and unhelpful alternatives for what that title phrase, and the panel overall, can mean. Sez me! What say you?
The only thing I can add to this discussion is that this post’s tag needs to be corrected (remove “looks-like-“) and enhanced (with the author’s name).
For some reason I thought this one had been here before, but I can’t find it.
@Mitch: The ExplainXKCD site also has at least one person making the same (wrong) interpretation on what 1:1 means, and being corrected (the comments were posted on the same day you posted on the other site, so they may or may not have been up when you posted (I’m not going to try to reconcile time stamps between the two different sites: the explainxkcd site has their time-stamps explicitly marked as UTC, but the other site?)). I’m with you on the scale explanation, but disagree that that implies rectangles or polygons — there was a useful link on the explainer site to a NASA image of the relative sizes of the planets, so just imagine taking the planets from that image and carefully overlapping them in a roughly circular configuration at a 1:1 scale….
I do agree that invented non-standard alternatives to what 1 to 1 means are unhelpful, and frustrating, especially when declaimed with such absolute conviction and authority (sort of like ChatGPT). What I irrationally find more frustrating through is just that others don’t just automatically know what the correct interpretation of a particular standard phrase is (in this case 1:1). Here in this case especially, map scale is a well defined concept, stop wasting my time with your ignorance, making up needless explanations…
and yet…
My best friend growing up was in hindsight clearly on the autistic spectrum — he was brilliant, but surprisingly lacking in understanding of trivial, conventional human standards, and he would invent Byzantine interpretations of the things that most people understand without even thinking about them, and it was so frustrating to suddenly stumble in a conversation because of a lack of a shared interpretation of a fundamental point, when the fundamental point in question was so inherently obvious that it was often difficult to even realize this was the point of friction, and then to try and dissuade his Byzantine theory with anything other than appeals to authority (everybody knows it’s this…) Unfortunately I cannot remember any specific instances that fully capture this, partially because they came so far from left field that even at the time it took hard work from my brain to even take notice that he was misunderstanding [concept x] (Fish1: How’s the water today? Fish2: What the hell is “water”?!), and also because Murphy’s Law. The one I can specifically remember is not perfectly representative, but it’s the one I can remember: There was a banal political cartoon one day where the actions of Cabinet-member-of-the-moment were likened to Zorro, mostly because his name also started with a “Z” (Zicharo or something like that, probably in the Reagan administration); it had the Z-guy putting his “mark of Zicharro” all over the place à la Zorro, and my friend thought this cartoon was the most brilliant thing he had ever seen! He knew nothing of Zorro, or if he did, he had failed entirely to make any connection — he honestly thought that this guy marking and defacing things with his “Z” mark was an original invention on the part of the cartoonist, and that this concept was hilarious, and fitting, and deeply meaningful to politician-of-the-moment Zacharro, and he had started using it in his everyday vocabulary, the “mark of Zacharo”, expecting that everyone else would know what he was talking about.
What I learned growing up with this friend is how difficult it is to explain just why certain things are as they are in a fair way without just resorting to “everybody knows this”, and also to realize just how many things are taken for granted without explanation, and how easy (and surprisingly often) what you think is obvious is actually a wrong understanding, even (or maybe especially) if you think of yourself as “smarter than the average bear”. The recent discussion on Topkapi comes to mind: obviously it’s Mission Impossible, I’ve never even heard of this Topkapi stuff….
There are two on point xkcd comics (and no, they do not reference Zorro): xkcd.com/386/ and xkcd.com/1053/
@larK, thanks for your thoughts on this!
To clarify one point about my answer at WEIT, the idea that planets were being represented by rectangles (or polygons) was just an observation from the way the map looked, and not supposed to be a consequence or correlate of what 1-to-1 map scale means.
BTW your NASA link wasn’t working for me; but the two XKCDs at the end are indeed classics.
Edited to add: Though larK’s Nasa link is a problem, the one from ExplainXKCD trying to illustrate the same thing (at a more manageable scale :-) ) is working fine, at https://imgur.com/a/WwdbXkN or as an embed:
I have had occasion to wake from a dream and immediately think, “That’s not right!” Often some incorrect scientific principle or fact about my house or city.
Danny Boy, you make a good point.
If I wake up from a dream and lie perfectly still while I tell myself the dream, I can usually remember large chunks of it long enough to write it down. If, however, I turn over (or sit up, but I’m more likely to roll over), I can feel the dream fading out as I move. Different blood flow? Dunno, but it’s been true for me over and over for decades.
I have neat dreams – adventures and mysteries and recurrent locations. I like remembering them long enough to write them down so I can see the story again. One set, I dreamed about a city/tower – a single building that would hold the population of a small city. One dream about the idea and its being built (with lots of skepticism), one about people living there and doing well, one about it starting to fall apart (the slums were in the basement, which was flooding)…and then one about a scientific archaeology expedition, to another planet, where we discovered a huge ruin that was all water on the lowest levels…and I the dreamer said, hey, this is that city tower! I in the dream had never seen it before, of course…a weird level of lucid dreaming. The dreams weren’t in order – falling into ruin, living there, expedition, and being built, I think. Because I remembered these and wrote them down, I can now remember them – the words bring up pictures. But if I can’t put words on the dream, it goes away entirely.
Yeah, that tower was going to be built in the desert in southwestern U.S., surrounded by low-rise villages,and FLW was to be the architect of the whole shebang.
Taliesan West and/or ArcoSanti, both of which are still extant; I visited them years ago
Frankly, if I were to write down my dreams, I’d be writing all day. I’d rather forget 99% of ’em. Usually, you can (I can) think back to what in your/my subconscious ‘created’ the dream. And I usually wake up exhausted and have to take non-dreaming naps during the day, which is a great waste of time. IF anyone ever invents a no-dreaming pill, I’d be first in line to try it!
I’m at the age where friends and relatives are dying; that’s where my dreams focus. And no, I don’t believe they are trying to ‘get in touch’ with me; that’s a bit too ‘woo-woo’ for me.
@ Andréa – The dreams that I (at least briefly) remember are usually the really weird ones that occur when I get woken up in the middle of the night, and cannot get 100% back to sleep. The body may be down and out, but the mind decides to play around. However, I have managed to “logic” myself out of a dream and wake myself up at least twice. One time was when I dreamt that I was in a friend’s house, and went through a door that I knew did not exist in that house. Another time someone asked me (in the dream) how the drive from L.A. to Oregon had been, and I discovered that the (two day) drive had been so unusually pleasant that I had no memory of it at all (and therefore was still sleeping in L.A.) I asked them “is this a dream?”, and woke up.
P.S. I still say that this strip does not look “like” XKCD, it really IS XKCD.
I once had such a dream about my first hubby that when I awoke, I thought he was sitting on my bed. Of course, by the time of this dream, I knew he had died, so talked myself out of the hallucination. However, purely by circumstance, we had moved to an area of FL very near to where he had lived, died and was buried. I know, no such thing as ‘woo-woo’. More like subconscious mind doing wishful thinking.
“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
P.S. The 1:1 map in “Blackadder Goes Forth” was just <a href="“>17 square feet, so it fit on a table.
The city/tower is a regular thing in SF stories; I don’t know if the stories or the plan for a real one came first, but the stories continue to use it (or neighborhood/towers – David Weber has a lot of cities made up of towers like that).
When I was younger than 5 I had a nightmare of a ghost over the foot my crib. I still can see him.
On the other hand, after we had bedbugs about 8 or so years ago I no longer remembered dreaming at night – I presumed I did as everyone does, but no memory. Over the years since I have found out – by waking up screaming or waking up Robert with my screaming and flailing about – that apparently my dreams are all nightmares and my mind is hiding them from me. He says that he holds me when it starts and I wake him and that calms me down.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I agree that it looks like xkcd.
He has a dream. He goes downstairs to share it. However, it fades from memory before he can.
I get this – both what the cartoon is about and the experience (and I think it is xkcd). I often have fantastical dreams that are like adventure films, sometimes very vivid. Occasionally I can hold onto quite a chunk of the memory of the dreams, if the circumstances of waking are good, but more often than not the vividness and any apparent logic soon fades once my eyes are open and my brain is flooded with brute reality.
This cartoon is just someone walking up from an amazing dream, rushing downstairs to share all the exciting drama of it, only for it to have faded to almost nothing by the time they are able to speak.
I even had one dream with a nuclear explosion… I was responsible for setting off a nuclear test blas out to sea. I looked out to sea though a window, pushed a button, then ducked out of view behind the wall. The explosion caused massive floods.
https://xkcd.com/430/ – “Every Damn Morning” is the cartoon. The mouseover is “There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill…”
My second comment with a link to the orignal at xkcd 430 was blocked, maybe as spam, because a link, or moderated for a supposed rude word in the xkcd title. Mouseover: “There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill…”
Thanks for tracking it down!
Since that’s a better image quality than what we have in the CIDU post, here it is embedded too:
Y’all’ve already got it, but I just wanted to mention for those who don’t know: There’s an entire site dedicated to explaining xkcd strips, making CIDU somewhat obsolete when it comes to that comic.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/430:_Every_Damn_Morning
And in case you don’t know it, the mouseover text is a quote from one of the Narnia books, Dawn Treader. Lucy reads a book that makes her feel happy, but she can’t remember the details.
Because I dream constantly, whether in novel, novella or short story form, I COMMAND myself to forget my dreams, and that often works. I do this because, as Haley Joel Osment said in ‘The Sixth Sense’, “I dream of dead people.”
@Xine Fury, on the one hand, thanks for alerting or reminding readers about the invaluable Explain XKCD project! On the other hand, pfffftt! to you for saying it makes CIDU obsolete when dealing with an XKCD — the goal, and entertainment value, of CIDU is not restricted to arriving at a single best answer. Yes, the Explain site does have a semi-open Discussion area in each comic’s entry; but semi-open is not going to get you a robust tangent culture.
Thanks, Pete, I would not have known!
It’s the dreaded Dream That You Forget As Soon As You Wake Up But Are Cursed To Remember Was Really Good thing.
Readers interested in explaining XKCDs, and in whether referencing ExplainXKCD always suffices for an answer, can check out the comments section to the April 11 post at the Why Evolution is True website (the host does not like to call it a blog). Someone made an entirely tangential comment asking for help explaining an XKCD (called 1-to-1 Scale).
Two of us answered with references to Explain XKCD. (N.B., all comments at WEIT currently are moderated, and approval is slow, so I would not have been able to see there was already an ExplainXKCD answer in the pipeline when I made mine. Anyhow, mine was better, as it pointed to the particular entry and not just to the front page of ExplainXKCD. ;-) )
Despite correct interpretations of how “1-to-1 scale” functions here (from me and from Explain site), other commenters invented nonstandard and unhelpful alternatives for what that title phrase, and the panel overall, can mean. Sez me! What say you?
The only thing I can add to this discussion is that this post’s tag needs to be corrected (remove “looks-like-“) and enhanced (with the author’s name).
For some reason I thought this one had been here before, but I can’t find it.
@Mitch: The ExplainXKCD site also has at least one person making the same (wrong) interpretation on what 1:1 means, and being corrected (the comments were posted on the same day you posted on the other site, so they may or may not have been up when you posted (I’m not going to try to reconcile time stamps between the two different sites: the explainxkcd site has their time-stamps explicitly marked as UTC, but the other site?)). I’m with you on the scale explanation, but disagree that that implies rectangles or polygons — there was a useful link on the explainer site to a NASA image of the relative sizes of the planets, so just imagine taking the planets from that image and carefully overlapping them in a roughly circular configuration at a 1:1 scale….
I do agree that invented non-standard alternatives to what 1 to 1 means are unhelpful, and frustrating, especially when declaimed with such absolute conviction and authority (sort of like ChatGPT). What I irrationally find more frustrating through is just that others don’t just automatically know what the correct interpretation of a particular standard phrase is (in this case 1:1). Here in this case especially, map scale is a well defined concept, stop wasting my time with your ignorance, making up needless explanations…
and yet…
My best friend growing up was in hindsight clearly on the autistic spectrum — he was brilliant, but surprisingly lacking in understanding of trivial, conventional human standards, and he would invent Byzantine interpretations of the things that most people understand without even thinking about them, and it was so frustrating to suddenly stumble in a conversation because of a lack of a shared interpretation of a fundamental point, when the fundamental point in question was so inherently obvious that it was often difficult to even realize this was the point of friction, and then to try and dissuade his Byzantine theory with anything other than appeals to authority (everybody knows it’s this…) Unfortunately I cannot remember any specific instances that fully capture this, partially because they came so far from left field that even at the time it took hard work from my brain to even take notice that he was misunderstanding [concept x] (Fish1: How’s the water today? Fish2: What the hell is “water”?!), and also because Murphy’s Law. The one I can specifically remember is not perfectly representative, but it’s the one I can remember: There was a banal political cartoon one day where the actions of Cabinet-member-of-the-moment were likened to Zorro, mostly because his name also started with a “Z” (Zicharo or something like that, probably in the Reagan administration); it had the Z-guy putting his “mark of Zicharro” all over the place à la Zorro, and my friend thought this cartoon was the most brilliant thing he had ever seen! He knew nothing of Zorro, or if he did, he had failed entirely to make any connection — he honestly thought that this guy marking and defacing things with his “Z” mark was an original invention on the part of the cartoonist, and that this concept was hilarious, and fitting, and deeply meaningful to politician-of-the-moment Zacharro, and he had started using it in his everyday vocabulary, the “mark of Zacharo”, expecting that everyone else would know what he was talking about.
What I learned growing up with this friend is how difficult it is to explain just why certain things are as they are in a fair way without just resorting to “everybody knows this”, and also to realize just how many things are taken for granted without explanation, and how easy (and surprisingly often) what you think is obvious is actually a wrong understanding, even (or maybe especially) if you think of yourself as “smarter than the average bear”. The recent discussion on Topkapi comes to mind: obviously it’s Mission Impossible, I’ve never even heard of this Topkapi stuff….
There are two on point xkcd comics (and no, they do not reference Zorro):
xkcd.com/386/ and xkcd.com/1053/
@larK, thanks for your thoughts on this!
To clarify one point about my answer at WEIT, the idea that planets were being represented by rectangles (or polygons) was just an observation from the way the map looked, and not supposed to be a consequence or correlate of what 1-to-1 map scale means.
BTW your NASA link wasn’t working for me; but the two XKCDs at the end are indeed classics.
Edited to add: Though larK’s Nasa link is a problem, the one from ExplainXKCD trying to illustrate the same thing (at a more manageable scale :-) ) is working fine, at https://imgur.com/a/WwdbXkN or as an embed:
I have had occasion to wake from a dream and immediately think, “That’s not right!” Often some incorrect scientific principle or fact about my house or city.
Danny Boy, you make a good point.
If I wake up from a dream and lie perfectly still while I tell myself the dream, I can usually remember large chunks of it long enough to write it down. If, however, I turn over (or sit up, but I’m more likely to roll over), I can feel the dream fading out as I move. Different blood flow? Dunno, but it’s been true for me over and over for decades.
I have neat dreams – adventures and mysteries and recurrent locations. I like remembering them long enough to write them down so I can see the story again. One set, I dreamed about a city/tower – a single building that would hold the population of a small city. One dream about the idea and its being built (with lots of skepticism), one about people living there and doing well, one about it starting to fall apart (the slums were in the basement, which was flooding)…and then one about a scientific archaeology expedition, to another planet, where we discovered a huge ruin that was all water on the lowest levels…and I the dreamer said, hey, this is that city tower! I in the dream had never seen it before, of course…a weird level of lucid dreaming. The dreams weren’t in order – falling into ruin, living there, expedition, and being built, I think. Because I remembered these and wrote them down, I can now remember them – the words bring up pictures. But if I can’t put words on the dream, it goes away entirely.
Yeah, that tower was going to be built in the desert in southwestern U.S., surrounded by low-rise villages,and FLW was to be the architect of the whole shebang.
Taliesan West and/or ArcoSanti, both of which are still extant; I visited them years ago
Frankly, if I were to write down my dreams, I’d be writing all day. I’d rather forget 99% of ’em. Usually, you can (I can) think back to what in your/my subconscious ‘created’ the dream. And I usually wake up exhausted and have to take non-dreaming naps during the day, which is a great waste of time. IF anyone ever invents a no-dreaming pill, I’d be first in line to try it!
I’m at the age where friends and relatives are dying; that’s where my dreams focus. And no, I don’t believe they are trying to ‘get in touch’ with me; that’s a bit too ‘woo-woo’ for me.
@ Andréa – The dreams that I (at least briefly) remember are usually the really weird ones that occur when I get woken up in the middle of the night, and cannot get 100% back to sleep. The body may be down and out, but the mind decides to play around. However, I have managed to “logic” myself out of a dream and wake myself up at least twice. One time was when I dreamt that I was in a friend’s house, and went through a door that I knew did not exist in that house. Another time someone asked me (in the dream) how the drive from L.A. to Oregon had been, and I discovered that the (two day) drive had been so unusually pleasant that I had no memory of it at all (and therefore was still sleeping in L.A.) I asked them “is this a dream?”, and woke up.
P.S. I still say that this strip does not look “like” XKCD, it really IS XKCD.
I once had such a dream about my first hubby that when I awoke, I thought he was sitting on my bed. Of course, by the time of this dream, I knew he had died, so talked myself out of the hallucination. However, purely by circumstance, we had moved to an area of FL very near to where he had lived, died and was buried. I know, no such thing as ‘woo-woo’. More like subconscious mind doing wishful thinking.
Robert Louis Stevenson apparently got his stories from dreams. See https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/110/selected-essays-of-robert-louis-stevenson/5111/a-chapter-on-dreams/
Apropos of almost nothing:
“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
@ MSJR – I didn’t recognize the quote at all, but I found it in Chapter 11 of Lewis Carroll’s “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded” (1893).
P.S. The 1:1 map in “Blackadder Goes Forth” was just <a href="“>17 square feet, so it fit on a table.
The city/tower is a regular thing in SF stories; I don’t know if the stories or the plan for a real one came first, but the stories continue to use it (or neighborhood/towers – David Weber has a lot of cities made up of towers like that).
When I was younger than 5 I had a nightmare of a ghost over the foot my crib. I still can see him.
On the other hand, after we had bedbugs about 8 or so years ago I no longer remembered dreaming at night – I presumed I did as everyone does, but no memory. Over the years since I have found out – by waking up screaming or waking up Robert with my screaming and flailing about – that apparently my dreams are all nightmares and my mind is hiding them from me. He says that he holds me when it starts and I wake him and that calms me down.