From an email I sent to Chris:

I had a very cool dream about you this morning.  it was somewhat brief, but I was lucid, so let me see what I can recall of it.

We were at a soundcheck somewhere in a very old building with wooden construction.  A garage door was open to the outside, sort of like what it was at Metropol in Pittsburgh, 1994.  It was warm out, probably May, just like then.

You had a device that you were using to compose something.  It was far more advanced than any computer or program that I’ve ever seen, but it is within current technological capability.  The device had a fairly large, completely smooth glass-like touch screen, it was flat not like a laptop, and bright like the displays they have in aircraft cockpits that you can read in direct sunlight (years ago I interviewed at a company that makes them, they are near here but they didn’t hire me).  you obviously had used it a lot because you could operate it with exquisite dexterity.
You had recorded onto it a bunch of stuff: samples of things, people talking, some music, all sorts of stuff.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

The device autoprocessed all of this recorded information and displayed it almost as if it were a map of the land, like a map of the U.S. but I didn’t see the boundaries, and each spoken word was printed over the map like the label of a state.  A sentence was a series of states, most of them were rectangular but of varying sizes.  you would pan across the map and zoom in and out like on an iphone, but it was a full size screen and infinitely more responsive.  You were moving around and selecting words and fragments of words and notes and sounds and sending them to the construction area, assembling something.

You could zoom in on any of the single spoken words or even on a single note, and as you did, the device would break up a word into something that looked like counties, each with a letter or a note or a symbol representing inflection if it was a spoken sound.  zooming in on a single word would show you a zoomed in view of a state on a map which represented the word, broken down now into smaller pieces that were a combination of English letters, notes, and pauses.  you could choose from these and were adding them to your composition, sometimes a full word at a time, sometimes just word fragments or music notes.  you explained that you could take a sentence and directly reassemble it in a different order without using a cut and paste operation, you did it by just selecting the words or notes or fragments as objects instead of as a waveform like the sound editors I’ve used.  The view seemed to have limitless zoom in or out capability, which is a bit reminiscent of that film from the 70’s, “Powers of 10” where they repeatedly zoomed out by a factor of 10 into the scale of galaxies in space, later back in to the microscopic level.  you were doing this with great dexterity and quickly assembled a composition.

After a while, you went to the composition field and played it and it played all of your samples in order, maybe 40 seconds duration.  I remember it wasn’t overly musical but it was outrageously creative and easy for you as you had started it before and finished it while I watched.

And that’s all I have from it.  But it was fuckin cool.