Esther Dyson is a venture capitalist, philanthropist, and genius — as was her father, legendary physicist Freeman Dyson. She was a classmate of Bill Gates at Harvard. From 1983 to 2004 she ran the non-pareil yearly PC Forum, the industry’s leading executive conference.
The Dream: I was with some people in a multi-story building which had no stairs below the second floor. We wanted to get out, and I said, “No problem; we can use the elevator.” We got to the elevator but it had no buttons for the floors, just an empty hole. “No problem,” I said, “We can use text search.” I typed in “first floor” and then woke up. What is the meaning here?
The Interpretation: As a building symbolizes the self by housing the individual, the very brilliant Esther Dyson’s multi-story structure well defines her complex, multifaceted personality.
The building’s foundation, having no stairs below the second floor, is not structurally rooted. By hovering two stories above the ground, the dreamer is made inaccessible and unreachable by ordinary means – in computer jargon this translates to access denied. For Dyson is on a higher level; at very least two flights above everyone else in the cerebral realm of reason and intellect. As such, one understands the dream wish to get down to earth, but the descent proves problematic.
In this problem-solving dream Esther’s descent represents the quest for self-knowledge. She delves beneath the surface into this empty hole – the uncharted places of the unconscious – which is why the elevator has no numbered floor buttons to push or locate one’s position.
Although Dyson is searching for emotional redemption – a deeper level of herself – one marvels at her chosen method of descent, which relies on the wondrous technological function of a computer’s Text search. In this view, even the dreamer’s departure from the cerebral to the instinctual realm necessitates high-tech know-how rather than feeling – indicating that in Dyson’s dream world technology is still the liberating factor.
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