Dreams grown fresh from a seed
ADdes dreams new fractal forms without end: fractal flames and strange attractors that unfold, drift, breathe and morph into one another.
Eleven Feels, recorded from the app
A Feel sets the colours, the kinds of dream, the symmetry, the glow and the pace. These are the nine in the Dreams drawer and the two Constellations.
Short silent loops recorded from the app. Silk Threads and Starlight Orbits are the Constellations: strange attractors only.
Grow a dream in your browser
This is a small re-creation that runs in your browser, so you can try the idea. The real ADdes runs on your graphics card and is far richer: the clips above are the real thing. N next, L more like this, 1 to 0 a Feel.
A dream is a recipe grown from a seed
Nothing in ADdes is a recording. Every dream is a pure function of its seed and its clock, picture and sound alike, so the same seed grows the same dream again.
On this page that holds in the same browser. Different browsers can round their maths slightly differently, and a chaotic system magnifies the difference, so a copied link can look a little different elsewhere.
Inside this dream
- Name
- …
- Seed
- …
- Feel
- …
- Mood
- …
- Kind
- …
- Made of
- …
- Symmetry
- …
- Chosen
- …
Read live from the dream on this page. Press L for a child that keeps the mood and the kind.
The three kinds of dream
- Fractal flames
- Veils and filaments of colour on deep black. A handful of simple maps fold the plane back onto itself, with 35 non-linear variations to bend them. Written clean-room from Draves & Reckase’s published algorithm.
- Silk
- Strange attractors in two dimensions: Clifford, de Jong, Svensson and Pickover. One rule, applied over and over, draws threads of light.
- Orbits
- Strange attractors in three dimensions: Aizawa, Thomas, Lorenz, Halvorsen and Dadras, with Four-wing and Sprott in Starlight Orbits. They turn slowly and are drawn with depth of field.
The browser dream above draws flames, silk (Clifford, de Jong, Svensson) and orbits (Aizawa, Thomas, Lorenz, Halvorsen). The other attractors and depth of field are in the app only.
How a dream is chosen before you see it
Most random fractals are not worth looking at, so a curator works ahead of you on its own thread. It invents candidates from style templates, from mutations of earlier dreams and from symmetry, and draws each one on the processor in a fast test render.
A gate then checks coverage, fractal dimension, density entropy, colour spread and loop stability. The target for fractal dimension is about 1.5, the most-liked and most restful range. A dream that passes lingers for a while, then eases into the next by a spline-eased morph, or dissolves when the two are different kinds.
The browser dream is guarded the same way: a candidate that would draw an empty frame, a blob or a lone hairline is refused before you see it.
Keep a dream you like
Press Ctrl + S, or the bookmark on the menu bar, and the dream on screen is saved. It keeps its whole recipe (shape, palette, camera), the Feel it was shown in and how far into its drift it was, so it comes back exactly as it was.
Saved dreams wait in the Saved drawer of the Feels panel. Choose one and it returns, and it stays until you press P.
L, more like this, is a different thing: it breeds the next dream from the one you are watching.
Ten of the 18 Feels are on the number keys
In the app, 1 to 0 switch to just that Feel, and Shift with a number adds it to the mix or takes it out. R turns every Feel on. Each new dream is born in one of the Feels in the mix, chosen at random.
The buttons below drive the browser dream above.
The other eight
The rest are chosen in the Feels panel. Prism Bloom, nested rainbow spirals, is the ninth Feel in the Dreams drawer. Voyage, the three hallways (Neon, Wormhole, Psychedelic) and the two tunnels (Flame Tunnel, Trance Tunnel) are on the Journeys page. The Visualizer Feel is made for music: see Visualizer Mode.
One dream is not random at all. C shows Claude’s dream: a sheep Claude made to show what being Claude is like.
How a dream moves
- It breathes 6.5 times a minute: the view swells, the light pulses and the glow swells.
- Speed has its own dream clock, in steps of ½×, 1×, 1½×, 2× and 3×. Breathing stays on real time.
- Every rate is capped, and a luminance governor limits brightness change to 2% of full scale per second.
- Framing fits each dream as tightly as its body allows, through every breath and drift.
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