A couple of weeks ago i watched an snippet from the new Judge Dredd Movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8lMmRe6Z44 <-- warning very graphic
Some days later i dreamed:
I was in a very bright natural enviroment, there was a cocktail party on a small hill surrounded by forest.
The Participants: a lot of Bankers, Politicians and Bodyguards all dressed in dark suits. I was standing behind a very long buffet table with lots of bottles,food and fine glass decanters. The positioning was deliberate. I was standing there with the table between me and the other "guests".
Now you can make an wild guessing what happened next:
As soon as i pulled out my 2 handguns, the whole world slowed down to nearly standstill, everything got even more brighter and colorful, and i started shooting. I wasn't really thinking about it. I had guns, the mission was clear, there where no emotions, like i knew it was just a game or something. I was actually focused on doing it so that it looks cool. I tried to shoot everybody THROUGH a glass bottle / vase etc... Which i did, and it was gorgeous, i got so entranced with the flying debris/sparks/water/blood that i actually forgot that the people involved in the spactacle where dying at that moment. Whenever i pulled the trigger another extreme colorful galaxy appeared before my eyes.
I got actually hit from the bullets of the Bodyguards and it really hurt. I killed the last of them, reloaded my gun and then killed the last politician/banker.
A whole magazine into the head....
Again i was entranced in an ultraslomo, and i was more concerned with observing the firing gun in front of my face and the amount of pressure (a lot!) i had to apply on the trigger.
As i was more focused on the gun the person getting hit was completly covered by the gun and the smoke. I never saw what i did to him, i only remember to pull the trigger until the gun was empty. The word "overkill" was obviously not part of my vocabular at that moment.
I woke up with a WTF?!! on my lips, and i was on an operating table in an really rotten and destroyed enviroment. The second i woke up i realized that i had lots of cables going into my chest, and i had to pull them out from under my skin. It was REALLY painful. Felt like the scene from Matrix; awakening in the real world.
I realized i was in an postapocalyptic world, everything was in ruins and all the other survivors i could find where insane, sick people, stumbeling around like zombies.
That was the moment i really woke up. I was shocked since i could still feel the pain from the wounds in my chest where i ripped the cables out. Or it seemed so at that moment. It took me minute or 2 to come to me, literally.
In retrospective, that was the most vivid and psychedelic dream i had in the last couple of years. The amount of blood and violence was astonishing, the pain seemed real. Like in the trailer, everything was 10x more colorful and trippy, particles everywhere, the sound was dimmed, pitched down. It felt like moving through an liquid medium,
I think i actually DID UNDERESTIMATE what kind of consequences it has when we indulge for a long time in entertainment with an overly violent character. Especially video games tend to mold the consciousness into a certain form which can have an negative effect on long term memory. Overloading the sensory to often has an diminishing effect on creativity and focus.
I am not arguing against games/movies here. I just wanted to make clear that if you put somthing in your memory, it might still be there even if you think you have forgotten it.