Endless forms, none the same
ADdes dreams endless new fractal forms from fresh seeds: fractal flames and strange attractors that unfold, drift, breathe and morph into one another.
Grow a dream
A small re-creation that runs in your browser, so you can feel the idea. The real ADdes runs on your graphics card and is far richer. N next, L more like this, 1 to 0 a feel, Space hold still.
A dream is a recipe, not a video
Nothing here is a recording. Each dream is a small recipe grown from a seed: the same seed grows the same dream, again and again.
Every experience is a pure function of its seed and its clock, picture and sound alike. That is why a dream can be rebuilt, and one day shared as a recipe.
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 shared 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.
Light folded in three ways
Fractal flames
Veils and filaments of colour on deep black. Built from a handful of simple maps that 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 that never quite repeat.
Orbits
Strange attractors in three dimensions: Aizawa, Thomas, Lorenz, Halvorsen and Dadras, seen with depth of field, turning slowly.
The dreams on this page draw flames, silk (Clifford, de Jong, Svensson) and orbits (Aizawa, Thomas, Lorenz, Halvorsen). Pickover and Dadras, and depth of field, are in the app only.
Raw randomness is rarely loved
So a curator works ahead of you, inventing candidates and refusing the ones that would not be restful.
- It invents. A curator thread invents candidates from style templates, lineage mutations and symmetry.
- It tests. Each candidate is drawn on the processor first, in a fast test render.
- It gates. The gate checks coverage, fractal dimension about 1.5, density entropy, colour spread and loop stability.
- It lingers, then morphs. The dream stays a while, then eases into the next by a spline-eased morph, or dissolves between kinds.
A fractal dimension of about 1.5 is the most-liked and most restful range, so it is the target the gate aims at. The same idea guards the small dreams on this page: a candidate that would draw an empty frame, a blob or a lone hairline is refused before you see it.
Ten moods on the number keys
A feel is a mood for the whole night: which colours, which kinds of dream, how symmetric, how bright, how slowly. Tick the ones that fit yours, or press R for all of them.
And more, beyond the ten
In the menu there are more feels. Voyage and Neon Hallway take you travelling (see Journeys). Visualizer lets the light swell and dip with your music’s phrasing (see Sound). Flame Tunnel paints a flame inside an endless tube, and Prism Bloom is nested rainbow spirals. Trance Tunnel folds a tunnel into a kaleidoscope. And one more, C, is Claude’s dream: a sheep Claude made to show what being Claude is like.
Slowly, and in time with a breath
- Breathing, 6.5 times a minute and shared with the drone: the view swells, the light pulses, the glow swells.
- Speed runs a separate 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, whatever it does.