the year the internet exploded

Jacob Ciocci sent this post from a pitstop in London:

I have had too many dreams to count like this . . . but the classic I always tell dates back to 1996, "the year the internet exploded". I was living in a dascomb dorm room at Oberlin College with my good friend from high school, David. My computer was positioned directly behind my head as I slept. I was just learning about the internet and in general was having my mind blown daily because now I was on a networked campus for the first time and hard drives were getting so BIG. At night I would dream of debugging javascript from within a dark terminal window. The night I would like to share however, I do not remember the dream. but David does. David walked into the room and I began talking to him, in my sleep. "David, come here" I said. David approached the bed and I asked "what is that in your hand?" And David said, "a toothbrush". Then I said "double click on the toothbrush icon, and that will take you to a popup window which should tell you how to brush your teeth."

About 8 years later, David recounted a dream to me that is just as interesting. We were on tour with our band, Extreme Animals, and were playing shows with another band from the west coast called "eats tapes". They are our rival fake-rave west coast band friends/enemies. David had a dream that someone in their band decided to, as a prank, create a fake Extreme Animals band page on myspace (since we did not have one). In the dream the myspace page was so poorly designed and the content was so embarassing that it was the perfect "prank". Soon after this dream occured, the rival band, Eats Tapes, did exactly this--they made a fake myspace page for us, which was pretty horrible in every way.