(this post is a bit of a living work in progress, so you might recognize several sections which were published on instagram or Facebook over the past several months. It’s a bit long so if you are interested in reading just the section about #dreampunk, scroll about halfway down :) )
Part I: The Necessary Seed-Bombing of the Future
“There are some people who are so magical that we break reality… [We] are alien in a world that won’t believe in us. We are mythic.”
— Seb Barnett, genderqueer artist & mystic (Rest In Power)
The late anti-capitalist cultural theorist Mark Fisher felt that Western civilization was experiencing a crisis of the imagination. Fisher located one generator of this crisis in the processes of late capitalism—with the hyper-interconnectedness of the digital as its handmaid—which he feared had colonized and constrained creativity, time itself, and the stories we tell about the future. From pop music to blockbuster science fiction, Fisher saw old versions of the future simply being remade or ‘upgraded,’ but not, in his estimation, fundamentally changing or producing subversive and diverse narratives. Throughout much of his writing, Fisher warned that Western culture had fallen under a spell wherein “our capacity to even conceive of alternatives to capitalism has atrophied.” Imagination was a skill that “we” were losing, fast. In Capitalist Realism—published in 2009—he remarked darkly that it had become "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." Sadly, we lost Mark to suicide in 2017.
Discovering Fisher’s work was a revelation because “the future” has always been a deeply troubling topic for us and Fisher helped us see that there is a lot of power in this ‘trouble.’ Our childhood and teenage years coincided with the rise of the internet, and as computing and the digital remade the economy, certainty and precision were the name of the game. For me though, as a queer and gender non-conforming kid in a rural New England town, I couldn’t envision myself as an adult. This was probably in part due to the fact that I didn’t know any real (and hardly any fictional) queer or trans adults. Throughout my teen years I was staunchly convinced that I was going to die before reaching adulthood. I had no idea what the future was supposed to look like for me, and it was literally easier for me to imagine my death than my emergence. We hear echoes of this when we re-read Fisher’s words printed a decade ago, that it was "easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." A lot of people, it turns out, experience a sort of oppression (and literally, depression) from dominant culture’s versions of ‘the future,’ either feeling shut out of it (like I did then), or locked into it, as in the vision of the indebted worker enslaved to a monotonous “future” under capitalism.
As a young teen growing up in the strange techno-utopianism of the Silicon Valley, Pinar became progressively horrified by the wastefulness and ecological destruction caused by human civilization and disillusioned with the visions of ‘the future’ that Silicon Valley was in the business of manufacturing. Though now the phrase ‘ecological grief’ has finally entered popular consciousness, when they shared with a therapist in the early 2000’s about their intense feelings of kinship with the more-than-human world and grief at its destruction, they were diagnosed as schizophrenic and bipolar. This dismissal of their reality and the pathologizing of their altered states created a violent sense of exile that was difficult to survive. One of the ways they survived their teenage years, other than through their connection with animals and water, was through art. They had to create worlds in order to survive, and art was a way for them to create worlds in which they belonged. It was not a pastime, but was very much a ceremony of survival. Art was also a form of mysticism for them because it was a way of metabolizing despair into an act of creation. Like me, they also eventually were drawn to both ancient and contemporary human mystical traditions because these ways of knowing de-centered human supremacy and centered mystery as something sacred, vital, and necessary.
Experiencing mystery is central to understanding oneself and one’s role—it is an engine of joy, resilience, awe, faith, and imagination. Mystery can remind us that reconfigured meaning and new relationships are possible, and that meaning-making is an active, living, ongoing process, not something that was pre-given or fixed before our births. Mystery is necessary for healthy culturing of futures (yet we are constantly told that the market hates uncertainty). For us mystery has been a critical concept in the formation of healthy relationships to our queerness and identities, because our spiritual wholeness and earthly belonging has not always been reflected by society, and we cannot afford to wait for a time when it will be. As young people, we both desperately needed to engage with ways of knowing that centered the unknown and uncertainty, and that allowed us to see the unknown and the little-understood in a positive light. In the 90’s and early 2000’s, these sorts of things were cryptic and hard to come by—we were brought up steeped in what Jason A Josephson-Storm calls the “anti-myths” of disenchantment—which told us that we lived in a mechanistic universe, where God had died like Pan long before him, and the rational and sane philosophical and emotional positions were atheistic ones. We both found affirmations of the priceless value of mystery via labyrinthine paths—though the common denominator was in relationship with the world beyond the human and through human mystical or mythical traditions that contemporary Western society has often been quick to judge as superstitious, delusional, or relegate to the past.
Although the computer seemed to be the crown-jewel of supposedly rational, disenchanted science, it is ironic that I first found mystery (and therefore mysticism) among machines. In my pre-teen and early teen years I became fascinated with the workings of the internet and the computer networks that made it up. The internet was like a mysterious landscape to me—I wasn’t brought up knowing that it was even possible to follow the trails of animals, so I followed trails made of wires. Connections with remote machines seemed like magic, and the blinking cursor and command line was a strange mix of absence and presence characteristic of the mystical—a reminder that this world was deeply interactive, and also unknown to me. This was a place in which I could wander, and it happened to be a virtual space. We often realize that mystery is most alive when we have ‘space’ (which could also be time) to wander through some sort of terrain that is rich with connections—whether it’s a landscape, a dreamscape, cyberspace, or even the micro-terrain of something we are making with our hands.
A similar experience of mystery was what attracted me to games, from text-based adventures to isometric RPGs. Because of the central role of the human user in these artificial systems, one naturally feels drawn into them, beckoned, in a way that to them felt spiritual (though it was of course, manufactured). Ironically, this use of machines formed part of my ability to see the world as animate, deeply interactive, and full of information. Looking back, it was not surprising that I soon fell in love with the more-than-human world and the mysteries of ecology and started spending more time outside and less time behind the screen. Here, the unknown went beyond the human in a way it couldn’t in human-made cyberspace. Here, no human was in control. The future was made everyday with paws, wings, teeth, leaves. You learned ‘who you were’ by your relation to others, to the land. You unfolded. Mystery was welcome here. This personal history is partially why we never shame gaming culture in our work as nature-connection mentors. The desire to inhabit and ‘belong’ in worlds that is characteristic of modern gaming is a deeply intelligent ‘hack’ for engaging with mystery within a mystery-deprived culture that is obsessed with what is already known and created.
When Mystery is marginalized in culture and society—or monopolized and only allowed to come from one source, like Western science or Protestant religion—as we believe it has been (at least publicly) for much of the last century, the future also becomes more monolithic and constrained. This has social and political effects, because then it is only certain people—often white, wealthy, and cisgender—who are able to imagine themselves in these futures. The mythos of the future is closely tied to how we come to define ourselves. Especially in adolescence, whether we are queer or not, we are unknown to ourselves, and in a healthy culture, this would be a source of mystical power, a ‘necessary crisis,’ and the object of rite-of-passage through which we would come to embody a local future by growing in to our unique role in community. Mystery is, as we say at Queer Nature, a primary need, along with shelter, food, clean water, and community. We both grew up in a society where we were told we could ‘be whatever we wanted,’ yet what if what we wanted to be was something society was not ready for—or even saw as antithetical to itself? This is not just any society, mind you, but one driven by immense capital created from slavery and stolen land. When this society becomes invested in certain futures, there is very little social and mythic space for roles that would question or undo those systems of investment. This is partially why mystics are medicated and institutionalized, hackers thrown in jail or their innovations appropriated by the state, Indigenous land protectors are imprisoned or assassinated, and transgender people are dehumanized and murdered. They represent futures that are not economically viable for the state and global capitalism.
Lately, the future has been a topic on many people’s minds, conjuring the post-apocalyptic for some, the post-human for others, and the enigma of uncertainty for many of us. The English word ultimately comes from the Latin futurus, which is the future participle of the verb ‘to be.’ In English we don’t really have this verb form, and something has been lost in our use of this potent word. In reading the etymology, the future is literally ‘what is about to become’ or what is ‘going to become.’ It denotes a process of becoming, not a fixed destination. Seeing the future as a fixed destination (as fate or destiny) can, at worst, create merely another terrain available for colonization and commodification. To be trans, for us both as non-binary or genderqueer trans people, is to be a futurist. However, to be a non-binary futurist is also to reject the dichotomy of utopia and dystopia (which Donna Haraway powerfully writes about in Staying with the Trouble), and to trust that we contain futures in our bodily becomings. We are imagination becoming flesh. Truly, all organisms are. We live in an era where entire ecosystems and species are transitioning from one state to another within our lifetimes—we are not utilizing the full potential of imagination if we are not paying attention to them and seeing them (as well as the various Indigenous peoples who have stewarded them for thousands of years) as “thought leaders” for these times.
“We have to invent the future,” Fisher concluded, arguing that we had forgotten how to create it. However, what if this has been a necessary forgetting for dominant Western culture? In some ways, Fisher and many other sensitive Gen Xers like him probably felt the future splintering—by the late 0s it was clear that the project of neoliberalism, with its dreams of economic growth and prosperity through globalization, was not sustainable, financially or ecologically. At this point, the ‘future’ as envisioned by those in power is a story of protecting and shoring up their property and resources, closing their borders, and mythologizing the zombie apocalypse, or lately, Hollywood’s popular climate catastrophe scenarios that only deviate slightly from the former by picturing the Earth as a ‘zombie mother’ who threatens to destroy her children and must also be controlled and subdued. The future needs to be splintered because it is plural. It is the natural state of futures to be legion, to be local, to be as numerous as are bioregions on earth, however inconvenient that might be to those fixated on prediction and control. The futures of the 20th century seemed more monolithic because they relied upon unsustainable systems of production, power, and imagination. That era is over, or at least it should be.
What if the future is something that can only be dreamt, grown, embodied? We don’t believe we have all forgotten how to be with the future. Only the most privileged of us ever had a chance to ‘invest’ in the future in the first place. For those oppressed and subjugated by the future-making machine of empire, envisioning alternative futures has always been a natural and necessary part of resistance, not a past time, but an emotional and spiritual and mythological necessity. Trans and queer folks live with uncertainty every day. We grew up seeing our community members kicked out of their homes, institutionalized, suicidal—or experiencing these things ourselves. It’s no wonder that many of us have cultivated methods of creating relationships with the unknown that are pleasurable or grounding for us—like through recovered ancestral traditions, through fantasy or sci-fi literature, or through ‘occult’ practices like astrology and tarot. One of our main eco-mystical practices that forms an important practical and theoretical core for Queer Nature is wildlife and ecological tracking—which is a practice of listening to the land so that we can better understand our place with it. These practices, and others, literally heal the trauma that we have around uncertainty and unknowing, they build our capacity to live without a Future™—they build resilience in the face of apocalypse and existential crisis.
Futures, mystery/mysticism, imagination, and creativity are all bound up together. Imagination is an ecological force. It requires space, mystery, and Otherness. It is a distributed phenomenon, among the neurons in our nervous systems yes, but also among singing songbirds, twinkling stars, and subterranean mycelium. It isn’t something our brains do in isolation. It is something that is done in community that extends beyond the human. So what happens then to our ability to imagine when there is less biodiversity, less other-than-human beings, less old growth forests? Less space and time to rest? Ecocide is not just something that is happening “out there.” It’s also happening to our minds, and to our dreamscapes. However, this is not a message of doom. It is also a way through. We can expand the scope of our dreams by engaging more with worlds beyond the human.
Dreampunks: Punching Phantasms in the Face and Distributing/Democratizing Dream-space since the Future
Enter the archetype of the #dreampunk, about which we’ve mused on a little, mostly through poetry. Dreampunk is a speculative aesthetic and subgenre of fantasy & sci-fi literature that, as some of its cultural stewards describe, engages with the questions “is this real?” and furthermore “what does ‘real'‘ mean?” Dreampunk questions the binary of real/false, fiction and nonfiction, and therefore, is also a way of being that questions ableist grand narratives about sanity and consensus reality.
Dreampunk, I think, is an aesthetic in need of attention now precisely because we live in an era where, because of a cocktail of social media, toxic skepticism, and fake news, it is easier than ever for many people to be deceived, their views of the world changed or shifted with a single click. Many many people already ARE asking “Is this real?” about our reality, I would wager more than they were 30 years ago. But this state of affairs doesn’t really have a name that feels true yet. It still feels like a bad dream. It’s a sub-reality of the Anthropocene that I struggle to name, but one name could be the Oneirocene—the age of dreams. Yet, this society seems undeserving of such a lyrical name—I fear too many of us are not dreaming well, but hypnotized, entrapped. So perhaps what we are in the thick of now is the Phantasmacene—the era of illusion, where sorcery has gotten out of control because of our overconfidence in magic’s insignificance (some day, we’ll reach the Oneirocene…).
So far the subterranean zeitgeist of surreality, skepticism, absurdity, and apathy bubbling up from our shadows and subconscious is being taken advantage of by malicious actors whose apathy and nihilism make them dangerous—apathy and nihilism turned against one’s kin make a dream terrorist, not a dreampunk. Dreampunk is not in favor of deception that will lead to hate, rather dreampunk is interested in enchantment, and in forms of “healthy deception” like those used by magicians for healing. (The trolls on 4Chan who made up #Pizzagate weren’t dreampunks...they missed the mark.)
When I started using this word last year, I wasn’t aware of its existence as a genre at all. I’ve now become aware of a more widespread notion of this term as a niche genre and vaporwave variant, and the ways in which others are also leaning into the philosophical potential of the word, such as my gifted contemporaries at the Dreaming Kinarchy page. I am excited about these connections and synchronicities, because they point to the widespread desire for a punk culture of dreams and myths. A subculture that doesn’t reject mythology and lore, but sees the subversive value in it, a culture that sees the dreams of oppressed and minoritized people as sources of the mythic—moreover, dreampunk is about resisting the co-opting of such liberatory mythos by “empire.”
Below I’ll continue to engage with my ‘own’ interpretation of dreampunk, through it in no way is meant to invalidate or erase any other work done on the term. For me dreampunk is a sort of spiritual descendant of cyberpunk—a dystopian hero archetype developed through science fiction and hacker culture in the 80’s and 90’s. The cyberpunk is one who utilizes computerized systems that are often designed for control in unpredictable ways. As discussed extensively in McKenzie Wark’s “Hacker Manifesto,” this figure is often an unrecognized innovator, because they naturally test the limits and weaknesses of systems in ways that the creators of those systems never could, and often bring about those systems’ unrealized capacities. However, the cyberpunk is often (unfortunately) a martyr, too, and somewhat of a tragic figure because her endeavors, her resourcefulness and creativity, often end up absorbed into the apparatus of the state or pirated by corporations that don’t always have the best interests of the majority in mind.
Instead of operating primarily in the realm of cyberspace, the dreampunk’s domain is then imaginative space, mythic space, what Jungians might call the collective unconscious. She is the hacker of the dreamworld. As a hacker thinks outside the box from an engineering perspective, dreampunks use mystical, altered, or outlawed states of consciousness as a way of breaking through the limits of ambient ways of seeing, knowing, and imagining, within a context of anti-capitalist/anti-authoritarian & de-colonial critique. Therefore there are similarities with the figure of the ‘psychonaut,’ but the latter is not devoid of problems, because it carries with it very little analysis of power, privilege, or the cultural appropriation endemic to psychedelic culture. Dreampunk has more decolonial potential than ‘psychonaut.’
I think as trans and queer folks, we had some unintentional training in mythic remediation and dreampunk-craft before we knew how to name it. Because we had to stretch the limits of cultural stories, narratives, folktales, fables, and myths that were passed down to us, from which we had been erased. We had to find ourselves in them. I have done a lot of excavating and reading between the lines… that’s one of the reasons I wanted to be a cultural historian… because the worst threat, the biggest enemy, was No Story. Like the Nothing from The Neverending Story. Actually, exactly like that. The Nothing is a dark storm of destruction, a wave of anti-matter that sweeps across the land of Fantasia—a living world generated by the dreams of humanity. When humans lose hope and forget their dreams, the Nothing grows stronger and destroys more of Fantasia. The Nothing is a metaphor for what happens when we cannot regenerate imagination. However, I don’t interpret the Nothing as strictly despair. It is also a form of psychological subjugation that occurs when others actually don’t want us to dream or are dismissive of our dreams because they see them as having no ‘real’ value (like when Bastian’s rather emotionless Dad scolds him for having his ‘head in the clouds’). A more sinister form of this would be the scenario where those in power are actually invested in reducing your ability to dream, because, as the anti-hero Gmork says in the Neverending Story, people who have given up their dreams are easier to control.
Going through despair is normal, losing the story is normal. Throwing out a toxic story may be necessary. But we have to be able to build story again. Especially those of us who are left out of dominant culture’s stories… Needless to say, The Neverending Story is a classic dreampunk/mythpunk text.
Queer Nature could be described as a dreampunk project because in addition to teaching place based skills we hope to steward futuristic (and ancient) narratives of belonging and resilience for QTBIPOC & LGBTQIA people. It is a restorying of relations and a reminder of the Land as Reality past all the bullshit and noise.
Dreampunks are necessary because cosmology, world views, grand narratives, whatever you want to call them (especially in globalized age of mass media or in authoritarian societies) are one of the most basic systems of control, encompassing all other systems. Paradoxically, worldviews can be roadmaps for connection with life and deep relationship with the other-than-human, so when they are utilized for alienation and division, or have that outcome, we are in an imaginative crisis, a war on dreams. The jaded may say that if the stories are what wound us, then we should take away the stories—a great example of that type of (toxic) cynicism is Landmark Education. But we don’t believe that tactic will work in the long run because even though some stories need to die, humans are story seers and storymakers and we cannot live without stories, without meaning, in a resilient way. Rigidity and dogmatism are actually the enemy of story and myth, especially in their living forms—this is something that you can learn by following stories on landscapes, like through wildlife tracking and other forms of pattern recognition.
The problem is that if we do not have healthy, resilient stories, (as well as their expression in funny memes and things that make us laugh—the rise of funny memes about wildlife beyond cats is a good sign in our view) and the means for creating them through access to deep rest and the more-than-human world, toxic stories will take hold. Healthy and liberatory story-systems are like a cultural immune system. When we lack them, we are vulnerable to manipulation. (Some people have talked about Zen being a tradition that is hugely resilient and immune to would-be 'mythic/memetic viruses’ because koans and parables act can function to essentially root out toxic views—I see this as similar to the action of a white blood cell on a pathogen). This vulnerability has been well demonstrated through the effective psychological operations against the American public conducted by psychographics company Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign, as well as the torrents of memes unleashed by trolls and alt-right keyboard warriors during the so-called Great Meme Wars. These phenomena, and more, helped “win” the election. Propaganda especially targets and takes advantage of those who are ambivalent, apathetic, or bored. (And those states, like all emotions, are not inherently bad… they actually beg to be understood. Read this article by Karla McLaren about how apathy is an emotional strategy to mask anger).
Memetic warfare—a digital form of psychological warfare—has been studied by DARPA since almost the beginning of the millennium. Memetic warfare is a thing folks—it’s a real, legitimate tool—memes are not something anybody should make fun of. Instead, we should take them seriously. For too long, leftists, and many who identify as progressive, have been wary of the big M’s (myth, magic, and mysticism… should we add memes to that?) to a fault—even when they have been embraced, in the case of memes, their underlying potential and power has not been widely acknowledged, and the M’s are basically seen as sources of entertainment. While some of the folks behind the “Great Meme Wars” actually outright refer to memes as magic. I’ve been studying and thinking about memes, mythology, mysticism, and the art of persuasion for 15 years. I couldn’t get through two degrees in religious studies without studying persuasion and so-called “charisma.” The book Poker Without Cards convinced me of the importance of the former back in 2008 when a lot of the “Great Meme Warriors” were probably babies. It’s a shame that so many have ignored the power of the mind as both a force multiplier and also as a contested site of weaponization and conquest—this has been true long before the internet existed. The consequences of liberal, progressive, and leftist skepticism about ‘magic’ suck a lot.
The Gradual Ambush of Rest
Before I go on to talk about sleep and rest more specifically, I want to mention the work of Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry and the one who coined the phrase Rest as Resistance. I hope you have heard of her—if not, look her up! The Nap Ministry is a project that creates spaces for collective rest as an act of ceremony. It actively imagines what it would be like for us to attend a communal space like church and rest, even literally, sleep together. Her work, which is rooted in her theological studies as an M.Div as well as in her prior experience in the performing arts, is a critical interruption of the business-as-usual of grind culture, where everything is seen as an opportunity for profit and burnout is inevitable. Her work brings attention to the racism and white supremacy inherent in grind culture, where the false myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps acts as a way of gaslighting people who are actually dealing with layers and layers of systemic oppression. This makes rest, especially ritualized rest, a crucial act of resistance for black folks (especially women), and other oppressed and targeted groups. Queer Nature is %110 on board with Hersey’s message, and we are huge fans!
In the book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, author Jonathan Crary weaves a veritable manifesto against all the ways industrial and post-industrial society wages war against our ability to sleep and rest. He points out all the ways that sleep is one of the biggest barriers to extractive economic growth under capitalism. The average nightly sleep cycle is down several hours from where it was 100 years ago. Corporate and state-sanctioned efforts to marginalize sleep, rest, and the natural cover provided by night are widespread, from the pervasiveness of light in commercial spaces, the legal and architectural designs preventing sleep in public places, to the ongoing quest for the sleepless soldier in military medicine. Crary also discusses how class inequity creates a grotesque situation where only the sleep of the rich is protected.
A big takeaway for us from Hersey’s and Crary’s work is that incipient in the war against sleep and against our circadian rhythms, is a war against our dreams.* This systemic erosion of dreamspace, while not a ‘conspiracy’ per se, unfortunately seems to be an emergent quality of the complex system of society as it currently is. Which is to say, it carries a different, more deeply rooted danger than if it were a conspiracy plotted and executed by a discrete group of “bad guys.” Emergence is not all sunshine and rainbows, it’s just a word to describe phenomena in complex adaptive systems. If the systems are fucked up to begin with, emergent properties of that system do have the potential to be toxic. So, dream deprivation, as an emergent property of extractive capitalism is backed by very powerful forces who truly do benefit from the dispossession of creativity from oppressed and minoritized people, including the average worker. Creativity is fueled by many things, but some of the big ones are deep sleep, and relatedly, “boredom” and the ability to daydream while awake (Fisher also discussed how foolish it was for American culture to position boredom as an enemy when it often is the beginning of creativity and other emotional breakthrough processes). These are things that our society seems to now consider optional or annoyingly in the way of productivity.
Crary talks alot about state torture and psychological control practices like those used by military and law enforcement, and quite a bit of it involves not just sleep deprivation, but also sensory abuse during times of wakefulness, such as bright lights, loud noises, etc. Constant stimulation erases the ability of our minds to think and plan, thus create, because all of those cognitive processes require space. It is well known to neuroscientists who study dreams that the brain is able to create more new neural connections, solve problems and see new solutions, when in relaxed states. Crary is suggesting that the sensory environment of late capitalist society is effectively a low level, chronic form of psychological control, resulting in a more complicit and suggestible state. At the same time, the people who are able to isolate themselves and control their environments more (i.e. the wealthy) are those who are more likely to be able to reap the neurological benefits from rest states, create startups, become CEOs… you get the picture.
In my estimation, one of the reasons dreamspace marginalization is tolerated at all is because systems of empire have come to mimic dreams. There is an aesthetic about some contemporary societies that is dreamlike, hypnagogic, almost dreampunk. Think of the screens, filters, and feeds that inhabit our environments and beckon our attention. The neon lights in the darkness. Some scholars and writers have referred to commodities that are designed to sensuously allure us—digitized and synced, glowing, blinking, or vibrating softly with haptic feedback—as ‘enchanted’ objects. One would have to hope this nomenclature is tongue in cheek. Because truly, this is hypnosis, not enchantment. When we are hypnotized by something, it is not fully consensual. Hypnosis has a purpose—to control, to identify or isolate a problem, a secret. Hypnosis is a controlled state where consent can not be withdrawn. It is also literally sleep without dreams, by the way. Hypnos means sleep in ancient Greek, and “osis” denotes a state of disease, as in “psychosis” being a state of the breakdown of the psyche. The dreamlike state I often find myself in while trying to navigate the world I live in is not dreampunk, it is a trauma response akin to depersonalization, the bell jar effect. However, within this hypnotized state, I believe it is possible to break in to a liberatory dreamspace, as if through a backdoor…
Dreampunk as a word is itself a site for mythic remediation—which is bioremediation at the level of meaning (in this view meaning is part of ecology, which is the view taken by the field of biosemiotics). The word is an example of the aesthetic at large—because there is no easy answer to “what does (a) dreampunk look like?” Similar to the word “queer,” the word for me creates space rather than describes or prescribes space. Language play has always been a way to track magic and move it around, make way for it like a gardener prepares a bed for planting, to cast spells, to create space with the paradox of circumscription.
I’m not just talking about dreampunk as an identity. The point of this isn’t strictly identity, much less mine. No, dreampunk is an archetype through which dreams and relations are made.
(Some) Hackers addressed and still do address questions of freedom and privacy in an age increasingly governed and influenced by cyberspace and the data industrial complex. Some of my most nagging questions these days are not that different from theirs. How can we democratize (in the true sense of the word meaning rule by the people), re(distribute), decentralize, the means to dream and heal our stories. We live in conditions in which these means have been taken away — through ecocide and environmental racism, through war and conquest, through obsession with profit and property, through xenophobia and fear of the Other, through intrusions into our privacy and dismissals of our dreams as dangerous. Yes, dreampunks still do share a lot with their cyberpunk cousins. If, as we’ve written about in the past, part of mysticism is longing for a transformed world, than count both the cyberpunk and the dreampunk under such a banner. I hope, in the future, we can join in solidarity. Ecosystems, after all, are the original cybernetic systems.
(To be continued…)
*There has been some interesting work by cultural historians and others on the history and cultural context of sleep and circadian rhythms. For example, in medieval Europe some have argued it was normal for people to sleep in two phases and wake up at least once in the night to engage in certain activities like prayer, reflection, dream interpretation, sexual activity, or socializing. See the book At Day’s Close, by A. Roger Ekirch.