| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper" |
|---|
| | | The biological memory, fragile though it is, does not travel alone, unmoored; it has for a constant companion its twin: that is to say, dreams--- the pieces of our day made ciphered, unreadable, and spit back into our gaping mouths while we sleep. Awake, the brain traces fire along neural pathways to form memory; in sleep, it reconstructs a narrative from the fragmented and bleating ashes of that loop, which whisper on and on into the night. But if the dream is the fractured reconstruction of memory, and our memories are now machinized, does it not follow that our digital selves too are susceptible of dreaming? Yes, yes, the digital self too dreams, but they are different in kind and more dangerous than those born of the body. | |
<
< | In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells us that dreams are a means of wish fulfillment, a symbolic reenactment of those wishes that have failed to find gratification in our waking life. But it is not our conscious desires that give rise to dreams, nor the longings we can readily identify. Rather, it is the workings of our unconscious that do so, and dreams are the child of the conflict produced by the unfulfilled nature of the wish that lurks beneath the surface. We try to suppress, push down, down, down the forbidden want, but we cannot kill our desire; in the dream, all is revealed, even if the nature of our longing is such that our mind must censor it. | >
> | In the Interpretation of Dreams , Freud tells us that dreams are a means of wish fulfillment, a symbolic reenactment of those wishes that have failed to find gratification in our waking life. But it is not our conscious desires that give rise to dreams, nor the longings we can readily identify. Rather, it is the workings of our unconscious that do so, and dreams are the child of the conflict produced by the unfulfilled nature of the wish that lurks beneath the surface. We try to suppress, push down, down, down the forbidden want, but we cannot kill our desire; in the dream, all is revealed, even if the nature of our longing is such that our mind must censor it. | | |
The dream censor is responsible for the distorted vision of dreaming. When is a cigar not just a cigar? When your subconscious wish cannot be fulfilled in the context of the social mores of the world in which you live, and indeed your mind cannot even admit its existence--- here enters the dream censor. It is by this light that we can understand the digital dream. When the Facebook machine looks at your profile, reads your digital memory and aggregates the small movements of your day-to-day life to produce the target ads which reveal the subconscious wish, it is dreaming. But where the biologic dream is opaque, the digital dream is crystalline. What do you want? Ask your dreams and come up with only a handful of runes. Ask your Facebook, and all your wants are known. It reveals the wish before you know you had it, just as the biologic dream does, except here there is no censor to keep you from the truth. | | | -- JustinColannino - 20 Nov 2009 | |
>
> |
Justin,
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I concede that my paper assumes the reader is at least familiar with Civilization and Its Discontents, an assumption I don't think is entirely unfair, given the sophistication of my audience and what I think of as Freud's place in the canon of Western thought, but you are completely right in saying that I can do a much better job of making the links clear. I'm still thinking about a way to do that, but your comment has made it possible for me to do so, so thank you!
-- DanaDelger - 28 Nov 2009 | | |
# * Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, DanaDelger |
|