… the sleeper returns to a primary state and attempts to ex-
perience in the dream that which during the day he [sic] kept
under strict control for the sake of reality considerations.1
You wake up, you check your phone, you turn on your com-
puter – maybe you take coffee or pills or cigarette or food
– you go to work, you are at work, you walk there, you surf
there, you are there, there you are. You see the street as
a giant plasma, towering over you. In your nervous system
there exists incredible adaptation to sensation – you will not
perceive your own hand if the nerves are cut. But you will
still learn to scroll the pad. The skyscrapers and smaller
shops bulge and shrink as your eyes scan for points of ref-
erence – seeking safety (always safety) – most often clearly
signed with logos we know like lovers. It’s hard to get lost
on the way to work. Endlessly lounging and rolling around
in bed with F and G, the governors of sex and sense. You
tab constantly so there is always the possibility of more, but
more no longer means more. The authority is there, where
you are, screened; in you to produce and be produced; you
begin to see yourself as the interface you have always been.
The way you’re supposed to think resembles precisely the
lobby of a corporate tower. Which in turn resembles pre-
cisely the interface. This is not the removal of difference,
it is far simpler: the irrelevance of difference. You will be
deleted. A corporate tower is a tower of corps. They fall or
fly according to the logic of the screen. Zeroes and ones.
Tumbling. But the falling is not such that we associate with
the concept of ‘down’, and likewise the flying is not the syn-
onym of ‘up’. Rather, in the screen plasma street dream we
must understand both falling and flying are produced by the
all-encompassing, all-defining interface. Some would call
it horizontality. Equivalence. Homogeneity. Whatever. You
think you fly but someone sees you fall; anyway, falling is
delegitimized and flying impoverished. Touch is you scan-
ning in and out. Checking in. Logging on. Caressing at the
exclusion of all others, to produce more. Monopolisation
of touch makes sense – seems smart to the screen sys-
tem interface. Facial recognition is the logical progression,
whereby all faces must become perfect representations of
the inter-face: a fixed identity. Protected. As you swipe to
enter, type to pass, glance to be scanned and buzzed and
x-rayed and then pushed out the other side (which is not, in
fact, other) to simply more buzzing and beeping and veri-
fication and system confirmation. And you pay to partake.
Your time (which was never really yours) is sold. You buy it.
The time of human becomes malleable; society functions
on the myth of immortality. And the dreams you have no
longer come as reminders of truth because truth is long
dead and the day-work has been turned into the dream – or
all of it into a nightmare sold as dream. Interfaced infinitely
until the nightmare no longer resembles anything except
something we’ve seen and touched before, so fear of the
unknown can be forgotten. Fear reigns. From the inside we
panic, seeking private types to explain our anxiety; as the
interface won’t accept system breakdown, we cannot. We
hide, lie, alone. And the system produces internal safety-
mechanisms for its own failure; it sustains itself by sell-
ing its failure, its inherent ruin, back to itself. Your mortal
panic is no longer something of the world; it is now some-
thing only of you, your interfacing, a problem to be privately
managed. A system error blip, who gives a shit. Purchase
anti-virus software, proxy alias! But we all know this is a
lie, really, nobody believes. Everyone’s just playing along.
But if all this playing is for the sake of reality considera-
tions, what could they possibly be?
—Eleanor Weber, Reality Considerations (for the sake of), 2012
1 Anna Freud, ‘The Meaning of Dreams: Introduction’, Sigmund Freud: The Essentials of Psychoanalysis (ed. Anna Freud), Penguin 1986 (p. 78)
