The Breakdown of the Dream Machine

To me, Twitter was and is a massive dream machine.

I would log in to watch the unconscious and instinctive content as it moved through us all, rising and falling like the surf generated by a giant wave machine at an amusement park.

An enormous manufacturer, generator, and disseminater of symbolic content, pulsing through the psyche of the nation, of the world. Surges of joy, laughter, terror, outrage, cruelty, righteousness would daily gather momentum, crest, and fade away.

Archetypal villains and heroes gathered up our projections and amassed power.

Some were destroyed, others elevated. Twitter was a living tarot deck, where one could observe the dreams and nightmares that overtook us, possessed us, gripped us, and spread through us like a virus.

The character of the day - admired or reviled – usually both simultaneously by different segments of the population – held everyone’s aspirations about who they hoped to be, as well as all our shames and terrors, all our private and collective cruelties.

All your faves are problematic.

I watched our psyches anticipate, create, and react to the characters who both gathered up and exploited our archetypal projections. We transformed random human beings and bits of stories into symbols and morality tales about all that we love and hate about each other and ourselves.

In a flash we could be pressed into playing roles that we often didn’t comprehend or even perceive. We could become a vigilante mob or a hoard of revolutionary peasants righteously storming the castle with pitchforks in hand.

The collective unconscious is not only a sort of psychological factor but it also appears in the outside world… One’s standpoint can be swept from under one’s feet because the collective unconscious is without as well as within ~ C. G Jung, Visions Seminar

Twitter was the fastest myth-making machine humanity ever built, and every day it cranked out millions upon millions of stories (and half-myths) that contained everything we hoped and feared two hundred and eighty characters at a time.

I remember, in 2016, the summer before the election reading about the scary clown sightings rippling through the U.S., a socially contagious fear. My gut told me that the candidate that the press had dismissed as a scary clown had a deeper grip on the American psyche than the dominant narrative could admit, and we would soon be ushered into the era of the Dangerous Buffoon, the Mad King, emerging from the shadows to turn the world upside down.

I began collecting literal, actual dreams that people typed up and posted on Twitter, in and around our out-loud day-time dreaming.

I eventually collected 3,000 dreams of Donald Trump, stopping only because that seemed more than enough.  The strangest and most disturbing, which I first dismissed, and only later began to consider seriously, were thousands repetitive “dreams” reported by obvious bots, blatant attempts to manipulate the political environment via the archetypal strata: Dreams of Trump as Messiah, as Prophet, as Anti-Christ.  Fake dreams meant to activate real ones and drive our behaviors and responses outside of our awareness.

The most disturbing “dream” of all, one that arrived at my website anonymously. A “dream” that the anoymous poster reported had about me, where I was being closely monitored, all my email and snail mail read and recorded because I had dared to monitor our collective dreams.

And now, the dream machine has a new owner, new algorithms, and the attempt to shape our dreams and our behaviors is being led by another Mad King, and other Dangerous Buffoon, who has also infiltrated our waking lives and is driving our conscious and instinctive responses.

Some have fled the site, shaking themselves awake, some have looked for new collective dream machines to immerse themselves in. Others stay, feeling compelled to, not wanting to cede the dream machine output of servant robots and life on Mars, racist frogs, anti-Semitic tropes, and guns and diet Coke on nightstands. Some have no stomach to be once again, subjected to the whims of another Scary Clown.

Others have no energy to leave or find it too isolating and painful to abandon those they have been dreaming hopeful dreams with. Still others feel that no matter where they take their internet dreams and prayers, that they will inevitably encounter the same threats, demons, and specters.

Is this dream space collapsing, disintegrating, or turning into a more powerful nightmare generator?

What does it suggest that so many are fleeing a collective dream space and so many others – stimulated by the prophets of Whiteness and the archetypes of wealth, power, masculinity, and supremacy are flooding the site with their memes, disinformation campaigns and symbols?

There is no telling.

I only know that we have consistently underestimated the platform’s ability to be shaped by and to shape our psyches and behaviors and have never fully comprehended its blessings and its dangers.

I don’t know what will happen next, what will take root, what will grow from the ashes, how we will reorganize or what the impact will be.

But the world will surely be changed (as powerfully has it already has been) while we all search out new ways to continue to dream our dreams together.