Strange Dream Loops

9 notes on dystopian futures.

PH/Midjourney

1.

Three years ago, I taught a graduate seminar on the subject of the arts of the future. As part of the class, we read quite a bit of the classics of dystopian science fiction (Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s A Brave New World, and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower among others).  What I did not anticipate was the increasingly somber atmosphere that our sessions would acquire as the semester progressed and we constantly examined apocalyptic scenarios that led us to conclude that humanity was inevitably doomed.  Once, when asked about whether her work was about predicting dire scenarios, Octavia Butler replied: “I didn’t make up the problems,’ I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

2.

One of the very first books I ever read as a teenager was HG Wells’ 12 Stories and a Dream, from 1903. The Dream, the final story in the book, is the narrative of a man named Mortimer Smith who starts dreaming about a distant future where he, in another life, is named Sarnac. Mortimer’s dream life as Sarnac soon takes a life of its own, as it were, becoming intensely passionate (he falls in love) and vivid,  and at some point it replaces his waking life, which in contrast starts feeling more like a dream.

Then, in 1924, exactly one hundred years ago, Wells decided to revisit his own short story from two decades earlier, this time writing a whole science fiction novel also titled “The Dream”. In this novel, the perspective is inverted: Sarnac is the main character, living in the present, who dreams about a man named Mortimer Smith who lived in the past.

Wells was interested in science fiction as a philosophical parable, touching on subjects of the cult of progress and the human alienation that comes with it— an interest that is apparent in both works. From an artistic and biographical perspective, it makes sense that Wells, who wrote the first short story in his 30s and the second in his 50s, ages in which one is primarily looking forward and another then one begins to look backward, respectively. Was writing his novel a way for him to enter into dialogue with his own younger self?

3

If we were to embody Sarnac in 2024 and dream back about our current period 20 years from now, perhaps the two intertwined elements that will stand out from this era will be the 2024 US presidential election and the moment when  AI-generated videos crossed the threshold of believability. It is a period where a presidential candidate is spreading racist lies about immigrants eating pets, and where his vice president recently appeared to admit on CNN that they are “creating stories” to make a point. In practice, the goal seems to be to spread so much disinformation that figuring out the truth might be unattainable.

4

Which is exactly one of the aims of authoritarianism. As Timothy Snyder has noted, “ If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”

JD Vance’s larger argument —that they will fabricate stories to make their point— falls in line with the demagogic playbook, as  Heather Cox Richardson notes:

“Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted the support of racist ideologue Alfred Rosenberg of the Nazi Party for the antisemitic text “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a text fabricated in the early twentieth century by officials in czarist Russia. Rosenberg stood by the “inner truth” of the text even though it was fake. Like Rosenberg, Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote, “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of The Protocols.”

5

“Inner truth”, in this sense, of course, means not personal truth but dogma: that which an authority figure says is true. In Christianity, those who are not creationists see the stories in the scripture as containing a metaphorical meaning which ultimately support, and reinforce, dogma.

6

In the past I have remarked that Trump is like an insidious version of Chance the gardener — the main character from the 1979 film Being There, a simple-minded gardener whose basic comments and opinions are taken as profound philosophical thoughts by the political class, elevating him to the point of being considered a kind of oracle and eventually a candidate for the presidency. Like Chance the gardener, Trump stumbled into the presidency almost by accident (there is ample speculation and credible claims that at first his 2016 campaign was a publicity stunt and that he did not fully expect to win). And like the gardener, Trump’s approach is instinctive and improvisational, but because of the power he now wields and the power apparatus that now exists under him, the Republican party is forced to contort itself to turn every one of his lies and random thoughts in Truth Social into “inner truths”.

7

As artists we know a thing of two about inner truths— if we are to understand the concept of “inner truth” as the deeper, symbolic meaning, as it were, of the fictions we often create using artifice. But we don’t evangelize and impose our works onto others, or pretend them to be the ultimate truth; the period of time of the avant-garde when aesthetics equaled non-negotiable ideology is long over.

8

The Matrix these days feels like a benign story, now that we seem to be living in it. What becomes of a desert of the real  where nothing is certain and everything is but a parable about something else?

9

Here is a proposed, updated version of The Dream, as if written in 2024 by HG Wells:

Sarnac 1 is a Silicon Valley engineer in 2024 who creates a dreaming time program using AI technology that manipulates neural networks in the human brain. The program allows one to dream about, and effectively feel that one lives in, a distant future. In that distant future, a person named Sarnac 2 is also an engineer, living in 2044, who digs out the dreaming program invented in the past by Sarnac 1 and decides to upgrade it to do the inverse: that is, to allow someone to dream in the past. This allows both Sarnacs to time-travel through their dreams, and by extraordinary circumstances get to meet each other and experience their respective living periods. Both know that they can never meet in real life, but precisely because of that impossibility, real life stops being important: it is merely a framing device of time.

The develop a relationship, and at some point they speak every day, as guests on each other’s dreams. One day they are reading German poetry, and encounter a line of a poem by Novalis:

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

At that moment, they realize that their inner truth is nothing but a copout, a lie, a camouflaged hiding place.  Both awaken. Neither is sure, nor will ever be, if the other Sarmac was real. They both abandon the notion of the “beyond”; they destroy all their technology devices and go off the grid and retreat to live in their respective ordinary worlds, a perfectly pedestrian and forgettable, yet authentic, life.