How Media Is Like A Dream
Media is not a window onto the world. It’s a window into the machine dream world, a system of material production pumping out industrialized information into every sensory organ. All of our media—including news—are just carefully engineered dreams. They’re either completely manufactured hallucinations (like dramas) or selectively edited perceptions (like news). We get confused because they look so real, but we also get confused by dreams every night. Waking or sleeping, in truth, we are always dreaming.
In both cases, the evidence is right in front of your eyes or, more specifically, it isn’t. When we’re dreaming, our eyes are closed but it still feels like we’re seeing. The brain manufactures an entirely believable experience from whole cloth, complete with sights, sounds, orgasms, and even wetting yourself. When we’re awake, our eyes are open, but we’re really just dreaming. Images on our retina while speakers play our eardrums. Instead of your brain running the simulation, some electronics and distant servers do, and a few perceptual tricks fill in the rest. It’s dreaming at a distance.
It’s all the same phenomenon really, dreaming between your skull alone or pulling out your phone to dream together. Indeed, the experience is much the same. Just think about…
