Dreams and Infections

Tick-Tock

Updates on Covid-2019 pretty much represent an umbilical cord to reality, something, however intangible, to hold on to. Venkatesh Rao captured this state in a Ribbonfarm post, writing «Global narrative collapse events tend to have a very surreal glued-to-screens quality surrounding them. That’s how you know everybody has lost the plot: everybody is tracking the rawest information they have access to, rather than the narrative that most efficiently sustains their reality (such as Rick and Morty in my case).»[1]

The new reality is staying at home, waiting for narratives to be rebooted. Rao cites Rick and Morty, a manic training manual to think outside the box of base reality. It continues to do a fantastic job messing with narrative and imaginative possibilities. Advantage of the situation: fomo is out the window, there is ample time to catch up with reading and the watch list. In a trend that sees galleries and museums provide more online content in anticipation of a multi-month lockdown, Gladstone gallery artist Anicka Yi cites among others the following science fiction novels: Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. I would add to that the mindbender Inverted World by Christopher Priest. In a time when life-saving medical ventilators are scarce ($50’000 a piece at the moment according to Gov. Cuomo), we may want, after this is over, to focus our efforts on conceiving that next level 3D printer able to print hundreds of ventilators a day. As Eric Frank Russell wrote in Hobbyist, published in Astounding Science Fiction in September 1947: 

Endless machines, all different, all making different things, plants, bugs, birds and fungoids. It was done by electroponics, atom fed to atom like brick after brick to build a house. It wasn't synthesis because that's only assembly, and this was assembly plus growth in response to unknown laws. In each of these machines… was some key or code or cipher, some weird master control of unimaginable complexity, determining the patterns it was building, and the patterns were infinitely variable.

The ventilators are the elephant in the room in this crisis. JG Ballard looms large whenever reality is out of joint. As Mark O’Connell writes, «A world of isolated individuals rarely leaving their homes, keeping a wary distance from one another in public, communicating with their friends and loved ones via exclusively technological means. These situations are so Ballardian as to be in the realm of copyright infringement.»[2] I mean, infected on a cruise ship. And yet «we all live in Ballard’s world, but we are not all Ballard’s people.» We are not in part because of Ballard, the way Contagion, Station Eleven, 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead and all the other zombie/virus narratives set a tone and kind of prepared us for it.[3] Luckily the technology is in place to keep the economy going on at least a basic level (we would be faced with another crisis altogether if technology failed on a large scale). Because Covid-19 is particularly hard on the lungs, people may smoke less. They may exercise at home. We could see emerge from this a proper Corona Jugend.

Dreams

Dreams can be seen as another type of tick-tocking taking place in our heads. Let’s consider dreams for a moment as types of updates, daily, or rather nightly updates of yourself by your mind. This idea links to the way we interact with apps of course. When an app updates, it fixes a security issue, improves or changes some part of the code. An app requires updates, otherwise it will become hackable, out-apped and silently disappear. Perhaps the updates get ever more detailed the longer the app exists with the main code architecture remaining more or less intact. Or whole sections of code may need to be replaced? I technically do not care because I don’t verify the changes in code. Even if I had access to the code, I would be unable to comment on updates. I would look at an alien language. I would need an explanatory briefing – which is usually provided, although there is an obvious gap between the brief and the actual changes in code. It’s a question of translation and trust. Trust that the app is not spying on me, for example. Trust that the brief’s translation of the code contains what the code actually does. A good brief is straightforward, along the line of «This update ensures proper updating and restoring,» or «This update is recommended for all users and improves the security.»

Dreams, however, are nebulous coding systems, never straightforward. The dream chooses the pictorial, often image sequences to convey something dear to us.[4] Are dreams to be counted among the worst conceived updates ever? Possibly. They seem random, incomprehensible, primal trolls of sorts. You may want a dream designed, co-opted like an Instagram story, a story of your life (you don’t). What you get is a partial, messy picture-story that leaves you puzzled. You wonder why the dream messes with you the way it does. Why can't it reflect back my life and give some decent update, be more accessible, to the point?

Well, the dream doesn’t exactly care about you. In a short piece on the unconscious, dreams and language, Cormac McCarty writes, «The picture-story lends itself to parable. To the tale whose meaning gives one pause. The unconscious is concerned with rules but these rules will require your cooperation. The unconscious wants to give guidance to your life in general but it doesn’t care what toothpaste you use. And while the path which it suggests for you may be broad, it doesn’t include going over a cliff. We can see this in dreams. Those disturbing dreams which wake us from sleep are purely graphic. No one speaks. These are very old dreams and often troubling. Sometimes a friend can see their meaning where we cannot. The unconscious intends that they be difficult to unravel because it wants us to think about them. To remember them. It doesn’t say that you can’t ask for help.»[5]

The dream comes to you from the unconscious, an ancient, image and intuition-based part of the brain speaking to you via the dream. The part of the brain that does the dreaming fails to directly co-operate with the newer parts of the brain responsible for language, reading, reasoning.[6] The dream wants to tell you about yourself through images and picture-stories to convey messages rich in symbolism and the metaphorical, yet there is no simultaneous translation into ‹your› language.[7] Can I trust the dream? What is it (really) telling me? Which part can I ignore, which should I pay attention to? With dreams you get the update but no translation. No brief. You have to perform a dream translation to excavate the message. You may use your post-dream decoding intuition and the tools of dream interpretation. As the fog laid upon you lifts, an intricate logic sometimes emerges. Then the message you weren't looking for (but needed) appears. Here is the feedback on your life you are free to ignore (at your peril). The straight outta unconscious update doesn't care, but it would never ignore you.

The dream not caring means it does care about you, but not the way you would expect. Whatever it presents or wants you to receive requires translation. The dream outsources half of the work to you/your friend/partner/dream analyst. It demands collaboration between brain areas. The dream appears like a trapeze artist out of nowhere handing you the dream in a brief encounter, swinging back into the darkness of the unconscious. Think parcel delivery – it's purely transactional. The parcel is handed to you, you sign, you part ways. Like the delivery man, the dream cares (is biologically paid for) about delivering the dream, but is not responsible for what you do with it. Yet the unconscious stores you, bureaucratically registers all your behavior, including previous dreams and your reaction towards them (memories store you too, of course). It follows you, traces the way you exist (your innermost tracking device), giving status updates in yet other dreams. Recurring dreams exemplify the caring/not caring behavior of the unconscious. The dream tells you something over and over again, but because you fail to decode or react to it (for example by making some changes in life) or are otherwise unable to receive the message, the dream resends it as if vexed mechanically, hitting that resend button over and over again as if it felt the message ended in your interior spam folder (whereas you just failed to label it properly).

While dreaming, you witness ‹your› code being rewritten within you. You witness your mind (the older part) trying to make sense of things. Not surprisingly, David Lynch perhaps comes closest to depicting dreams by creating the dream atmosphere you intimately know.[8] Because of the way he ‹gets dreams,› he leads you into dream territory both messy and logical. Dreams are terrifying precisely because they possess terrifying logic. Logic never offered on a platter, but shrouded in symbolic code, its meanings layered and never entirely decipherable.

Enough is enough.

There are stories of people solving puzzles, scientists discovering future solutions in dreams.[9] An update contains the code’s history. The unconscious knows your past general behavior, the history of your soul’s code. Dreams may stage the future by mapping past code with its behavioral characteristics onto imagined situations, anticipating them in the mind. Playing you like a marionette – while sleeping you (parts of you) are deep in its territory, at the complete mercy of the unconscious – the dream can insert ‹you› in whatever scenario it wants and through such displacements make all kinds of speculative propositions. It sounds like science fiction but happens every night in your sleep. The intimate encounter between the unconscious and ‹you› can explain why artists, scientists and everyone else gains crucial intel from dreams. If deciphered, dreams are powerful updates indeed.[10]

I started writing this in early 2020 BC (Before Covid), the first year of a new decade. In his 1930 The Man without Qualities, Musil wrote «if humanity could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger.» Which is slightly unfavorable towards mankind, as Moosbrugger is a psychokiller. But what would humanity dreaming as a whole look like in 2020? Cats (the movie)? Or Don’t F**k with Cats. Tiger King (insert any new weird true crime documentary series on Netflix. Musil may binge.). Now it’s April and the tick-tocking echoes through the city. A good time then to think about collective dreams.

A citizen of Hong Kong.

Infections

I have often said to my students: Nature is not out to get you. In fact, the truth is worse. Nature is not out to get you. It is indifferent to you.
Heather Heying[11] 

In 2015 Bill Gates’ wrote, «The problem is not the fault of any single institution — it reflects a global failure. By building a global warning and response system, we can prepare for it and prevent millions of deaths.»[12] He goes on sketching such an institution. Popular again, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 Contagion is perhaps the most realistic depiction of a contemporary pandemic. Luckily for us, the fictional Mev-1 is about 30 times deadlier than Covid-19. There is a whole new level of understanding watching the movie now, having gained pandemic literacy in the meantime. The movie captures the spreading, the rumors and tick-tocking of news, panic, the empty streets, airports and malls, the self-isolation and relentless quest for a vaccine. Noteworthy is the film’s epilogue, showing the origin of the virus (‹Day 1›). A bulldozer knocks down trees, disturbing the local bats. One bat flies over a pigsty and drops a piece of banana, which is eaten by a pig. The pigs are slaughtered and prepared by a chef who shakes hands with Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) in the Hong Kong casino, transferring the virus to her.

What an incredible and instructive ending/beginning. Another scene features CDC research scientist Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) explaining how the virus attaches to a host’s cell like «a key slipping into a lock.» Ehle, in a world mother role (in contrast to her icy corporate character in Advantageous) is a guiding light throughout. Contagion’s depiction of selfless public health workers is one of its majorachievements. They truly are models to be emulated and thought about beyond the confines of the film. No doubt they will emerge as the true heroes in the battle against Covid-19.

Contagion. Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) injects herself with an unproven vaccine before kissing her Mev-1 infected father. If the vaccine proved ineffective, Hextall’s act would amount to suicide albeit for a noble cause. Her smile before the kiss is pure selflessness and dedication. 

Later in the film we learn that a birthday-based lottery will be used to deploy the vaccine, with randomly chosen, numbered ping-pong balls read aloud on live television, to most fairly determine who will get treated first. A remarkably designed simulator by Harry Stevens about how Covid-19 spreads shows similar dots moving in space.[13] In both cases humans become single moving or resting dots. The individual citizen – so important to our conception of society – is set aside, replaced by a terrifying yet essential survival-strategic apparatus. The scenes don’t feel exaggerated. They are grounded in the film’s new pandemic reality.

Top: Graph by Harry Stevens for the Washington Post. Middle two: Contagion. A vaccine lottery based on citizens’ birthdays begins. Bottom: Contagion. Randomly selected citizens queue for the vaccine with a heavy military presence.

While Contagion and zombie movies such as World War Z featuring Brad Pitt as a globetrotting United Nations investigator capture the frenzy of the global reach of a pandemic, there is another film perhaps more relevant to the current predicament: Phantom Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson.


Phantom Thread

Phantom Thread is not an obvious Corona movie. Set in 1950s London, the playfully twisted tale revolves around of two lovers, fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and waitress Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps). Woodcock has a pretty obsessive and controlling personality. Boyish in behavior and protected by sister Cyril (a fierce, brilliant Lesley Manville), Reynolds is unable to form a long-term relationship. Enter Alma Elson, a waitress Reynolds meets in a countryside restaurant. Alma is the one able to break through Reynold’s defenses and provoke a deeper reaction. In order to have him completely disarmed and for herself, Alma occasionally poisons Reynolds with mushrooms. Near the end of the film, Reynolds, aware of the poisoned omelet he is about to eat, swallows it, making their ‹arrangement› official to both parties. Here is the sequence where Reynolds slowly chews the poisoned omelet while Alma addresses him with a grave facial expression:

Now using this scene as a parable detached from the film’s context risks distorting both Phantom Thread and the realities of Covid-19. Still, let’s isolate the scene and imagine the following. Alma represents an existential risk event (insert Covid-19, asteroid, natural disaster etc.) intended to stop Reynolds the system (insert world society, base reality, daily routine) in its tracks. Reynolds gets sick, vomits, rests in bed while Alma takes care of him, making him healthy, functioning again. In what could make Alma seem evil, and I’m aware of the potential gendering of Alma as the bringer of sickness, another reading would offer that Alma halts an essentially entropic endeavor (Reynolds’ inability to change, his unsustainable behavior in the long term) from evolving into destructive resolution. In this reading, Alma, through the arrangement found in accordance with Reynolds, becomes an unconventional savior figure.[14] As one YouTube comment puts it: «Ah, codependency. The cornerstone of any enduring romance.» The key here is that both are aware of the arrangement. World society knew the next pandemic was on the horizon, but it wasn’t even thinking of taking precautions, of stopping it in its track, or just resting for a while, not even for a week or two. In some sense it needed Covid-19 to stop and self-isolate and get sick and get better again.

I want to avoid rigidifying the parable further, for example by labeling Reynolds ‹capitalism.› On that note, I would encourage the world to find new labels for words like ‹capitalism›, ‹socialism› etc., as they fail to capture my imagining of 21^st-century world systems. Both ‹capitalism› and ‹socialism› seem grossly misused in the media and twitter landscape. A statement found online such as «If capitalism is so great, why does it need to be bailed out by socialism every ten years?» misrepresents (obviously trolls) both ‹capitalism› and ‹socialism› and the dynamics of government bailouts.

A specter haunts the world – the specter of tired terminology. Aspects of ‹capitalism› and ‹socialism› are more intertwined than ever (since 1945, specifically). As neither of ‹them› will ever disappear, there needs to be a new wave of thinking precisely the arrangement between ‹capitalism› and ‹socialism›. A thinking that considers the arrangement’s co-dependency without easily dismissing either side.[15]

Top: Anonymous heroes: Delivery worker during Covid-19 (Incheon, South Korea. Bottom: Death stranding, video game by Hideo Kojima, 2019. Working through the apocalypse: «Because of conditions outside, a lonely nation is holed up in bunkers. A strange illness demands they keep their distance from one another, so everyone communicates by holograms. The only people that go outside are service workers who deliver packages of essential things like medicine and food.»[16]

In Accelerate Management, Mark Fisher (as if cooking the mushroom omelet) has in mind a CEO with a hyper-focused, relentless work ethic. Fisher questions the way these work rhythms give the tact to large parts of the working society. Covid-19 threw a wrench into schedules, forcing the world stop full throttle as if Fisher was orchestrating from beyond the grave. «Instead of managers who overload us with work – using their own addiction to work as an example – can we not imagine managers who protect us from overwork?»[17] Bertrand Russell made a similar point in his 1932 essay In defense of Idleness,[18]

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

In an interview, Phantom Thread director Paul Thomas Anderson echoes Fisher, «it’s exactly what you said; it’s some sort of bizarre wish: Won’t somebody or something come along to slow me down? It’s funny, isn’t it? What idiots are we that we need cars to hit us or some act of God to do that for us? We’re really incapable of pumping the brakes ourselves.»[19] It’s not ‹capitalism› or ‹socialism› or something else, it’s us unable to stop and pause and reflect what we are doing as if any system has entropy encoded within. The virus ‹took back control,› a feast both unimaginably creative and banal as only nature could conceive of. In this twist of supreme indifference, self-quarantine is now a form of solidarity.[20]

Remedies

Covid-19 has shown the need for international cooperation. A question that puzzles me when looking at the numbers the governments across the globe are willing to pour into their economies is «Why not generally invest more in peace and stability?» Why we still have the massive military budgets across the globe when you could invest, foster and support the human community? The self-isolation policy seems replicated on the national stage: each nation for itself. The virus infection and death number stats appear like some Hunger Games Corona Olympics. As global emergencies appear every other year nowadays, post-Covid-19 could see people collaborating across the globe building anti-fragile infrastructure that serves humanity.[22]

To give an example from science, taking the first image of a black hole was a multinational endeavor:

To see a black hole you would need to build a telescope as large as the earth, because the black hole that we’re looking at gives off copious radio waves. It’s emitting all the time. So we used telescopes all around the world, we synchronized them perfectly with atomic clocks, so they received the light waves from the black hole, and then we stitched all of that data together to make an image. … We’re 200 people strong with 60 institutes and 20 countries and regions. If you want to build a global telescope you need a global team. And this technique that we use of linking telescopes around the world kind of effortlessly sidesteps some of the issues that divide us. And as scientists we naturally come together to do something like this.[23]

Perhaps the new thinking alluded to above means a shift from the political to the psychological-aesthetic-biological. We humans are a virus of sorts too. We spread and spread, co-opt environments and ecosystems. There are theories that consciousness itself might have emerged from a viral infection. «You've got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you've got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought.»[24] The unconscious itself is a black hole within ourselves and we have barely made an image of it. The work developed by Freud, Jung and others truly has to be explored further in conjunction with neuroscience and virology. Only through this can we get a glimpse of what moves us. Virology links not just to biology, but extends to the realm of ideas. Haven’t there been countless periods in history, sometimes decades long, where humanity seems to have been infected by bad ideas, without anyone realizing that they’re in a collective nightmare.

The unconscious is the place that gives us dreams. Freud and Jung had a qualitative and quantitative approach to dreams, they studied dreams as a collective endeavor. Jung especially thought about how dreams exist across space and time to find patterns based on recurring, partially overlapping picture-storylines that say something not just about you, but about dreams as a collective updating entity. This step from individual analysis, which remains the basis for dream interpretation, to a collective dream sphere is where Jung's imaginative and vexing move lies. Vexing in the sense that Jung isn't that interested in ‹you,› but in how timeless things move through you. You are a dreamer among billions. Humanity shares a dream territory barely understood (perhaps glimpsed in psychoanalysis and aesthetics and art in general). The realization that all of humanity shares similar dreams (both the dreams we have while asleep and the dreams of hope for a better future) could be a basis for a common human project.