Russ and Paco.
Are you acquainted with Adam Haar Horowitz’s work and the device he calls a Dormio? He and a team of professors and researchers at the MIT Media Lab developed it to induce “dream incubation”. He says he wants to create a “community of dream incubation”, i.e. a community of culture to open a new route between dreams and public life. Thousands or millions or billions of people hooked up to Dormios. And for what? Apparently, we'll only discover that answer through the practice of dream incubation itself, and what it reveals to us.
Adam, however, is afraid that it may be used by companies or politicians to infiltrate our subconscious as a way to further control us.
On the other hand, the Dormio could make us aware on a mass level of how “unbelievably, compulsively, naturally, and irresistibly" creative the mind becomes once it slips loose of conscious control. But there’s a fear here, too — a threat that our awareness may come apart under the pressure of such a torrent of creative energy surging through.
The ancients intimate that beneath our consciousness lies a ceaseless swarm of chasms & metamorphoses (the kind you & Paco express in “Fex & Coo”). A few minutes in the hypnagogic state is all we need to enter a world where everything is change. It’s a little scary to realize the sluggish movement of regular experience is made up of “millions of shining, vibrating filaments”.
The creativity of the dreaming mind is a transformative force that can’t be distilled into intellligible writing, paintings, or even music, no matter how hard we try. I’d like to ask Xhactu if the power of our dreams is growing? Too bad he has left the planet with his broken transmitter! Do the dreams feel an urge to spill over into our world through devices like a Dormio? Or more “Fex & Coo” type novel novels? It’s all play, isn’t it? A cosmic dance, indeed, although I sometimes fear what this incessant stream of forms and worlds, leaping and diving beneath our conscious mind, will reveal. And not just to me or you — but to itself?!
Anyway, I was curious if you knew about Adam and his Dormio device.
Also, I appreciate hearing again the story of your fall as a nine year old, and why the owl became your totem. So glad the owl spoke — and you heard its voice!
Hi Merrilee,
I share Adam’s concern:
“Adam, however, is afraid that it may be used by companies or politicians to infiltrate our subconscious as a way to further control us.”
This danger seems to be mounting by the day, as humans become more and more fractious.
But I also share this concern that you expressed as a fear:
“On the other hand, the Dormio could make us aware on a mass level of how “unbelievably, compulsively, naturally, and irresistibly” creative the mind becomes once it slips loose of conscious control. But there’s a fear here, too — a threat that our awareness may come apart under the pressure of such a torrent of creative energy surging through.”
Collectively, we’ve gotten so far away from our autonomous creative sources that we seem ever more vulnerable to the manipulations of mass psychology.
Thanks for all your contributions, Merrilee!
Paco