Dreams in SFF

My essay 'Wages for Dreamwork' is up on Strange Horizons (thank you editor Gautam Bhatia). It looks at a quite specific intersection of speculative fiction and dreaming (the dream taken up by logics of quantification and instrumentality, or vice-versa). 

AI Generated by Walter Licinio

Here are some other snippets about speculative fiction and dreaming, some of which drift from that intersection. I will try to keep adding (might add some poems and philosophy and science too).

From Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest:

“But they only dream in sleep, you said; if they want to dream waking they take poisons so that the dreams go out of control, you said! How can people be any madder? They don’t know the dream-time from the world-time, any more than a baby does. Maybe when they kill a tree they think it will come alive again!” 

From Tlotlo Tsamaase, 'Dreamports':

“Feeling lonely, bored, or uninspired?” the voice continues. “Dreamport allows consumers to manufacture their dreams into a new reality where anyone anywhere in the world can join, subscribe, and interact with each user’s Dreamport or even link one another’s into a network, a community. Create your own universe, events, games, or lover’s network.” The slogan expands out into the screen: “Dreamport: the new way to be social. Purchase with a once-off lifetime fee prior to our upgrade date that will have new users subscribing for a monthly fee. Your mind is the new web …”

From Greg Egan, 'Dream Factory.' James is observing the dreams of a cat, Pawpaw:

It was mesmerizing . . . but the household would be awake soon, and James needed to be sure that his changes to the library really could damp down the prodding from the electrodes. He injected a keyboard-cockroach into Pawpaw’s dream, at full strength, and saw the swipe response it evoked. Then he set the dial to zero and tried again; there was nothing. At fifty percent, the dreamer noticed the incursion, but the reaction was tentative. The apps would lose their grip slowly, their decay seeming more like natural causes than foul play.

From Kathleen Alcalá, 'Deer Dancer':

Tater dragged herself back to the waking world. She might have been having a True Dream, but if that's what it was, it would come back. She would need to let the others know if it did. [...] When she was a child of eight, it became clear that Tater got the Dreaming. When she was fourteen, she was given her aunt's journal. Ceci was an original Dreamer, born in Mexico, raised in the US in secrecy by her family.

[...]

Sometimes the dream was clear and direct; other times, they could only speculate at what it meant, and what they were expected to do with the information. But no one doubted the authenticity of the dreams.

From Sheila Jasanoff's Uncertainty:

Recognizing the multiplicity of dreams that must be actualized is already at the core of many radical practices, as the Zapatista “world where many worlds fit” philosophy would suggest. Far more challenging is the act of moving in dialectical fashion from a dream state to waking existence, synthesizing a mixture of the two that neither delimits our imagination nor erases the hard work yet to be done of materially changing our surroundings. After a half century of being told that the radical demand for a transformed social and economic order was nothing more than a series of empty illusions, the choice to keep dreaming, even as we plant both feet firmly on the ground and in the streets, is exactly the kind of radical practice Le Guin would be proud of. 

From Sandra Newman's The Heavens:

Often, she dreamed in the dream—or the person she was sleeping as dreamed. These dreams were mostly of horses she was riding, which reared and threatened to throw her off or flew uncannily into the sky; or else she was playing a stringed instrument whose strings broke, lashing her fingers.

From Eric Schwitzgebel's 'Why did we think we dreamed in black and white?'

What might explain the rise of the opinion that dreaming is predominantly a black and white phenomenon? It will likely have occurred to the reader that the first half of the twentieth century was the pinnacle of black and white media. Black and white photography was first made public in the 1830s, and became increasingly popular through the early twentieth century. Although color photography was invented in the 1860s, color photos did not become easily attainable to the public until the 1940s. Motion pictures, invented around the turn of the century, were, from very early on, occasionally hand-painted with colors, and two-color filming was sometimes used in the 1920s (for example in Ben Hur). Nonetheless, motion pictures were overwhelmingly black and white until the late 1930s when a few ‘technicolored’ movies such as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz drew huge crowds. It was not until the 1950s that colored movies became commonplace, and even as late as 1960 a black and white film, The Apartment, was mainstream enough to win an Academy Award for best picture. Black and white television became widespread after World War II; color television did not become popular until the late 1960s. It is surely not chance that this flourishing of black and white media coincided with the flourishing of the opinion that dreams are a black and white phenomenon. The question is what to make of this fact.

From Theodor Adorno's Dream Notes:

Two giant, black triceratops, as if made of plastic, furious, horrifying animals whom I disliked. While one of them looked on, the other attacked an ankylosaurus in an unspeakably ferocious manner. The ankylosaurus lay spread out on the ground (‘a base animal’). The triceratops used its horns to slit it open at what might be called the suture where its lower and upper half had grown together like an edible crab. It then removed the upper half. The internal organs lay in the lower half neatly distributed in compartments, each with a different colour, like a dish of hors d’oeuvres. The triceratops fell upon it and began to devour the different parts, each of which represented a different taste (concretism) – once again just like an edible crab. I was just thinking indignantly: but the triceratops are vegetarians, when I woke up. 

 Max Richter Dream 13 (minus even)

From Yasutaka Tsutsui's Paprika:

“Come to think of it, I heard that rumor too,” said the social affairs correspondent who’d asked the very first question. “Her name was Paprika, that’s right. She called herself a ‘dream detective.’ She would get inside men’s dreams, then engage in some kind of sex act and thereby cure them of their mental hangups.”

From Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest:

Once you have learned to do your dreaming wide awake, to balance your sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance, of reason and dream; once you have learned that, you cannot unlearn it any more than you can unlearn to think.

From Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain:

Camden said, “What about the need to dream?” 
“Not necessary. A left-over bombardment of the cortex to keep it on semialert in case a predator attacked during sleep. Wakefulness does that better.” 

 From Harl Vincent, 'Master of Dreams':

Other apparatus there was, whose purposes and uses Stanley could only conjecture. Delicate mechanisms, these were, and like nothing he had ever encountered. Some held crystal balls like those of the so-called mystics and seers. All were well worth investigation and all had some- thing to do with this amazing system which had been developed by the Master of Dreams — all of absorbing interest to men of science. 

From Dimension 20’s D&D actual play podcast The Unsleeping City, ‘Timesquaremageddon Pt. 2’:

[...] you can see it has the button-up shirt and the slacks and is like, ‘I need an SUV and two and a half children’ […] it seems like Robert’s dream, a young rich handsome All-American thing that he has summoned through the Golden Door in New York City to form a realm here for his own.

From 'art in america' by Sophie Robinson:

fevery dream in which i see a drunk 
woman (me) doing shots & snorting coke from a key.
i tell her let me help you 
& then i open a wound on her arm 
& remove from the wound a giant plastic egg.
i crack the egg to reveal a small wooden sphere
& from it emerges a large white rat. don’t ask me how.
i put the rat on a leash & walk it back to my apartment.
i go to sleep in my dream petting the rat & wake up feeling good. 
i give the rat breakfast which she eats happily. 
i kiss her head. 
i go back to the bar & find the woman (me) sicker than ever. 
thin, sweating, with two black eyes & a purple arm. 
i say hey what happened 
& she says
you shouldn’t have taken what you took the way you took it.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

Our dreams are linked with each other not just because they are “ours”, but because they form a continuum, they belong to a unified world, just as, for example, all Kafka’s stories inhabit “the same world”. The more dreams hang together or are repeated, the greater the danger that we shall be unable to distinguish between them and reality.

From Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night:

A dream is nothing else but a bubbling scum or froth of the fancy which the day hath left undigested, or an after-feast made of the fragments of idle imagination.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

Next Tuesday old Hahn has his eighty-fifth birthday. I dreamt: what can one give to old Hahn on his eighty-fifth birthday, something he might find useful? – Answer: a guide to the kingdom of the dead.

From Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night:

There were gates in Rome out of which nothing was carried but dust and dung, and men to execution; so, many of the gates of our senses serve for nothing but to convey out excremental vapours & affrighting deadly dreams, that are worse than executioners unto us.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

I was due once again to be executed – like Pierrot lunaire. This time, like a pig. I was to be thrown into boiling water. I was assured that it would be completely painless, since I would be dead before I realized what was happening. I was in fact quite free of fear, merely somewhat surprised by a technical detail: immediately after the scalding, cold water would be let in, as with a hot bath. So I was thrown into the cauldron. To my ineffable astonishment, however, I did not die right away, but nor was I in any pain. However, probably because of the additional water that had been let in, I did feel a pressure that seemed to increase inexorably. I realized that if I did not succeed in waking up right away, I really would die. Managed to wake up after huge efforts (physically in a poor state, bad neuralgia, in a condition between life and death, after dreaming of a visit from Luise Rainer that lasted until deep into the night).

From Thomas Nashe, Terrors of the Night:

How many sorts there be of them no man can rightly set down, since it scarce hath been heard there were ever two men that dreamed alike. Divers have written diversely of their causes, but the best reason among them all that I could ever pick out was this, that as an arrow which is shot out of a bow is sent forth many times with such force that it flieth far beyond the mark whereat it was aimed, so our thoughts, intensively fixed all the day-time upon a mark we are to hit, are now and then overdrawn with such force that they fly beyond the mark of the day into the confines of the night. There is no man put to any torment but quaketh & trembleth a great while after the executioner hath withdrawn his hand from him. In the day-time we torment our thoughts and imaginations with sundry cares and devices; all the night-time they quake and tremble after the terror of their late suffering, and still continue thinking of the perplexities they have endured. To nothing more aptly can I compare the working of our brains, after we have unyoked and gone to bed, than to the glimmering and dazzling of a man’s eyes when he comes newly out of the bright sun into the dark shadow.

From Theodor Adorno, Dream Notes:

I dreamt that I had to take the exam for the diploma in sociology. It went badly in empirical sociology. I was asked how many columns there are in a punch card, and, as a pure guess, I said twenty. Of course, that was wrong. The situation was even worse when it came to concepts. I was given a number of English terms and was asked to give their exact meanings in empirical sociology. One term was: supportive. I translated like a good boy, giving the German words for supportive, assisting. But it turned out that in statistics it meant the precise opposite, something altogether negative. Taking pity on my ignorance, the examiner then announced that he would question me on cultural history. He showed me a German passport of 1879. It ended with the farewell greeting: ‘Now out into the world, my little wolf!’ This motto appeared in gold leaf. I was asked to explain this. I took a deep breath and explained that the use of gold for such purposes went back to Russian or Byzantine icons. The idea of the prohibition on images had been taken very seriously in those parts; only gold had been exempted. Because it was the purest metal, an exception was made for it. Its use in illustrations was followed by baroque ceilings and then by furniture intarsia, and the gold lettering in the passport was to be the last vestige of that great tradition. The examiners were delighted by the profundity of my knowledge and I passed the exam.

From Thomas Nashe, Terrors of the Night:

Even as one’s eyes glimmer and dazzle when they are withdrawn out of the light into darkness, so are our thoughts troubled & vexed when they are retired from labour to ease, and from skirmishing to surgery.

You must give a wounded man leave to groan while he is in dressing: dreaming is no other than groaning while sleep, our surgeon, hath us in cure.

From Selwyn Cudjoe's interview with Jamaica Kincaid:

I don't really think I make these distinctions between dreaming and waking. This, again, goes back to my childhood [...] Your dream could tell you things about your waking life; it illuminates your waking life. [...] I used to be quite afraid because they could tell me things I didn't want to know, and I really believed all my dreams and took them very seriously. I still do, in quite the same way. So when I write about dreams, it's not really a dream, it's something that happens, but in this way.

Le Guin being interviewed by Bill Moyers about The Lathe of Heaven movie:

Ernst Meumann, 'On Reading and Writing in Dreams':

I dreamt that I stood in an auditorium before the students and wrote on the board the results of a long development. They were the words, “The result o f a disposition is being announced.” This was the very vividly spoken conclusion of a long exposition by which I believed myself to have summarized everything in a most poignant manner. In the dream, the words greatly impressed me.

From Emil Kraepelin's dream corpus, trans. Heynick:

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference:

Madness, theme or index: what is significant is that Descartes, at bottom, never speaks of madness itself in this text. Madness is not his theme. He treats it as the index of a question of principle, and epistemological value. It will be said, perhaps, that this is the sign of a profound exclusion. But this silence on madness itself simultaneously signifies the opposite of an exclusion, since it is not a question of madness in this text, not even to exclude it. It is not in the Méditations that Descartes speaks of madness itself.) What must be grasped here is that from this point of view the sleeper, or the dreamer, is madder than the madman. Or, at least, the dreamer, insofar as concerns the problem of knowledge which interests Descartes here, is further from true perception than the madman. It is in the case of sleep, and not in that of extravagance, that the absolute totality of ideas of sensory origin becomes suspect, is stripped of 'objective value' as M. Guéroult put it.

Michel Foucault, 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire':

Distinct from dreams? I put it to the test: I remember dreaming that I was nodding my head. I will therefore nod my head again, here and now. Is there a difference? Yes: a certain clarity, a certain distinctness. But, and this is the second stage of the test, can this clarity and distinctness be found in the dream? Yes, I have a clear memory that it was so. Therefore what I supposed was the criterion of difference (clarity and distinctness) belongs indifferently to both dreams and waking perception; so it cannot make the difference between them.

Walter Benjamin, 'Dream Kitsch':

The history of the dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this subject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural necessity by means of historical illumination. Dreaming has a share in history. The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety -- indeed, the range -- of dreams. 

Elsewhere:

• Diletta de Cristofaro, 'The counterproductive promises of a "sleep goal"'
• Kirsty Dunlop and Maria Sledmere, Soft Friction
• Eileen Myles, 'Dream'
• Langston Hughes, 'Harlem'
• The Dream Turbine
• Michael W. Clune, 'Night Shifts'