Thank you for listening! Please take a moment to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) if you prefer to listen that way. You can also find a transcript to this episode below.
Joseph Campbell once described myths as the earth dreaming.
My feeling is that dreams are one way for us to grasp at the greater mysteries of the world, beyond the literal, beyond the physical. Just like myths and great stories and really all art, dreams communicate through the body, through memory and through experience. Some of my first memories as a child were of dreams. I felt like before I was fully capable of conscious thought that I acclimated to the world through dreaming.
Maybe that's why babies need so much sleep.
My first dreams are hard to put into words, because they're not very rational.
But through them, I felt like I experienced a sort of initiation. I remember these creatures visiting me, and this feeling like they were trying to prepare me for life.
It felt like the mystical and the physical were meshing together until finally, when I was fully ready, the physical took precedent. Even so, dreams have held a particularly important place in my life. To me, they're the most obvious sign that the world isn't everything, that it seems, that the physical isn't all that there is. And I've personally never found there to be any satisfying materialist explanation that explains the wide range of phenomena I've experienced during dreams.
In my experience, I've had a handful of dreams that have truly changed the trajectory of my life. The first one happened to me when I was 16. I was sleeping over at a friend's house, and that evening, after we had turned off the lights and we were about to fall asleep, she started talking to me about all of her sexual conquests with the boys we knew from school. I remember feeling this great fear grip me, and I saw this impassable gulf between us, even though we were lying down right next to each other in the same bed, this sensation I felt in my body was as if we were miles away.
I'm not exactly sure why she made me feel that way. Maybe it was just the fear of growing up or not being able to cope with the existential dread of having love and lust being turned into these markers of status. Maybe I was just inexperienced and intimidated, but the sense of separation between us lingered.
That night, I had the dream. I dreamt that I was miles up in the sky, in the air, falling through the clouds. I knew I was about to die, so I cried out to God please tell me the secret of life, because I am about to die and I won't be able to tell anyone.
He agreed.
He said there are two worlds within this one. There's the world of humans and of society, and then there's the world of nature. And before you reach the ground, before you die, you must choose.
Without any effort or really even thinking about it, I chose the world of nature.
When I hit the ground, I fell through the earth softly. I had this overwhelming feeling of peace flow through me. And then I woke up. I felt like everything had changed, and yet nothing had really changed.
I was at that age in the midst of a very confident phase of teenage atheism, but somehow I knew that the dream was real in the ways that mattered.
I didn't tell my friend about it, but I was pretty shaken up.
I didn't really fully understand what had happened, but I knew that I would never forget this dream. Years later, I'm still trying to parse through what it means.
I'd never had a dream that had felt so real, and I've been trying to toy with it ever since, dreaming up different explanations for what it what it meant.
What did God mean by human society? Were those my words or his? What did he mean by nature? Was society just the cultural trappings of the world, gossip and status and ideology?
Was nature just the forest, animals, trees, rivers, or was there something deeper in what he meant by that? I feel like my changing interpretations have had largely to do with the place I've been in at my life at the time, but lately, I've been feeling like I'm coming to a more timely understanding of what that dream meant. Maybe this human, or rather this artificial thing that was being referenced wasn't society, but maybe technology.
I had another dream more recently, maybe two or three years ago. In the dream, I received an ad in the mail for a chip that you could implant in your brain to replace your phone.
I was disgusted, but I brought this pamphlet with me to meet a woman for lunch. She told me that she was excited to implant this chip in her ear when it came out. That it would be so convenient. She could text in the shower, or never worry about losing her phone or forgetting to charge it. I told her my genuine feelings, that I thought this was awful. And she sighed and said, “Yeah, but it'll be so convenient.”
She didn't understand how I felt about it that this trade off for convenience meant that she would be giving up any sense of peace and independence in her life. The dream felt more like a prediction of the near future rather than any sort of mythic-like event, but it made me think about something more deeply.
At what point in our technological innovation do we sign away our humanity for good? How far can we go before we lose our souls in the process? Have we already? While I was growing up in my formative years, writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell definitely helped me understand the perils that technology can bring on two totally different ends.
But lately, I found a lot of solace and understanding and reading the words of one current day writer Paul Kingsnorth, who uses the word the “machine” to describe this force that's beyond our control.
He didn't invent this word, but him and other writers from about the past two centuries have been using it to describe this feeling of uncontrollable technological progress. I want to read an excerpt from one of his more recent essays that helps describe what I'm thinking of.
The ultimate project of modernity I have come to believe is to replace nature with technology and to rebuild the world in a purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream, to become gods, what I call the machine, is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.1
He talks about the replacement of nature with technology. I mean, how we have all seen this come to light in so many different ways. Corporations and superstores flatten out the world and destroy so many small towns, making them all look the same. We no longer have a direct connection, most of us, at least to our food, our local wild places, or even the plants and the creatures around us. Online dating and social media takes this natural human search for love and compassion and turns it into this market of commodification.
And now AI of course, a service used to replace even the most basic human thought and labor. If there could be a silver lining in all of this soulless churning of nature and wildness and beauty into quantifiable outputs, is that it leaves us no choice but to either embrace nihilism or to search for the deeper meaning behind our existences, for meaning in the midst of so much destruction and erasure of our own natures.
If like me you've never been fully able to accept this, and if at times you've capitulated to despair, I believe that the search for truth, meaning and beauty is the way out of letting our souls harden and our humanity wither. There is a deeper meaning to all of this, I'm sure of it. And the only thing these days that's keeping my head above water is clinging to that hope, to the things that can't be quantified, to the human soul, expressed in art, in love and dreams, in our spirit.
To search for meaning within the machine.
Share this post