Dreamwalking off the Cliff

Consider this question: how do you know you are not dreaming right now? When you are immersed in a dream, everything feels real, until—a moment of lucidity breaks the spell. You say, “Oh, I am in fact dreaming”.

But what guarantees that you are not dreaming right at this moment? You might point to consistencies, details, or sensations of the present moment that seem too vivid, too coherent for a dream—but these ‘headful’ arguments falter under deep scrutiny. Can you be completely sure? Or is the chance that you are dreaming always nonzero? After all, your only access to what is called “reality” comes through your senses, and these same senses skilfully fabricate convincing worlds and mimic coherence while you sleep.

What if you’re dreaming all this right now—a recursive dream of reading these very sentences, which talk recursively about dreaming? And what if your present scrutiny is yet another layer of the dream? How far do the roots go? The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi captured this paradox in a simple reflection:

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither… conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” — Zhuangzi

Zhuangzi’s reflection reveals something we all feel at times: the strange sense that we’re missing the one thing that would make everything make sense. Certainly, it is only lucidity as such—no matter how brief—over the limitlessness of our uncertainties, that strikes at the heart of our acephaly. It is only because we lack a head-ful head to anchor our reality—a tough, solid, unbreakable ground—that we can possibly fail to distinguish between dreaming and waking, between reality and unreality, between being alive and being undead!

So, are we real? What is certain is not any one particular answer, but the feeling the question provokes: a strange kind of uncanny (unheimlich).

This word, “uncanny”, is now commonly used in the context of animated films and AI-generated graphics. This type of “uncanny” is in effect what Mark Fisher called the ‘weird’, a nausea-inducing encounter with something alien, robotic, or artificially intelligent that doesn’t belong in our world (‘uncanny valley’). But Zhuangzi’s dream—and the lucid awareness of our limitless uncertainty—creates another longer-tail, breathier, stranger kind of “uncanny”. Fisher termed it the ‘eerie’, invoking the sensation that something is missing from what should be complete. Indeed, through the dream, Zhuangzi discovers he’s missing the very thing he needs to ground reality with certainty—and he is left suspended in the eerie rift.

You do not need a butterfly to fall into that rift; it opens in the middle of an ordinary day. Have you ever encountered that ‘record-scratch, freeze-frame’ moment when you suddenly feel like you’ve been separated from yourself, the ‘camera’ of perfection zooms out into a wide-frame, and you catch yourself watching yourself from some eerie outsider perspective? Or, perhaps you suddenly catch your own self-staring eyes wandering in a mirror at 3am, and feel a fleeting sense of utter imbalance; “who is that person” and “what is this person doing”—perhaps this is all the nightmare of a butterfly dreaming while perched on a tree? Just like in The Matrix, when Neo first perceives the code behind reality, as the concrete world dissolves what it really is?

I suffer from the question that’s in the air before me. I try to turn away, I try to discipline it like a powerful stoic, but it slips around and follows my gaze like a ghost who I know is there, who reads my every move, who knows very well what I am trying to do. Ah!—this is not unlike one of those amusing cat videos we’ve all seen: a cat pounces on its own reflection in the mirror—the nemesis—the unwanted other! But in trying to catch reflection catch reflection—at some point you have to ask which one is doing the catching and which one is being caught. In David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Bellucci articulates this precise vertigo when she tells Agent Cole: “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream.” Breaking the fourth wall, she asks directly: “But who is the dreamer?”

Now, we enter dreamtime, where I once had a dream similar to Zhuangzi’s, though not nearly so meditative:

I am an insect—a fly, I think—being hunted through closed rooms. Someone had informed a group of youths that ‘an insect here is stealing people’s powers’. That’s me: the insect! I flutter desperately from room to room, seeking escape. Just as I spot a door leading out, slightly ajar, with the light of day spilling in—the youths burst into the room. I frantically retreat up to a corner of the ceiling, and watch them approach me slowly, with terrible certainty. They come armed with strange implements: a straw-like device shooting invisible projectiles, a glue-like substance meant to entrap me. Eyes and faces blurred as they took turns reaching for me.

I realise suddenly, with a strange meta-awareness: that I am both the fly flailing about and a viewer watching a YouTube video of a fly’s persecution: ‘POV of a fly’. Comments scroll beneath the horror: “so much anxiety!” “terrifying!” “I hate this new type of content”…

This dream-image’s horror is not that I am a butterfly or worse, a fly, but that I watch myself as one. To watch yourself as the hunted thing is to feel the membrane between the real and the unreal go thin—and once it thins, it thins everywhere. As Cioran writes: “When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal.” It becomes more and more apparent that everything as we know it turns around the axes of the unreal and the unverifiable: the walk of life becomes more and more of a dream-walk. Whereby, everything we think to be practical suffering—per the Buddhist expression ‘all is suffering’—is transmuted into its actual horror: all is nightmare.

We humans are many things, an uncanny manifold, an infinitised nightmare; “normal” we are not! All this incessant speak of the normal, normal, normal only makes things feel all the more weirdly (in Fisher’s sense) abnormal. And so the “normal” has invaded even our psychology—by way of the medicalisation of the history of derangement, its reduction to the historical and psychiatric study of madness. All this mental wellness vs. mental illness talk fosters a false expectation; it implies there to be a mentally healthy state. A “normal” state. But are mental breakdowns really the symptoms of an infection? Or does the whole conception of mental health make us anxious simply because we are infinitely far from such a thing? Hence, Erich Fromm says in a 1977 interview: “Normal people are the sickest, and sick people are the healthiest. That may sound witty or perhaps exaggerated, but I’m quite serious…”

The newest priests of the normal are not therapists but technologists. Now, a certain group of late-capitalist techno-optimist types might butt in to say: it will be possible in five or ten years to amend any ill predispositions with a pill, or with a brain-computing interface. But is the human—the headless one, the Bataillean acéphale, missing the very organ that would make it programmable in the first place—really a programmatic automaton with fuses, wires, and a switch at the back of its neck? Indeed, if you were to program ‘happiness’ or ‘mental wellness’ into a subject, or any kind of psychic management, perhaps to render it productive—the unreal simply returns like an outsider’s sleight of hand; by some unexpected trigger, it comes right behind your back, grips your chest, and says: “a-ha, gotcha!” (Is this not the case also with post-traumatic stress disorders, for one, where a military veteran or a bomb survivor is crippled by the interruptive onslaught of traumatic surreality in the program?)

But notice what the dream quietly assumes—that there was a clean program to debug in the first place. There was not. After exhausting all the questions, what simply seems to be the case: our existence appears to be thrown, without reason, into its own nightmare. Heidegger names this perplexing state: “thrownness” [Geworfenheit]. And this sense of thrownness reveals the first and deepest violation: I never consented to my own simulation. I was never presented with terms and conditions to sign before being hurled into this spatiotemporally-contained dream-composite! Shouldn’t any serious discourse on “human rights” acknowledge this primal absence of consent? The right to opt-in or opt-out of the dream would be the only true foundation for rights—everything else seems to be merely negotiating the terms of a nightmare we never agreed to.

And so we furnish the nightmare. Day to day, we self-organise like an office elevator: predictable chime, familiar floors, reliable patterns. Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, we press the same buttons: 1st floor for coffee, perhaps, 4th floor for meetings, perhaps, 7th floor for the desk, perhaps. Just like the office building, the mental architecture evolves—floors get renovated, departments relocate, new wings are constructed—with the buttons of our mental map carefully updating to match. We adapt to new social norms, learn new concepts, absorb new cultural references and memes, play pretend—all while doing so in the confidence that we are still in the same reliable building, riding the same trustworthy elevator, navigating accessible floors. And yes… however, only in the vertigo of lucidity does all the order give way; the elevator flings like a sustained lucid dream-image—below ground—into the obscure levels below the basements. Camus calls it “absurd”, Land calls it “meltdown”—in all cases, the elevator has given way, the elevator falls through. Smash, smash, smash; the elevator lights start flickering violently, and the impact keeps suggesting the end of the fall, but it does not end—smash… it keeps going through, until a moment of silence to spare… and it suddenly falls free through endless space. All the same, the subject does not fall completely or freely! Amidst the vertigo of the fall, a residue of order remains, the subject still remains perched manically on the floor of the elevator. Look! This person is not actually moving at all. Land writes ecstatically of this utter incapacity: “I have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat me down to the ground, but the floor is also a wall.“

What is it, then, that stays perched on that floor—watching itself fall, and never quite falling? I can imagine one keenly asking now: so, are ghosts real? This follows neatly: yes they are. Should we be afraid of them? You already are. But what is a ghost? It has been said that the ‘I’ is a ghost. In my body, I am a ghost in concreto [in concrete]. But is it possible to come up with a universal definition? Yes, I believe—but it will not be in a direct way. What is a ghost? The answer to the question rustles and sways in the posing of the question itself… Picture yourself in one of those typical horror-film situations. When you investigate an eerie phenomenon, when you look for it—thump; thump—that is precisely when it is there, watching. In the same way, when you ask ‘what is a ghost?’, that is precisely when it is there, watching the asker, unseen; watching its faithful asker watch. When it is forgotten, then it is gone… or is it?