Leo Kim is an essayist and critic. He has written for Wired, The Baffler, Logic(s) and other publications.
One evening during the 4th century B.C.E., the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi fell asleep. As he slept, he dreamed that he was a butterfly. He spent the day fluttering about, doing as he pleased, far from the concerns and wants of his human self and even further from any knowledge that he was Zhuangzi. Like all pleasant dreams however, this one eventually came to an end. When he awoke, he found that he was the great scholar once again. But a thought nagged at him: Was it really Zhuangzi who had dreamed that he was a butterfly, or was he a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuangzi?
Change was in the air the night that Zhuangzi dreamed. The waning years of the Kingdom of Zhou had opened up a vacuum of power, and as rulers jockeyed for control, their titanic clashes unsettled the foundations that had previously organized the world. The political upheaval was paralleled by a concurrent intellectual upheaval. As the Chinese literature scholar Achim Mittag has written, as people sought to navigate “a world in turmoil and a fundamental crisis that shattered the norms and values as associated with Zhou kingship,” a panoply of intellectual movements sprouted up, each trying to make sense of a world in flux. This phenomenon was so significant that it earned the moniker “baijia” — the Hundred Schools.
Slumbering amid a world grappling with the unprecedented change, where the future was frighteningly unclear and the path toward it undetermined, Zhuangzi dreamed about the nature of transformation itself. Rather than brush it off as a frivolous fantasy, Zhuangzi used it to make sense of his milieu, to understand the sameness that exists across difference and the differences that are cleaved into sameness. He nurtured the dream into a metaphysical insight that came to sit at the heart of philosophical Daoism, guiding others in their search for harmony as they weathered precipitous changes.
In many ways, those of us in the modern West find ourselves in a similar moment of uncertainty, though it’s often been stasis more than transformation that troubles us. We wake to a world populated by seemingly intractable structures that operate at scales we can hardly comprehend: climate change, international flows of information and capital, the consolidation of corporate influence, oceans of trash and atmospheres of nanoplastics, and the growing poverty of natural life.
“Dreams can serve a powerful organizing function.”
One of Zhuangzi’s more vocal fans, David Holz, is the founder of Midjourney, the AI imagery company that will supposedly be worth nearly $200 billion by 2032. Holz has credited the butterfly dream for inspiring humanity’s “collective consciousness,” and he claims to have named the company after another Zhuangzi quote because he felt the phrase “mid-journey” captured this idea that we’re coming from a “rich, beautiful past” and heading towards a “wild and unimaginable future.”
The irony of Zhuangzi’s metaphysical insights becoming branding fodder for an AI system bounded by the dataset it’s trained on, designed as a predictive system rather than creative one, and always on the prowl to steal human dreams (the company is embroiled in a lawsuit for training its generator on artists’ work without their permission), is illustrative of the ways in which modern culture and emergent technologies are reshaping our relationship to dreaming.
Today, dreams are increasingly positioned as commodities to be sold and consumed — less a vehicle of any higher truth than something to be manufactured, optimized, packaged and sold. In a moment overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, when nothing beyond the existing constraints of our world seems feasible, it seems to me particularly critical to resist these maneuvers. After all, it’s only once we’ve re-enchanted ourselves with the possibilities of our own dreams that we can begin to dream of a better society.
Historically, dream interpretation was a collaborative process that drew on both the dreamer’s reports and collective knowledge. In Australian Aboriginal cultures, dreams were and are a way for individuals to acquire knowledge. Critically, this rarely happens alone. As the religious scholar Elizabeth den Boer has noted, the “guides on the road toward understanding are the elders and religious specialist of a community,” and without these guides — as when the “uninitiated dream of Ancestors or connected concepts” — dreams are liable to become nightmares.
In large part, this collaborative sensibility stemmed from the belief that dreams were collective from the start. While the slumbering subject received the dreams, the dreams themselves were thought to have lived and come from elsewhere. In “Summa Theologiae,” Thomas Aquinas made a distinction between dreams that emerge from the inside — which are often shaped by individual preoccupations or their bodily dispositions — and those that come from the outside, which result from the “surrounding air,” “an impression of a heavenly body” or God and his angels. The mind here is a porous membrane, shaped and formed by the universe around it, always in dialogue with the world.
Because dreams illuminated this connection to the world, they were revered for their ability to help people navigate an often difficult relationship. In his discussion of Native American epistemology, the philosopher Joel Alvarez noted that dreams were considered action-oriented: “[V]isions or dreams are, for many Native Americans, ‘a primary source of revealed knowledge’ where the individual obtains knowledge of what they should do in the real world.” Sometimes, these dreams were reality, just a version of it that had been forgotten or broken. Certain Indigenous traditions, for instance, consider dreams a space where humans could experience the intimate relationship with the animal world that existed before short-sighted humanity severed that primordial connection.
But it was not only wisdom that people sought in dreams. As Sidarta Ribeiro observed in his book “The Oracle of Night,” savvy operators often engaged in the “shameless political manipulation of dream narratives” to establish authority. Conveniently timed dreams can have the effect of legitimizing regimes and making myths out of mortals. Ribeiro suggested that Plutarch’s account of Julius Caesar’s fortuitous dream prior to crossing the Rubicon — in which he engages in maternal incest, a sign later taken by his advocates to mean that it was fated that he’d eventually conquer Rome, his motherland — was one such product of narrative tinkering.
Yet even in this act of manipulation, there’s an implicit recognition that though dreams are experienced by the dreamer, they invoke the collective by containing the power to shape a community. They transcend the individual and inspire broader action, guiding the dreamer by revealing something true about their relationship to the waking world.
“Only once we’ve re-enchanted ourselves with the possibilities of our own dreams can we begin to dream of a better society.”
One of the most influential dreams of the Enlightenment wasn’t a revelation but a deception to be overcome. In “Meditations,” René Descartes wrote that he was sitting by his fireplace, wrapped up in a winter gown. He could feel the heat from the fire, the texture of the paper beneath his fingers. Yet after reflecting, he suddenly posed a question: “Am I not a human being, and therefore in the habit of sleeping at night, when in my dreams I have all the same experiences as these madmen do when they are awake?” Could it be that everything he was imagining in such vivid detail was a dream?
If Zhuangzi saw his butterfly dream as a pathway to understanding the openness of the self, Descartes had the opposite reaction. Confronted with the destabilizing possibility that he might be dreaming even when he felt awake, he sought firm ground. Escape from a spiral of doubt came in the form of a walled-off self that promised security and self-sufficiency. You might be dreaming, he argued, but you can always be sure that it is you and not someone else doing the dreaming; your thoughts are yours regardless of whether or not they are fantasy. This led him to the infamous axiom that would go on to underpin our idea of the human mind for the next several centuries: “Cogito ergo sum” — “I think, therefore I am.”
Such security, however, came at a price. The once-porous self was cut off from the world around it, assured of little else but its own existence. In his biography of Descartes, Desmond Clarke called him a “reclusive, cantankerous, and oversensitive loner.” Descartes envisioned the mind in similar terms: isolated, lonely and sequestered. Despite these anti-social tendencies, or precisely because of them, this solitary cogito turned out to be a perfect companion for a broader culture that had become obsessed with what the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour called “purification” — classifying and organizing the world into discrete, legible boxes that rid it of all its ambiguous hybridity.
The topic of dreams would be resigned to the margins as the acolytes of the Enlightenment focused on the capacity for rationality over the “lesser-developed” characteristics of the mind. When Sigmund Freud eventually helped reintroduce dreams into discourse in the early half of the 20th century, he continued to see the mind itself as an enclosed kingdom: Visions weren’t expressions of any outside truth but the product of an individual’s most primitive self, a “piece of infantile mental life that has been superseded” and banished away to the recesses of thought. Not so much a window to the world but a reflection of the self in a carnival mirror — one that could, in the modernist spirit, be used to classify and diagnose by a trained professional.
And so our confident march into modernity gradually stripped dreams of their privileged status. Where they once carried profound revelations, they were now little more than distorted and hidden desires emerging from restless, solitary minds. In this brave new world, dreams were diagnostic instruments at best, and more often than not meaningless drivel — a far cry from the conduits of truth they were once held to be.
“The mind is a porous membrane, shaped and formed by the universe around it, always in dialogue with the world.”
By all accounts, we live in a relatively dreamless world today. The amount of nightly sleep people in many countries get has dropped 1-2 hours compared to those who lived a century ago. The average American gets around just 6.5 hours a night. For the forces of contemporary capitalism, that’s still too much — too many hours spent without want, without the ability to work or spend or consume.
The art critic and social theorist Jonathan Crary has called this insomniatic time the era of “24/7 capitalism.” He argues that the massive deregulations of the late 20th century across the U.S. and Europe created a system wherein there “ceased to be any internal necessity for having rest and recuperation as components of economic growth and profitability.” Unlike the strictly on/off binary of factory time, our increasingly networked, digitized economy generated a form of always-on capitalism “defined by a principle of continuous functioning” — where money is always circulating, labor is always running and profit is always possible. It’s the same world in which software companies tout tools to monitor remote employees at home and bankers die from working 100-hour weeks.
In an economy kept afloat by constant circulation, Crary wrote, “the huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep freed from a morass of simulated needs subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism.” Unlike the other “irreducible necessities of human life,” sleep has proven notoriously difficult to monetize. To gain entry into the inner sanctum of slumber, techno-capitalists have started eyeing our dreams as a pathway to profitability.
In 2021, Coors released an advertisement that featured a research study in which participants watched a video designed to incubate dreams about the beer before going to sleep. Once they entered REM sleep, researchers woke the participants to see what they were dreaming about: waterfalls, snow, mountains and, of course, “something to do with Coors.” Where dreams once came from Gods and ancestors, the ad essentially proclaimed that they could now come from conglomerates like the Molson Coors Brewing Company — enterprises that aspired to similar omnipotence. The video was made available for anyone also wanting to dream about the beverage, though the host website has since been taken down, likely due to the backlash the campaign received after its launch.
This hasn’t stopped companies from attempting to profit off of our dreams in subtler ways. The start-up Prophetic, for instance, is currently developing a “halo” that people can wear to bed in order to induce lucid dreaming. As Claire L. Evans wrote in these pages, the initiative involves “training machine learning models on EEG and fMRI lucid dream data” and beaming “their findings via transcranial-focused ultrasound directly into willing brains.” The goal of this lucidity technology, according to an article in Fortune, is “to give people control over their dreams, so they can use that time productively. A CEO could practice for an upcoming board meeting, an athlete could run through plays, a web designer could create new templates.” Not even sleep will be able to tear us from the mandate for constant production.
“Though dreams are experienced by the dreamer, they invoke the collective by containing the power to shape a community.”
Other companies are working to transform dreaming into pure entertainment to be consumed. The company REM Space is developing an ecosystem of products to induce lucid dreaming based on the idea that “unlike virtual reality, REM sleep allows individuals to immerse themselves in a fully developed reality.” As the website phrases it, this is a space with “significant business opportunities.” The desired end-product is what the late film theorist André Bazin might have called a “total cinema” — a multimodal experience unbounded by IP, production bottlenecks or ethics. AI unsurprisingly is being employed to “visualize” dreams, giving people the ability to record and circulate these visions as if they were just another form of what contemporary social media platforms call “user generated content.”
Crary points out that this commodification requires the “pervasive assumption that dreams are objectifiable, that they are discrete entities that, given the development of applicable technology, could be recorded.” For dreams to be turned into vehicles of profit, in other words, we must think of them as particular kinds of objects capable of being commodified in the first place.
Underlying this way of thinking is an uncanny marriage of both old and new attitudes. On the one hand, the idea of the mind as an enclosed system — and of dreams as neutral emanations of this mind — allow these technologies to be framed as products of self-betterment and self-control. These companies are simply helping you connect with and manipulate what is already yours, a line of reasoning Descartes would’ve been proud of. As the CEO of Prophetic emphatically phrased it, “Control is what we want.”
Yet in practice, these technologies rely not so much on inward-facing self-control as the openness of the mind to the outside world. After all, the entire premise behind these mediating technologies is their ability to effectively engage with the formation and content of your dreams from the outside. So companies may proclaim that dreams are private phenomena in their positioning and marketing, but their products and services depend on dreams’ porous nature.
Over the past few decades, many people have willingly outsourced taste to sophisticated algorithms, memories and know-how to our external devices, and even pondered whether algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. Dream technologies operate off of the same playbook: Under the guise of self-management, they convince us to abdicate yet another part of ourselves to external apparatuses so that we might be directed toward productivity and corporate entertainment. Challenging this transformation requires not just a rejection of the technologies being developed, but also a reconsideration of what dreams actually are.
There is a concept in Australian Aboriginal cultures that is often translated to the English phrase “Dreamtime” or the “Dreaming.” It’s a tricky term to define because of its multivalence — at once an atemporal plane of creation, a set of cultural practices and a guide for how to conduct oneself in life. As Mussolini Harvey, who is Yanyuwa, put it: “The Dreamings made our Law or narnu-Yuwa. This Law is the way we live, our rules. This Law is our ceremonies, our songs, our stories.”
In this full sense, the Dreaming doesn’t simply refer to some “beyond” that we go to when we sleep or die. It is immanent to the world — or more accurately, it challenges the very distinction between the here and the beyond that has organized Western metaphysics since at least Plato. Moreover, it refers to something greater than any single individual’s actual dreams. It’s one reason why there’s been debate on the accuracy of this translation, which was made originally in the late 19th century by white anthropologists, for fear that it diminishes the richness of the concept by conflating it with our relatively impoverished notion of dreaming.
Perhaps it could encourage a reconsideration of the boundaries of our own language — showing us how dreams can be woven into a worldview that extends beyond the individualism that not only defines our modern culture but has enabled the privatized commodification of these dreams. Without repeating lazy Western appropriation of some lost “authenticity,” these metaphysically rich frameworks can still serve as catalysts illuminating a way forward past the unknowns of limited worldviews toward new territory.
It’s not as if the modern world doesn’t already operate on widely held beliefs that are true only because we consider them to be. “The world of ghosts and spirits is as real as that of markets,” the anthropologist Ganath Obeyeskere wrote. In Western culture, abstractions like international finance and phantoms like rational consumers are as real as flesh. What makes these spectres real isn’t their material self-evidence, but a collective faith that gives them the ability to guide behavior and mediate relationships. Dreams can serve a similarly powerful organizing function.
“Dreams are social acts that cut through the boundaries of the self.”
In 1980 and 1981, the filmmaker Mohammad Malas spoke to over 400 people in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps about their nightly visions. The vast archive of footage he captured was eventually edited into a 45-minute film featuring their testimonies, “The Dream.”
In one scene, a child talked about a dream in which he was shot in the chest as he was running in a forest of olive trees. In another, a woman dreamed of arranging a coup d’etat. Others dreamed of collapsing buildings and imprisonment, of martyrdom and triumphant peace. All of them dreamed in one way or another of displacement, home and return.
In the way that only dreams allow, their stories reveal the senseless, paradoxical position — between hope and despair, somewhere and nowhere, life and death — they’d been subjected to as refugees. As the film progresses, it becomes impossible to brush any of the dreams off as the illusions of a lone mind. They start to coalesce into a report on a shared topography of feeling as undeniably real as any riverbed or mountain range. It’s a profound maneuver given how often the refugees had been subjected to repeated campaigns of dehumanization, robbed of any right to their inner lives. Against this hollowing out, Malas used the dreams to confront the viewer with the full, complex depth of subjects who fear, hope and grieve in order to reveal their humanity, precisely what was so often denied them by our dominant epistemologies and media representations that default to easy caricature.
By bringing refugees’ dreams, their traumas and their world into the light, Malas opened up an ethical demand. The poet basalt i.h. called them “dreams that make demands of our selves.” The materialization of collective traumas and hidden territories of experience urge us to consider where we might go from here; dreams become a medium through which recognition and obligation begin to flow.
This awareness in the interrelational capacity of dreams inspires researchers investigating the therapeutic possibilities of intersubjective dreaming practices. Whereas a diagnostic approach sees dreams as vehicles to classify and sort — dreams are used to identify brain disorders, for example — a small but growing cadre of psychologists and therapists are looking to unpack the many ways that dreams might provide avenues for connection rather than control.
“It’s not as if the modern world doesn’t already operate on widely held beliefs that are true only because we consider them to be.”
At the core of their work is the renewed notion that dreams exist first and foremost communally as part of a shared process. When writing about dreams, the clinical psychologist Robi Friedman doesn’t simply refer to the act of dreaming, but a holistic “dream cycle” wherein a “collective preoccupation” becomes manifest in personal dreams, which is interpellated through an inner narrative before being made public again in a “shared relational elaboration.” This cycle recognizes both how dreams come from the collective sphere and how they might return and reform it.
This cycle comes to life in practices like dream-sharing, which allow groups to use their dreams to restructure and strengthen their relationships to one another. One experimental study, for instance, found that dream-sharing in couples increased feelings of intimacy more than describing events from the person’s day. Meanwhile, social formations like dreaming groups have been explored as resources to support everything from healing to creative collaboration. Mark Blagrove, a professor of psychology at Swansea University, has written that while scientists have historically seen the benefit of dreams as emerging from “neural processes that take place during sleep, regardless of whether the dreams are later recalled,” now they have begun to build out the idea that “the function of dreams resides in their waking use.” It is in the process of becoming communal that dreams realize their full potential.
Just like Malas, these researchers are re-engaging with the idea that dreams come from and belong to a collective — that they are social acts that cut through the boundaries of the self. In doing so, they open up the possibility that we’re always intertwined with the people, places and ideas that make up our world. Dreams become vessels through which we might engage with the world in yet undiscovered ways — and even steer it toward something better.
If dreams ultimately gain their power from their ability to guide us in our waking lives, as some ancient practitioners have long known, they might inspire or invoke. But it’s up to our waking selves to transform a dream, even a communal one, into a shared reality.
