‘Sleep is a foundation, period. It is under siege. We need to protect it.’
Chapter Seventeen
Chevauchet’s monologues were never rants. Despite his mounting foreboding, he carried himself with utmost composure. If he had official status then, he would already have been expelled, as all ties of Greater America with the land of sleep were being definitively severed. He knew about these disquieting developments, state secrets at that point, long before the public did. If anyone could access top-level fantasies and power trips, it was he.
As with any drastic measures, there was bureaucratic inertia and reaction in some sectors of the government. It would be months before everyone there was on the same page; and months before stepped-up economic policies, leaked to the press, triggered the creation of new supervisory agencies to instate censorship; months, as well, before they were implemented and functionalized; and months again before popular initiatives of mass distraction appeared in their true light, if only to the few conscious enough to infer their effects on civil society.
‘Empire of the Mind’ was the latest experiment in the field of Comprehensive Illusion (ci), aiming to institutionalize daydreaming. The program already interfaced with reality, allowing subscribers – which would soon mean every registered household – to realize their dreams by constructing virtual environments deceptively close to the actual. (The first to be granted free basic access were displaced peoples, eco-refugees, to divert their attention from life in the camps.) In this pluralistic daydream, everything was possible. Individual fantasies became mutually reconcilable. The new dispensation did away with the unity of time and space, and gave citizens leave to stretch reality as far as it would go.
The free-for-all engendered by this ostensible loosening of laws had no bearing on the real world, where social bonds were disintegrating. The fantasies entrusted to ci were contained by it, centrally monitored, analyzed, and disarmed. With a mere tweak of the algorithm, all potential threats to the new order were nipped in the bud.
Reality, meanwhile, was run ultra-rationally, with galloping and uncompromising efficiency. In it, all were about to become slaves to their own sanitized fancies. In the most recent upgrade to security, everything was encrypted, tamper- and foolproof. Whatever facilitated policing was sold as just one more step to ensure privacy. But the fact of the matter was that, as part of an effort to thwart terrorism and other political activities in ci, individual daydreams, though they remained interactive, became immune to peer influence and criticism. This would soon apply across the board – to all reveries – since everyone who hadn’t yet done so wanted to transition to ci’s flashier, more stimulating and rewarding, less fatiguing environment. Natural reveries were work – work that, being merely ‘creative,’ got in the way of true, profitable productivity. Daydreaming in cyberspace was assisted and augmented; it was easier. (The more data ci gathered on its users, the faster it relieved them of inputting new material.) As a result, it took up much less time. The mediated experiences it enabled were richer and exponentially more concentrated. There needed no better incentive. Addiction to ci could not but bring forth a more docile and impotent public.
In such a climate, Chevauchet’s subliminal labours fell short of their aim. For how could those whose dreams in a sense came true, and whose de facto masters came up with imaginative ways to keep them happy, designing a playground of desire that at the same time corralled it – how could they possibly be convinced that this wish-granting virtual reality was to be resisted rather than embraced and celebrated? And, in a sense, they might be right not to be. Did not all daydreams, and not just these ‘artificial’ ones, substitute for action? Had not all imagination always colluded with existing conditions, altering reality as little as possible, accommodating and compensating for its flaws? Was not a stable reality indispensable to sanity? And finally, was not reality itself a great construction, which might founder as soon as credibility was withdrawn from it by those who were its citizens? Would not the fantasy-world prevail someday, reversing the hierarchy – when partakers of reality died out, and their children, averse to its hard consequences, deemed it too dangerous, unpredictable, and irreversible by comparison? If all migrated to ci, what would be left of the powers that be? Over whom would they rule? Their sole legitimacy would derive from running ci. They would not dare shut it down and risk real rebellion. In the end, being only human, they too would jump ship, abandoning the nave of reality, and, crossing over, incapable of deferring any further the satisfaction offered by ci, would live out their fantasies of power unchecked as never before. With this, the state as such would wither away, die a natural death, and the universal statelessness Chevauchet was after would be a fait accompli. The great unmooring from reality would be justified once reality itself was no longer anchored securely but set adrift.
Chevauchet’s reaction to my reverie (for I was not playing devil’s advocate) was ‘Keep dreaming!’ and it cut to the quick. Not that he would have none of it; only that there were obvious blind spots in my reasoning. Unless it was fully automatic and closed to new material, ci could never ‘run itself.’ Its so-called ‘minders,’ the watchers, would always manipulate its users and content. Reality, no matter how devalued and miserable, was here to stay. With the rationing of sleep and a general embargo on natural fantasy, there would be no daydreams worth mentioning, hence no revolt against government abuses to control or even phase out ci – leaving it with a power that the authoritarian regimes of the past certainly never dreamt of. This was proof enough to Chevauchet that wilful delusion was winning out over the principle of reality. For him, this principle was non-negotiable.
‘The scotomization of vision is already far along.’ As harsh as I found his diagnosis, it was just. On this point, I would soon come to see eye to eye.
Chapter Eighteen
Despite at all times looking and sounding ambassadorial, and trying by peaceful means to retard the progress of ci, Chevauchet was powerless to stop something whose global appeal was so eyely. He could not himself sabotage the program; for one thing, he lacked the necessary skills.
For a while, he had collaborators who took inspiration from ‘Le Passe-muraille,’ as they nicknamed him. In the wake of their infrastructure attacks, some groups on ci noticed a significant drop in quality and complained that it was ‘not as advertised’ (language that betrayed they still believed themselves consumers, who had a choice to go elsewhere, or even opt out). A thorough investigation turned up nothing: no technical failures or rogue activity were detected. But, one by one, the collaborators turned away from the ‘Passer-through-Walls’ and, spellbound by ci, dropped like flies.
More alarming was the fact that, because the illusion of ci was so complete and seductive, these early collaborators preferred the state of wakefulness, ignoring the interdependence between daydreaming and sleep. Yet for his diplomacy to bear fruit, Chevauchet needed stakes in all three: dream, sleep, and reverie. This work did not consist in ‘dream interpretation’ or ‘analysis.’ First, he promoted Onirica by showcasing its virtues and clearing up common fallacies. Thus, Onirica was not ‘the royal road’ to anything, the privileged means and most direct route to ‘real’ desires that had been repressed. It was just the place where the creative imagination had the fewest restrictions. Without dreams’ power to transform experience, reveries would always risk collapsing into that from which, by default, they did their high dive – the hard springboard of the real they found deficient. But daydreams did not simply take their cue from night-dreams. Instead, they complemented them (the best in them, ideally), contributing to that dimension of reality unique to oneiric experience.
I admit I struggled with Chevauchet’s notion of dream-reality before fully grasping the nature of dream states. For a start, he disliked the opposition of dreams, whether night or day, to consciousness. As a matter of fact, he believed both kinds of dream to be integral to conscious experience. ‘Normal,’ that is to say, passive, waking consciousness
, which registered an ‘objective,’ hard reality (existing outside and independently), to which it bound itself, was a scientific abstraction, an unproven hypothesis. If dreams prevailed over that waking reality by banding together, as they did in some hypersensitive individuals, they would activate a qualitatively different, ‘deviant’ consciousness, within which reality itself would be alterable.
It was thus elemental to defend the right to dream – a basic, natural, universal, inalienable right and freedom, nowhere explicit, and whose legal protection would be contrary to it, creating what is called a productive contradiction. As things stood, there was no sign of this happening. The boundless freedom to daydream was taken for granted (and when it came to night-dreams, few cared anymore). Its actual restriction, already far advanced, escaped notice. When something proliferated as much as dreams on the ci platform, fighting for the right to dream seemed like a waste of time. Why fight for what everyone, or nearly everyone, already had in abundance? No one appeared to realize that this piece of psychedelic engineering, this sham proliferation, had as its end goal dreaming’s real extinction. Lulled by ci, none would awaken to legally secure dreaming as a right before it was gone – unless, at the last minute, it somehow became valued as essential, rather than as luxury. Chevauchet’s plan to build an alternative network and community of dreamers to overtake ci was a race against time.
Chapter Nineteen
The values and ideals of Chevauchet belonged to a long underground history of opposition to the modern state. Among his many heroes were La Boétie, Pierre Leroux, Joseph Déjacque, Marx, Blanqui, Emma Goldman, and Louise Michel. Their writings were, in his words, ‘jailbirds’ tunnels beneath the imperial edifice.’ In the years leading up to his mission, the state had become all-present, and all but invisible. There was broad consensus that we had finally entered the Cosmopolitan Age, the age of the universal state: Greater America, whose power, despite reaching across the globe, was ‘diffuse,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘soft,’ and ‘harmless.’ The unification of all nations under a single democratic government sounded to all ears like a dream come true, and one dared not question it, let alone name its totalitarian face. For all intents and purposes, there were no ‘oppressed peoples’ on the planet.
Onirica had, since time immemorial, been at least as global and sovereign a state, if of a different order. Looked at one way, it was still part of Greater America, provided that the latter was not under an egeirocracy, or a regime of total wakefulness (a permanent state of exception of sorts). Looked at from another angle, and more politically, it was an ‘inland island,’ a conspiratorial deep state undermining a world government hostile to it.
Until recently, everyone who frequented Onirica would do so once a day, ensuring the balance of power. This system of dual and overlapping statehood functioned seamlessly; power over minds was shared. Prolonged stays in Onirica – more than twelve hours – were rare and authorized only for the poor, the infirm, and the very young. No one was made to live in it permanently, though being spirited away there against one’s will did happen. The same could not be said of the waking state, with which Greater America was synonymous and wanted to be identical. Of late, it had aggressively promoted abductions and exclusivity to weaken somnolence. It exercised its will to domination just short of declaring war.
As the waking world’s human population swelled, Onirica’s dwindled. This decline, not steep, was about to become a precipice. Extending over decades, it would terminate overnight – with the full-on assault on sleep. Sometimes, it is true, Onirica was black with people, bedded down, catching up on it, ‘recharging their batteries.’ But this was merely an epiphenomenon in a downward spiral, and soon many were getting their last fill of a ‘good night’s rest.’ They felt they would be happier, more fulfilled, going without sleep altogether in exchange for working even longer hours, punctuated by sessions inside ci.
There was, however, an important difference in citizenship between the two states. The Onirican republic received both humans and animals. Animals dreamt – their dreams feebler and free-floating, to be sure, but also happier, or so Chevauchet maintained.
The Onirican embassy, its location in daydreams on the fringes of reality, was a strange, outré place. The founding fathers of Greater America did not suspect its presence, though they recognized the threat posed by spontaneous reverie. They increasingly stigmatized such wishful thinking as inefficient, wasteful, unhealthy, indulgent, inferior, and degenerate; as child’s play, and nothing compared to the wonders of ci – the latter ostensibly providing a ‘safe’ outlet for it and, before long, a medium of its censorship.
The masterminds of ci sought by degrees to replace all natural creative imagination with artifice. They claimed it was for the sake of quality control: optimized content and better use of time, what with advances in the temporal compression of daydream experience. In reality, it was to abolish mental activity that was off the grid and went untracked. ci was a step up from what ‘circuses’ were for the Romans, appeasing the masses by spectacular diversions. To the extent that, for the time being, participation was still voluntary, it did not reek of total control. No one would accuse its makers of wilfully spreading political apathy.
Similarly, no one would credit Chevauchet’s prediction that ci was temporary; that, once everyone bought into it, total control would be secured and followed by the interface’s deactivation; that, having bankrupted the imagination, the ersatz would be retired. It was a preposterous idea when one thought of it. Crying wolf, is all. As for the death of the imagination, its poverty now manifest, would anyone truly mourn it?
‘Why has natural imagination become undesirable?’ I asked, artlessly. The reply – his most inspired to date – put everything in perspective:
‘People usually associate creativity with works of art. But what is the occasional artwork alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone countless times a day? What is a David or a Van Gogh beside seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, ideas, and gestures presaging nameless upheavals? The energies expended on artistic spectacles – like the interactive virtual mass theatre of ci – are energies diverted from the arsenal of individual reveries, which agitate against reality. Once armed and animated by the will to change the world – anything less would not be worth the trouble – there is no more question of treating them as fantasies.
‘Daydreaming is directly subversive. Sometimes its subversion is spontaneous play, sometimes it is turning the master’s tools against him, sometimes it is original creation. In all three cases it is subjective subversion or détournement. That is, it may be as unstructured, or as derivative, reflexive and reactive, or, again, as controlled and laborious, as you want, requiring no thought and attention or, to the contrary, a good deal of it. But it needs to have a basis in reality to gain any purchase on it. Daydreams are turned away from reality only in part. They are reality without principle. But no matter how unprincipled, they are real nonetheless.’
What made the imagination politically threatening was this radical subjectivity trained by natural, unassisted daydreaming.
‘Strengthening the subjective core,’ Chevauchet explained, ‘is no easy matter. In the mind of each human being there is a hidden chamber, to which only reverie can find the door. A magic circle in which the world and the self are reconciled, where every childish wish comes true. The passions flower there: brilliant, poisonous blossoms wide open to the mood of the moment.
‘Technology, falsely promising utopia, wants to bar the road to it, and by the same token suppress the purely magical aspect of the daydream. Even without any help from technology, it is by no means impossible for me to give objective form to everything I have ever dreamt of being. Surely everyone, at least once in their life, has been a little like a Charles Lassailly, a frenetic romantic, or like a Sergey Nechayev, that catechetical revolutionary. Lassailly, passing himself off as the author of a book he had never written, wound up as a true writer. A
nd Nechayev, who began by cheating money out of Bakunin in the name of a non-existent terrorist organisation, later became the guiding light of an authentic group of nihilists. We all dream of passing through the eye of a needle, and some of us even manage it.’
The power of subjectivity, if only it could be harnessed and collectively expressed, was infinite. All seemed to turn for Chevauchet on nature, the imperative of following it. In his reaction to the persecution of natural desires and the concomitant cult of technology, I immediately saw a danger that was no less real for being hidden from him. This danger – his own blind spot, for a change – was fetishizing nature, making an idol of it, placing on it demands that it could never fulfill.
Chapter Twenty
Many of Chevauchet’s ‘teachings’ were difficult to take in large drafts. Nor did he bother to sweeten them. But, in his tireless animation, he would sometimes shift from the often dry, critical register to something like poetry. He was at his most enthusiastic and least prosaic when speaking of reveries. His most memorable and whimsical turns of phrase were reserved for their praise.
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