Posthuman Blues

Last night (9-15) I had two of the most vivid dreams in recent memory. The first was an engaging lucid dream that took place in what seemed to be a future society or an alternate present in which all human activity took place in massive enclosures lined with vertiginous buildings.

There's a common misconception that lucid dreaming allows the dreamer to consciously control every aspect of the dream experience. In my experience, I can only offer "suggestions," which are absorbed into the context of the dream and regurgitated with sometimes unexpected results. Even though I'm partially if not fully aware that I'm dreaming, the experience is terrifically weird.

My other dream had lucid elements, but contained so much detail that I was preoccupied with taking it all in and didn't "experiment" as I had in the previous dream. Very briefly, this was an "end of the world" dream -- something to do with an impending comet impact. I remember looking at a satellite image of the continental United States and seeing it progressively covered with ice and snow, as might be expected in a "nuclear winter."

For some reason, trains play a recurring role in many of my dreams; I really have no idea why. In this case, a desperate parade of rail-mounted vehicles sought refuge from the increasingly dangerous weather. In retrospect, it's unclear if the comet (or whatever) had already hit, or if people were readying themselves for an inevitable demise a la "Deep Impact." My clearest, most lingering impression was the stoicism demonstrated by Earth's population. No running wild in the streets, looting or mass suicides. For the most part, everyone seemed almost alarmingly calm and resigned.





I think this dream might have been inspired by the fringe-science speculation that the nuclear-powered Galileo spacecraft, doomed to crash into Jupiter as it finishes its mission, might explode, igniting the gas giant's hydrogen and filling our sky with the celestial equivalent to the Hindenberg catastrophe. ("Oh, the humanity!")

(Personally, I don't have any qualms about living in a binary star system, however short-lived. There would be some devastating environmental effects, of course, and there would cease to be such a thing as "night," but the overall effect of Jupiter undergoing fusion reactions might force the world to look up and contemplate our collective vulnerability. This might be a naively utopian view, but so be it.)