Dreams VS News

Last week, Jason Novak had a dream:

He later turned it into the next installment of the Saint of the Desert comic:

Jason told me,

I’ve never actually had a dream before where the visuals disintegrated into abstraction like that. Really messed me up!

I do have these kinds of dreams every once in a while.

The most recent one I remember was in the first weeks of the war. Here’s how I wrote it down in my journal:

A sequence of dreams within dreams—virtual realities in which I’m playing as a Russian fighter pilot.

Everything is set up against the player: you take off on a jet that’s falling apart from a piss-covered aircraft carrier, you don’t understand what you’re fighting for, you feel shame throughout the mission, and then you die.

I try to pay non-judgmental attention to the entire experience and to not be afraid of death, because, at some level, I recognize the dream nature of what is happening.

It is the death and the space between the dreams that’s the most interesting part. It feels like falling into a darkness.

I do manage not to feel fear.

A close friend—an American who spent a couple of years in Russia and now lives in Germany, going through a divorce, raising two little girls—sent me a dream about Russia:

I was near a fence with some others, we were wrassling our prisoner to confinement. He was Vladimir Putin, but there was a bag on his head. I had him in my grasp, but my body can’t remember feeling that. He is small, crooked, ghastly white ankles and shins between dark crew socks and shabby black basketball shorts. His hands are even tied, and I see him wriggle away from one, then another, and two more of the unknown people who apparently shared the same assignment as me. And I watched all of us fail to hold him. I could see how he would leap and twirl and twist away from us in a vexed, demented, triumphant dance — he finally was gone. 

And next, I knew I was back in Russia. I floated down remembered streets of Moscow and Zelenograd housing. Kids’ blocks left out in the weather. Futuristic, rational architecture, soaked with the neuroticism of its tenants. I fly over the corner at the supermarket entrance where Nikita gave me a single flower. He sat there leaning against the cement wall, lit by fluorescent yellow light from the store’s sign. He is so young. I feel, for a short time, at home. 

Then I remembered I had been on an assignment. I woke up, desperately lost in the Moscow underground, forgetting how to write cyrillic into latin letters, so I could tell my boss my location so they (he? she?) could come get me. Who is my boss anyway?

A train whooshed by, I knew my hair had flown over my face with the force, but my body doesn’t remember the feeling. It’s understood that I am foreign, suddenly, but also that all these other people are foreign to each other, and that is part of the reason we are all here. I am in a double underground, that I know I cannot leave. Nobody is coming for me because I haven’t the first clue about how to navigate the Metro’s labyrinth. So I board the next train. I remember the war and how I am in a place that I will not be allowed to leave, even if I try.

I keep coming back to my “dreams = news” formula, wondering what I should do with it.

For all the influence somebody like Putin has had on my life and that of others, I’ve never met him, never talked to him, never had a direct experience with him—not in the waking life, anyway. Yet to say “Putin’s not real” is to be poetic and playful.

Dreams, on the other hand, are something that everyone knows isn’t real—that’s what our parents told us when we’d wake up from a nightmare as children, and they weren’t wrong, were they?

But dreams are something we go through ourselves, they’re one of the sources of primary data about reality—not hearsay, not expert analysis, not a news report that might or might not have been fact-checked.

Instead of dreaming, I spent last night asking GPT-3 to write scripts for various ideas we’ve been playing around in PsyPol. Here is its pitch for a cartoon about the “Putin’s not real” idea:

The scene opens with a group of people gathered around a TV, watching the news. The headline reads “Putin doesn’t exist!” and the people are in shock. One man exclaims, “I knew it!” Another says, “But what does this mean for Russia?” A woman adds, “I don’t know, but I’m not going to live in a country ruled by a figment of our imagination!”

The scene cuts to Putin, who is sitting in his office. He hears the news and starts to panic. He knows that if people find out he doesn’t exist, they will overthrow him. He has to think of a plan fast.

He decides to make a public appearance and address the nation. He has to raise the stakes, to give people a story that will convince them he’s real.

He takes to the podium and tells the people that he is actually an alien from another planet. He says that he was sent to Earth to help Russia become the greatest nation in the world. Everyone starts to believe him and cheers for their leader.

Putin knows that has bought himself some time, but he knows he can’t keep up this charade forever. He has to find a way to make sure that people never find out his secret…

This, too, seems more real to me than much of the news coverage I’ve seen in the recent months.

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