The Machinery of Dreams

FIELD NOTES: In an age where sharing our dreams means feeding them to machines, true lucidity is remembering how to dream together; not as data, but as communion.

Once, we shared our dreams around a fire. The dream was a language of intimacy, exchanged through voice and trust, an act of belonging.

Now we share them through systems.

We wake from one simulation only to enter another.

When we recount a dream online, post an image from it, or let an app analyse it, we are not sharing, we are feeding. The unmachinable becomes machinable. The night mind becomes data.

Yet there are still cultures that remember how to dream together. In parts of the Amazon, people wake before dawn to drink tea and recount their dreams to the group.

The elder listens, interprets, and weaves the visions into the fabric of the day. Could be guidance for where to hunt, how to heal, or what omens to heed. Dreams there are not confessions or curiosities; they are shared cognition.

Knowledge carried through spirit, not system.

So could we preserve, maintain or create new ways to share: the unmachinable way. To dream together without the machine extraction. To speak what cannot be coded. To commune through symbol, story, and resonance and not through metrics.

Perhaps true lucidity now means knowing the difference: between sharing to be seen, and sharing to be known.

Between a network that consumes our dreams, and a communion that protects them.

Part of The Me:chine Codex — a philosophy and practice for living as both machinable and unmachinable.
© Tracey Follows 2025 — Published under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).