Fill out the online survey form on computer dreams:
http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/computers/computerdreams.htm

Digital Dreaming Research Project:
Project Goals and Considerations

Richard Catlett Wilkerson

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Are you having dreams about robots, cyborgs, androids, Borgs, robots or animated machines? Are you having dreams of computers, programs that take on a life of their own, dream experiences with keyboards and monitors, printers or wires? How about dreams of the Internet, surfing, chatting, interacting with others or online bots?

If so, we would like to have your digital dreams for our research project examining the shift in culture from man to machine, organic human to augmented humanoid, analog thinking to digitally mediated virtual reality.

Digital Dreaming Survey:
http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/computers/computerdreams.htm

Thanks for your help in this research project!

Also, you can :
o e-mail them to me, Richard Wilkerson, at rcwilk@dreamgate.com

o drop them off anonymously at http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/temple

o fill out the ascii plain text version
http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/computers/computerdreams_survey.txt
and snail-mail to
Computer Survey
%DreamGate
4644 Geary Blvd PMB 171
San Francisco, CA 94118

Considerations and thoughts:

We began the last century using horses and buggies, but quickly shifted to cars, trucks and jets. More and more of our time is now spent in these vehicles and our dreams reflect these changes. As the 21st Century begins, we find ourselves spending more and more time with digital objects and in computer mediated realities. And again, the objects in our dreams are changing. More computers inhabit the dreamscape than ever before. More monitors, keyboards, and modems take up our dream time. New combinations of humans and machines reveal themselves at the dream's doorstep. In short, the dreamworld is becoming more and more inhabited by digital objects, by digitally concerned and augmented subjects, by digitally mediated environments and ecologies. Through the collection of digital dreams, the Digital Dreaming Research Project will provide a front row seat for dream researchers, psychologists, cultural theorists and others interested in perhaps one of the greatest socio-historical moments in history at this threshold of change.

Of course, just as the dream cars are not made of metal and rubber, the digital dream objects are not exactly digital. This brings up the interesting question of how dreams handle analog vs.digital dream objects.

For example, there has always been a problem with dream machines. Brakes that don't stop, steering wheels that don't turn, phones that won't connect. These are classic tales of dreamland. Will digital objects follow suite? Will they cause the same degree of difficulty or not? Will they appear more as helpers, or objects that hinder and frustrate us? Do digital dream objects statistically break down as often as analog dream objects? Will this be a function of the way they are reflected in our waking attitudes, or will we see variances that call for other explanations? The Digital Dreaming Research Project will look at this change in objects from one Century to the next.

Or more psychologically, will the mind and soul use digital objects in a different way than analog objects? Does the digital dream object follow the displacements and metonymies of old analog tropes, or is it a whole new trope, which distributes significations in a manner never seen before? It is quite possible that digital objects will affect the dream in ways that would be unimaginable with analog objects. Perhaps we will see new networking metaphors, reproductive viral distributions, packet switching information modulators, convertible symbolic replicants, substantial androidic envelopments and cybernetic enviro-responsiveness. The Digital Dreaming Research Project will provide data on how these new dream objects are experienced by the dreamers and suggest ways the images function differently than analog dream imagery.

Digital objects are enveloped by analog dreaming. As the two crash headlong into one another, series of variable permutations will emerge, creating fractal variations and polyvocal lines of novel relations. That is, as we begin to merge the analog/organic and digital/silicon in waking life, our dreams will be enveloping the differentials, modifying the models and developing series of variation. The Digital Dreaming Research Project will provide the dream data for researchers to begin watching these processes unfold.

Perhaps our dreams will resist these new digital objects. Will we dream of them with the same frequency as we did cars when they first appeared in the cultural scene? Or will these digital objects be too foreign to the dreaming mind and be tossed aside as unusable, non-preferred images that inadequately express the deep affect of a soulful underworld? The Digital Dream Research Project will track the resistances as well as the appropriations of the dreaming mind and explore these using both traditional psychologies as well as alternative cultural practices and perspectives.

The question of what it means to be human is challenged, extended and sometimes exceeded in the human-machine mix. Biological computers, augmented intelligence, prostheses for limbs, fully machined organ transplants, and cloned genetic material all allow us to ask if something is still human. From one side we ask how many artificial parts, cloned additions and transplanted pieces tip the scale and send the human teetering on the edge of being designated a machine. On the other side, how smart and efficient does a machine have to be before we allow it the status of a sentient being? Or, as in the replicants of the movie Bladerunner, is there a point where the machines are far more sentient, intelligent and capable than the human who may have created these machines? Will the humans then become a non-essential animal in the swirl of cultural developments which move too fast for the human to keep up, or will we have created an intelligence that is globally sensitive to our goals and desires? The Digital Dreaming Research Project will look at what dreams have to say about this development and how replicants may already be using our dreams to find the answers.

Related data and computer dreams March 2001 - April 2001

Please send in computer dreams and keep the digital dreaming research project going. rcwilk@dreamgate.com

OR use the survey form:

http://www.dreamgate.com/dream/computers/computerdreams.htm

Other articles:

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (1999 August). Research Request: Computer's in Dreams : Pre and Post Internet Perceptions. Electric Dreams & Part I Pre-Net Electric Dreams 6(8). Retrieved October 30, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_1999_aug_computers_in_dreams.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2000 March). Digital Dreams: The changing (inter)face of dreams in the twenty-first century. Electric Dreams 7(3). Retrieved October 30, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2000_mar_computer-dreams1.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2000 July). Digital Dreaming Series: Computer Dreams II : The changing (inter)face of dream texts. Electric Dreams 7(7). Retrieved October 30, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2000_july_computer-dreams2.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2000 November). Digital Dreaming Series: Computer Dreams III :: The Digital Shift in Culture. Electric Dreams 7(11). Retrieved October 30, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2000_nov_computer-dreams3.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2001 January). Digital Dreaming Series: Computer Dreams IV :: Dream Code and Decoded Flows. Electric Dreams 8(1). Retrieved December 31, 2000 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2001_jan_computer-dreams4.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2001 May). Digital Dreaming Series: Computer Dreams V :: Emergence of Digital Imagery in Analog Dreamers. Electric Dreams 8(5). Retrieved May 1, 2001 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2001_may_computer-dreams5.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2001 August). Digital Dreaming Series: Digital Dreaming Research Project: Project Goals and Considerations. Electric Dreams 8(9). Retrieved August 26, 2001 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web:
http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2001_aug_computer-dreams7a.htm

Wilkerson, Richard Catlett (2001 August). Digital Dreaming Series: (7b) Digital Dreams from March 2001 through April 2001.  Electric Dreams 8(9). Retrieved August 26, 2001 from Electric Dreams on the World Wide Web: 
http://members.telocity.com/rcw666/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2001_aug_computer-dreams7b.htm