On Dreams (A fun little riff)

(Jan 2021, I wrote this little riff on dreams and possibility after hanging out with Duncan Horst in New York. I was high on the train and had a lot of fun rhyming and riffing. It starts slow but hits its stride somewhere in the middle and I kind of like how rough and silly it is; the roughness and silliness disguise the true insights. )

Dreams evolved for fear and hope,
Terror times desire
Our eyes wake up startled in the darkness
And see infinity behind our eyelids
Everywhere

What do eye see?
How do we make sense of it?
What is it useful to imagine,
Evolutionarily?

If we simulate the possible
(The past and the spirit of the present)
And bet on potential
We can see prophecy
Speak
Fail
And succeed
Integrating experience
Alchemy eyes alchemize
Even if experience is imagined with the world
(Our experience of the world is imaginary)
It is good to gain experience,
Points possible to be referenced by a future present

Let’s say for simplicity that there’s just one thing—
Possibility.
Let’s say we are in it, are it,
We die, so we divide–

We know two possibles
We know we know known possible
We experience
We hope and fear unknown possible
We dream

We smash together known possibilities
And project them out into the unknown
World

Like the light
Of hydrogen
Dying brightly
For love of gravity

When we project an imaginary present
Into the darkness we see

Environments of novelty excessively
Prepare for future presents
Our earthly mastery means we have energy aplenty 
So we adapt to possibility
We randomize some variables & mix some scripts & smash some neurons
Investing in a raw stock of stored experiences
For future presents to smash with act with react with 
Create with the alchemy of associational experience

(association is experience)(

Computers just don’t do it like we do it
We do it jazz and blues all we feel 

What if I told you something really crazy?
What if I thought of and shared the words
“What dreams are to the body, art is to society”?

I mean,
Can you imagine if I said that?
Created experience, novelty, shared?
If we created it, could it create?

Maybe
The known possible
Smashed across space
In time
Imagined
Can create new
Possible futures—

Whether it succeeds or fails
Finding unknown possibilities,
You know the known is bigger than it was
Further more
Have faith that there are new unknowns 
Because your new knowings
Are related
To more than you know…

You can imagine it
Like a sun getting always bigger
Bigger burning something with a center and a mission
And the darkness getting bigger the more it burns emission—

I believe
The big bang is always
Bigger banging,
I believe the whole
Growing bigger is good.

As the universe becomes,
It is good to become with it.

Death is the change ceasing change
If you stand still, you die
If you run, you die farther.

Mice need fear to survive
Men need hope to survive

Homo sapiens
Are more than equal to the environment the earth
Yet we desire and fear 
Each other,
Our primary adaptational environment,
Our personal challenge to survive and thrive in a world
In which you and me and we and them and them and them
Are our greatest threats and hopes, 
Our only natural predators
Along with whatever superorganisms we can successfully organize

(Could Exxon outcompete the American public?)
Viruses are very good at replicating
Almost like life
But dead
Could we kill Dow and Koch?
Could we kill killing machines?
Could we kill the Pentagon?
Everyday we are more like the mice we test on
Everyday they make more profit

I said dreams are made of hopes and fears, both
Desire and terror
This means that American Dreams are not necessarily
Posively valenced
Dreams are neutral
Dreams can be wet
Or nightmares,
Can play pleasures and pains
On the front of our brains
Can stain our membranes with remembrings
Part of who we are.

The American Dream includes American Hopes and American Nightmares.
Both have been made real by dreamers,
More and more and more real.
More and more and more unaware
Of the tragedy of commodity—

Can we heal?
Do we dare?
Can we face our illusions? Can we kill what is there?
Or would we choose comfort along with despair?

If everything possible 
We feel is provided,
We will soon find we were squarely misguided.
We must now then create 
As naturally as dream,
Everything can be possible
If we see more than seem.

What is the American Dream, and what is the American Nightmare?
The Dream is hope.
Hope for what?
Utopia.

The nightmare is growing less than we could together.
The nightmare is alone. It is afraid.
It destroys, it imposes, it lashes out,
It reacts like a mammal under threat.
It cares only for its own bodies.

It is the self-preservation we are most closely responsible for
Yet it is not the self-preservation we are most responsible for,
For we are all responsible for the whole species of creators,
A much smaller part of a much larger thing
(.0001 times 10000, 1 times 1)