As screentime clocks up similar amounts to dreamtime, what mutual hyperrealities do they invite? Maisie Florence Post returns to the Plaza with a trenchant statement of intent, asking: is it time to now start talking about the dreamification of the internet? This essay marks the first iteration of a new Plaza series, Digital Dreamland, soon to be announced.
“Don’t you think dreams and the internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents” ― Yasutaka Tsutsui, Paprika
Hyperreality — a world where simulations of reality seem more real than reality itself.
A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur involuntarily in the mind during sleep.
A website is a collection of content identified by a common domain, appearing almost as a collection of visions.
Today, we spend nearly as many hours online as we do asleep. Sleep occupies around seven to eight hours of each day, with 30% of that precious time spent dreaming, while screen time often clocks in at six or seven hours, blurring the boundary between our waking lives and our digital ones. It doesn’t leave much time for anything else. Just as our subconscious is flooded with fragmented thoughts and images during sleep, the internet has become a place where imagination and identity drift freely.
We are bearing witness to the dreamification of the internet. Hyperreality—a term coined by French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, to describe a state where simulations seem more real than reality itself—is now embedded in our online lives. In a hyperreal world, we engage in fabricated digital interactions that feel more vivid, and perhaps more meaningful, than anything outside of the screen. Much like a dream, the internet now exists as an extension of our subconscious. As we scroll, click, and refresh, we are sinking into a digitally induced dream state.
Dreams flash across our minds in uncanny episodes, much like the endless, fragmented media we consume online. Our virtual actions—scrolling, refreshing, clicking—mirror the passive way our minds absorb images while we dream. It could be argued that both processes are involuntary, driven by an urge to explore, understand, or escape.
In both dreamscapes and webspaces, there are few rules and endless possibilities. As we shift from video to article to image, our subconscious weaves these digital experiences into our memory, just as it might blend fleeting scenes in a dream. Dreams may offer us profound insights or moments of absurdity, just as the internet can plunge us into the banal and bizarre with a single click.
While the internet once felt more like a sprawling, freewheeling dreamscape; with the essence of democracy and Web 1.0. Today’s digital spaces are increasingly constrained by the architectures of platform capitalism. Surveillance, algorithmic filtering, and policies like shadowbanning, narrow the pathways through which we drift. Yet, these can shape our online experiences and tune us into surreal, recursive loops where the familiar is constantly repackaged and fed back to us, blurring the line between choice and compulsion, much like a recurring dream.
The World Wide Web began as a project in the French-Swiss Alps during the 80s, initially called Mesh. It was designed as a collaborative medium, a place to ‘meet, read, and write’. By the 90s, it had transformed into an era of plugging in and switching off, and by the 2000s, with Web 2.0, the internet became participatory. People began to actively produce on the web rather than passively consume, as platforms like YouTube, MySpace and Tumblr democratised content production. The divide between IRL and URL started to blur.
What began as an information-sharing tool morphed into a boundless, hyperreal experience. The internet now offers simulations that feel more ‘real’ than anything offline—an endless stream of curated personas and exaggerated realities. Just as dreams make us fly, fall, and transform in impossible ways, the internet has become a space where we can play out personas, create stories, and embrace all manner of illusion without consequence.
Hyperreality on the internet is seen vividly in social media, where carefully constructed versions of ourselves are published to feel more real than our day-to-day lives. Apps allow us to stage ourselves and our lives as idealised hyperrealities, trapping us in endless echo chambers. We scroll, seeking confirmation of our worldviews and personal fantasies.
The app BeReal (of a moment in time and left on a shelf with apps before it) attempts to disrupt this pattern by prompting users to share unfiltered glimpses of their day. The idea is simple: by showing our ‘real’ selves within two minutes, we dismantle social media's hyperreality. But even this so-called realness is quickly dreamified, adding yet another layer to the illusion. We begin to watch ourselves watching ourselves, in a constant deja vu effect. We are so engaged online we lose our conscious state and have no idea we are redreaming in a loop of our own fragmented memories.
While our bodies sleep, our dreams perform essential functions: they allow us to process, recover, and explore. In much the same way, our online behaviours—scrolling, clicking, and refreshing—have become digital bodily functions. As with dreams, these actions are often subconscious, habitual gestures performed as we sink into the internet’s collective dreamscape. A shared hallucination. Here, we embody personas, share our thoughts, and consume each other’s lives. The internet has become a surreal space where, much like a dream, we can experience the outlandish and mundane, often in the same scroll.
Dreams are also marked by their personal nature—yet the internet has collectivised this aspect of the subconscious. When our online lives bleed into our dreams, it raises questions about whether the internet is shaping our subconscious more than we realise. Studies show that media consumption impacts our dreams: older participants who grew up watching black-and-white television were found to dream more in greyscale. Gamers are able to lucid dream easier, because of the problem solving nature of the games that they play. Does our time online, filled with disconnected content, make our dreams more fragmented? More rapid? Vapid even? Do we dream about digital blunders like accidentally liking a photo from 2017?
Darker still, with the amount of information we consume, on a global scale, we watch wide awake nightmares in real time, frozen in a state of sleep paralysis, feeling stuck and useless. Are we having more nightmares about the very real issues in our world we feel unable to solve? Dreams are rarely remembered in the waking world, nightmares on the other hand, thrive there.
In both our dreams and online spaces, truth is elusive, irrelevant even. Online, as in dreams, we’re free to be anyone or anything we imagine. On the internet no one knows you’re a dog. This environment encourages us to experiment, blur the lines between identities, and detach from reality. The digital space, like a dream, is simulated—a place where people can reimagine themselves. We can now sleepwalk through the digital realm, unconsciously sending emails or texting while asleep.
Online, we can escape the mundane—or amplify it to absurdity—without ever needing to wake up. We are left watching, scrolling, and engaging in an endless likeness of our own making.
Baudrillard’s hyperreal world has finally reached its culmination in the hyperreality of it all.
~
Published: 10/12/24 Author: Maisie Florence Post
Comentarios