(ESSAY) 'Wi-Fi in the Underworld: A Dreamer’s Guide to Hyperconnectivity' by Marcin Ciszek

An essay on (dis)connection and dreamlife for Digital Dreamland. 

It starts with a notification. A single vibration under your pillow, setting off an earthquake in your dreamscape. The sky cracks open like a dropped iPhone screen. A pop-up window appears in the cosmos: Your subconscious has a software update available. You tap ‘RemindMe Later’ and continue wandering the neon-lit hallways of sleep.

But the dream has changed. Instead of a quiet meadow or a childhood home, you find yourself in a waiting room, endless and fluorescent. The receptionist is a three-headed owl scrolling through Twitter. You try to ask a question, but it replies in emojis and stock market graphs. This is what hyperconnectivity has done: even in dreams, we are online, entangled in an algorithmic fever dream where meaning is both omnipresent and utterly lost.

Freud once argued that dreams reveal hidden desires, but what does it mean when you dream in memes? When your subconscious serves up a surreal TikTok slideshow instead of symbols rich with mythology? Last night, I dreamt of a giant email inbox stretching across a desert. Each unread message was a tiny screaming mouth. When I tried to delete them, a CAPTCHA test appeared, asking me to select all images containing “real human emotion.” I Failed.

This is the curse of hyperconnectivity: we are never alone, even in the realm of sleep. The

brain, wired for metaphor and mystery, now speaks in notifications and glitchy livestreams. Your dead grandmother doesn’t visit in the form of a whispering breeze—she DMs you on an astral Discord server, typing, then deleting, then typing again. A poet once said the night carries messages from the deep. Now the night just carries push alerts from a reality that refuses to log off.

There is no true disconnection anymore. The old dreamers, the mystics and sages, wandered through visions untethered, swimming through a cosmic sea of archetypes. But now, even in our deepest REM cycles, the Wi-Fi signal flickers strongly. We don’t dream of being chased through dark forests; we dream of failing to submit an important form before the deadline. Our nightmares are loading screens that never resolve. The monster under the bed has been replaced by a constant, low-grade anxiety about missing an important email.

In last week’s dream, I met a hooded figure who whispered ancient secrets into my ear. I leaned in, ready to receive profound wisdom, only to hear: “You should really update your password.” I awoke in a sweat, rushed to my laptop, and changed my credentials to something so complex I would never remember it. That night, I dreamed of being locked out of my own mind, endlessly attempting to reset my soul’s security questions.

What if hyperconnectivity is the death of dreaming? Or perhaps the next stage of its evolution? We no longer fear monsters under our beds, but we do fear blue-light exposure, online irrelevance, the unread messages collecting dust in our inboxes. Maybe the new dreamscape is not a lush, symbolic jungle, but a labyrinth of notifications, all competing for our deepest, most intimate attention.

Yet, sometimes, amid the digital static, something ancient breaks through. A symbol older than the internet—a black cat, a silver key, a vast ocean. A moment of mystery untouched by algorithms. And in that moment, the Wi-Fi flickers, and for one blessed instant, we are truly, beautifully offline.

~

Author: Marcin Ciszek

Published: 2/7/25