4:56 AM

1There was a time when I would tell people I did not dream. If they did not believe me, I’d say okay maybe sometimes I dreamt about shapes and colors. This went on for about fifteen years. I thought talking about your dreams was childish, even a little tacky. Looking back now, I realize I did not want to cop to the parts of myself that were squishy and unknowable. I needed to believe I was a rational man, powered solely by reason and will. Not anymore. Today I crave the murk and the mess and the mystery. Now I agree with John Steinbeck’s admonition that “people who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.”2There were a few days last spring when I used artificial intelligence to draft client proposals, generate videos, and catalogue nearly a million words of scattered writing. The results were absolutely dead. I had no connection to this material. I deleted it and moved on. Better to make something embarrassing that etches a memory and points me in new directions. Better to take the risk of a client saying they don’t understand what I’m trying to express.Today I use artificial intelligence primarily for two things: 4% is for spotting typos in a final draft. It’s not very good at this, but it’s nice to have another pair of eyes on words like ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘graffiti’. (When it comes to actual ideas and darling-killing, I will never find a better editor than C.) And 95% is for writing code. Part of me misses writing CSS and PHP myself, but not enough to be unrealistic. Claude’s code is faster and better than mine, which frees me up to focus on more creative things. Like dreams. This is where the remaining 1% comes into play.A few months ago, Olly and C. and I used Claude to build an app called Dream Club because we want to make infrastructure for dreams. Although I enjoy using it to organize and analyze my dreams, I have mixed feelings about it. More than anything else, dreaming is what makes us human, even a little magical. It’s a zone the machines will never reach. Yet paradoxes abound, and the hallucinatory nature of artificial intelligence seems very much related to the opaque logic of dreams.Last week, we wired up Dream Club to a PlayStation engine, which allowed us to watch and even play our dreams. There was a delightful sense of slippage at first, seeing the half-remembered murk of a nightmare in 32 bits. I stayed up late with Claude, building a dream museum in the style of Tadao Ando that played a strange TV station. At first, I was thrilled to see my dreams about six-fingered hands and murderous women become static-ridden footage on soaring concrete walls. Then I began to worry.Experiments with Claude to hallucinate my dreams.Is artificial intelligence generative or a zero-sum game? Does it feed or rob the imagination? When I posed this question on the internet, Will Ellwood replied that “it not only mugs the imagination at knifepoint, but leaves the victim permanently injured.” A few days later, Martydescribed my unease well: “When you read the book after seeing the movie, you’re trying to get your freedom back.” Strong opinions, but these are intense times.3Lately I’ve been dreaming about an island, overheated and obscene, choked with vegetation that seems to be breathing. A tinny song by the Thompson Twins is always playing in the distance for reasons I do not understand. Hold me now. Warm my heart. There are spider bites across my back and cobwebs in my hair as I scramble through the undergrowth towards the music. But the only technology on the island is an overhead projector. I first visited this island in the early summer, and every few weeks I return. Always the same song, always the same feverish sensation of friction. Friction is the thing, isn’t it? Dreams are friction, resisting clear explanations and reasons. Writing is nothing but friction. And so is the busywork of sketching, designing, organizing, and searching. This is where new discoveries and energies emerge. Friction creates the scaffolding for memories. But C. thinks the real fight is to preserve ambiguity. Are ambiguity and friction the same thing? I’ll need to ponder this. In the meantime, I think the better path is to make dream collages with C. or pair my dreams with a tranche of 1970s family photos that resonate with six-fingered hands, mysterious islands, and judgmental giants for reasons I do not understand. And don’t need to.In my dreams, I can never operate a device or screen. It always displays the wrong thing or the interface is garbled. Perhaps this is a blessing. Or a message.4But Deb Chachra is proof that screens can still be delightful. A chance connection through Adam Greenfield, a mutual friend on Bluesky, led to some nice emails. When she asked if I was going to MUTEK, my initial response was of course not. I’m not the kind of guy who jets off to a techno festival but . . . maybe I could be? So C. and I went to Montreal and had so much fun that we’re planning to go again next year. So thank you, Deb, for expanding my sense of the kind of guy I am. Speaking of expansive: she wrote a book about infrastructure, which reminded me the world is full of miracles because I did not expect a book about infrastructure to be so damned readable. She makes the wiring of our world personal, interweaving stories while unpacking how we treat the water from our faucets (if we think about it at all) like the sunrise: a mundane mechanism that should be wondrous. Her writing carries the increasingly rare faith (and proof) that we have agency, that we are capable of building a better world. From now on, I will always think of bridges, dams, and transit stations as the “megafauna” of our experiments with civilization, which is a beautiful gift.I’m so happy she’s with us tonight because she sent me a wild tracklist of old classics and big new sounds. But first, the mandatory Midnight Radio interview question:5Do you believe in a god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?“We use the word ‘belief’ in wildly different ways. We use it for things for which the evidence is absent or disputed (like ghosts), where something is intangible but exists insofar as our belief makes it so (like justice), or even where the whole p...